10/28/09

Good morning. Durable Goods numbers (items lasting longer than 3 years) have already come out this morning, rising 1% in September as expected. This was the second increase in the last three months, and but compared with a year ago orders are down about 24 percent. The only scheduled news out for later today is New Home Sales, but we had plenty yesterday to chew on. The Case-Shiller Index saw August as its third straight month of price improvement for the bulk of the twenty cities in its survey and up 1% from July. Dallas showed the smallest drop since August 2008, while Las Vegas showed a 30 percent decrease, the most of any city. The biggest month-over-month gain was in San Francisco, which showed a 2.6% gain. Of course, economists want to see flat-to-rising prices through the winter to be sure that housing is rebounding, but skeptics point to unemployment and commercial real estate as two big hurdles to this happening.
In addition to yesterdays news, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence numbers declined in October from September’s levels, which was unexpected and did not help the equity markets. The Treasury‘s 2-yr auction went well and the results helped fixed-income securities, and mortgage prices. This morning, mortgage prices are a shade lower than yesterday afternoon.