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Chart Of The Day: Housing Starts - Found In Seasonal Translation... Again
Today, we got more great news on the housing front as housing starts rose from an upward revised 910K (was 890K) to 917K, modestly beating expectations of a 915K print. This was a blistering number, and as the mainstream media will have you know, was the second highest since early 2008, lower only compared to the very amusing 982K starts recorded in the dead of winter in December of 2012. All of this would be great if it didn't have one rather profound two-word caveat: "seasonally-adjusted." What happens when one strips away the Arima-X-12 seasonal adjustments? We have the answer! As the chart below shows, when one maps the seasonal pattern in the winter, the November-February three month period, one gets the following chart....
... What one doesn't get, is how a 0.2K increase in not-seasonally adjusted housing starts (from 62.2K to 62.4) manifests itself in a 76K surge in seasonally adjusted house starts.
We are confident the government's assorted propaganda outlets will promptly explain...
Don't believe us: check for yourselves.
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Who says you can't print houses?
3D printers on their way to Detroit
The last thing Detroit needs is more houses.
can someone please tell me what season we are always adjusting to or for?
is it basebal season, football season, spring rock fish season, mares coming in season?.....
Whatever is in season, that's what it is adjusted for. Ask your waiter for today's prices.
You know, I love this website, but why did the author choose to show data from 2010 -> present??? Why did we not get housing starts from 2004->present? Would that data contradict the authors position? Would a regular pattern emerge?
I just wish more posts would cover '2004/5/6 -> Present' otherwise we have no reference if this is a legitimate problem or not.
Granted, I could/should do the research myself, but who has the time? Apparently this guy did... and he stopped at 2010?? It's interesting at least.
We're adjusting to/for the season that starts or ends in Decembuary, up till the season that starts or ends in Octomber, going back to Jugust, then on to Tuesday, when it's most windy.
aka the four seasonings.
Our trusted government numbers...
When consequences occur that do not harmonize with the happy numbers, will this transfer into plausible deniability? Such as a Congressman bleating over the PA system of his armored car that he/she didn't do anything to stop the spending and printing becuase he/she thought we were in a recovery too?
How can the seasonally adjusted number be MORE volatile than the raw data? Aren't seasonal adjustments typically applied to REDUCE the month-to-month volatility of numbers such as this?
Oh, wait. I get it.
Refer to my comment above. To reiterate, Volatility is affected by how windy the Tuesdays are in a particular season.
If you look back at the 2008 crash it didn't really drop until the -150k NFP hit... It was the economic indicators that really killed the market... Ben knows this which is why he must manipulate these numbers... He has no choice... It's his last policy instrument now that QE is wearing off... They can manipulate the markets as long as volume remains low, but when things start to heat up even they can't control the markets via fringe buying... Should be an interesting 2013!!!
"Highest since 2008"
That was a good year!
What is funny is that housing completions actually fell YoY. SO housing starts surged, but completions fell, makes a ton of sense.
Union labor
So...is a seasonally adjusted house cheaper than a non seasonally adjusted house? I might be interested....you know, if Bernanke can get mortgage rates below 2%.
You would think that whatever voo doo you might ascribe to "Seasonal Adjustments," they would at the very least be, well, seasonal.
"Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I keep trying to seasonally adjust my paycheck,but somehow it never seems to work. I'm just as broke now as I have always been.
Today the temperature is 78F(26C) Seasonally Adjusted.
The actual temperature is 35F(2C) for those folks who actually need to go outside, dress warmly.
Good thing the US Federal Government does not do weather reporting...yet.
She was a four, but adjusted for the alcohol she was a ten.
+5 ajax.......
They must have been on the coke to think of that figure! Blatant manipulative propaganda
The single best thing done for our economic recovery was the bribe given to the pimple-faced code jockey in change of the seasonal adjustments program. It's truly amazing what some people will do for a Bahamas condo/bimbo package.
$45 psf is what they cost to build when you use illegals and pay them $5 an hour some builder told me. They turn around and (try) to sell them for $150 and up. he also said many of these foundations are not properly laid so they may have problems later...when the builder is long gone.....those boxes are not worth it he said.
The Bernankenstein economy cannot be killed! Not Never!!
The Dow and SP500 are up again this morning. The NASDAQ gapped up.
That's fucking awesome. Ben and Barry are spending our future to hold onto another two years looking to control both houses.
And then the nazi in Barry gets unleashed.
