Construction of new homes plunged last month to the lowest level on records going back nearly 50 years as U.S. builders slashed production while Wall Street nosedived.
Embattled homebuilders, who enjoyed a five-year boom, are now building new homes and apartments at a record-low pace, according to government data released Wednesday. New building permits, a barometer [...]
Last Monday The Wall Street Journal kicked off a debate on how best to allocate scarce resources to solve the world’s problems. Bjorn Lomborg offered a summary of the latest findings from his Copenhagen Consensus project, where he has enlisted some of the world’s top economists to address the issue. Over the next few Mondays [...]
United States stocks dropped last week, resuming a two-month slump, after home sales fell more than economists forecast and bond investor Bill Gross predicted 1 trillion U.S. dollars of losses for banks and brokerages.
All of the 23 developed nations in the MSCI World Index except for Canada have experienced bear-market plunges of 20 percent or [...]
An economist might deem the opportunity cost of building versus buying a house right now to be unacceptably high. And judging from emails I have received, so do some of my readers.
With the U.S. in a housing slump there’s an ever growing array of homes for sale at lower prices. Meanwhile, prices for supplies like [...]
U.S. home builders, struggling under sinking demand and a credit crisis, now face a fresh obstacle: competition from a flood of homes in foreclosure.
Grappling with the worst U.S. housing market downturn since the Great Depression, home builders have curbed their building activities. They’ve also been slicing through their inventories of unsold homes by slashing prices [...]
Home prices in Britain fell 2.5 percent in April, Nationwide, the country’s largest building society said Friday.
Prices have fallen seven consecutive months and are now 4.4 percent below a year ago.
Home prices in Britain peaked in October at an average price of $367,7620, the report said.
Howard Archer, an economist at Global Insight, said April’s figures [...]
Sales of new homes in the U.S. probably fell in February to the lowest level in almost 13 years, economists said ahead of a government report today.
Purchases declined to a 578,000 annual pace from 588,000 in January, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News survey. That would be the fewest since [...]
Growers must choose among an increasing number of cultivars and an increasingly diverse spectrum of pest management options linked to the cultivars. In recent years, the number of different transgenic cotton production options that a grower may purchase has outpaced the capacity of the official cultivar trials (OCTs) to adequately evaluate their economic value.
First, large [...]
Housing prices are dropping steadily as interest rates are rising. Those who enjoyed the luxury and convenience of tapping into the rising value of their real estate holdings are suddenly feeling less wealthy. Americans relied on home equity lines of credit (HELOC) and home improvement loans during the past decade to fund everything from [...]
Interest rates, like summer temperatures, are beginning to climb steadily, and most economists expect the Federal Reserve to continue raising them in order to curb the threat of inflation. As a result, many borrowers are looking for fixed-rate loans to replace their HELOCs. Today’s interest rates are still at historically low levels, so those who [...]