It is not Ben and Barry. It is the owners of Ben and Barry. They also have "a person" who programs in the stock market action for the day, which then feeds the computers at the banks and market makers. The whole market is now run and priced through computer programs. There is no chance of the free market messing it up.
Drones? Why drones? Because anyone can run a drone and be ananymous. They do not need human pilots who might have some remote thoughts of morals, ethics or an attachment to the indigenous species of this planet.
In other words: "we are raising prices due to runaway inflation and to cover it, we are going to make it look as if there is a market for new houses". Oh, and our cronies who run the big homebuilders need to keep the banks off their backs, so they need to make is seem as if they are not zombie-companies.
Sooooo, what should I be looking at and going by, housing starts or lumber/copper price trends? Gee, if only I could pick which numbers to trust...
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but does anyone have a link to the leaked Blumenthal-Clinton memos?
The ONLY outlet even mentioning them is The Smoking Gun. Where are they?
Seasonal/annual adjustments have turned Economists into math alchemists. They have taken mathematics from a predictive science that most can understand to a level of confusion intended to numb the senses of most citizens.
My generation used to laugh at Soviet statistics under its various communist regimes. The economics profession and the boys and girls of our government agencies have wasted no time in taking the "propaganda" away from their coleagues in the Kremlin.
But.... We Americans are a trusting/stupid/uninformed, (take your pick) bunch most easily led by advertising and still believing in an America of a different time and place. Waking up one day, will be a most real nightmare.
What fits into Russia?
Time to bail on this shindig. We had a chance before the tax increases and the second coming of the Eurpocalypse. We had a real chance at 18000 DOW. Barring a gigantic QE5, that is not happening. The establishment is sounding and acting more crazy by the moment. Tax raises an d bank account confiscations in a depression. LOL.
Having given thought on the structure of QE5. It must include buying bank stocks and debt in massive new offerings. The banks need money, lots of money, and soon. We can't keep buying treasuries at these levels or we will cripple SS and pensions.
These houses will be leased to refugees from Cyprus for 6 months after which they'll be moved to a large parking facility in northern Detroit and destroyed.
Um, the houses, or the refugees? Didn't Bill Gross pen a piece way back on the former? Pretty sure the are a bazilloin blame-them pieces that would fit the later....
and there will be 100 or so guests and pundits who all proclaim the housing number is incredible and a sure sign the economy is picking up on every business channel. Not one person will call them out for the lie. Cavuto might mention the seasonal adjustment once, but his guest will proclaim that data is always seasonally adjusted to smooth out fluctuations and gives a clear indication of the direction of the economy.
There will be no mention of the largest seasonal adjustments in history since November of last year. Turing 20k annualized home sales into 800k, turning 2 million job losses into 200k+ job gains, etc.
How hard is it to say to one of these assholes, "You're lying, and here is the data to prove it." It doesn't even take ten seconds to find the data that proves the outrageous manipulation.
this is based on a survey and then extrapolation...so it is pretty much whatever they want it to be.
"The statistics in this release are estimated from sample surveys and are subject to sampling variability as well as nonsampling error including bias and variance from response, nonreporting, and undercoverage."
Aren´t you comparing annual rate data (seasonally adjusted) with monthly data?
Can I get a discount on an unadjusted house?
From the small print at the bottom of the census.gov press release that Tyler linked:
And so, for single family housing starts, we find:
Holy God: that means housing starts could actually be anywhere from -11.6% to +12.6%. Why would any journalist print that? Why even put it on a press release? That's long past the point where an honest press release (oxymoron?) would just say, "We don't have enough information to be able to determine whether single family housing starts have increased or decreased," with maybe a footnote giving what fragments of data are available, rather than a seasonally-adjusted increase over a revised figure for the seasonally-adjusted increase last month with a micro-print footnote at the bottom saying that it's all meaningless.
These idiot journalists at Marketwatch haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about. They just get the press release and add the word "soared to" the new affirmative number, then their work is done. Nobody knows what the truth is, they just announce as directed. Nobody but the intelligent has any idea why we are not sailing into the new recovery. And you saw how well the intelligent did last November. Not a majority I'm afraid. The imbecile will have his day.
The actual annual rate data (Actual LTM data) for November 2012 was 760.1 units, the actual annual rate data for Feb 2013 is 805.8. So in the last 4 months the annual rate of housing starts rose 45.7K units (or 6%). Seems pretty good to me. Maybe you guys want to go back to math school...
You can run the numbers from here http://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/pdf/startsua.pdf
Just add the actual starts for the previous 12 months in November 2012, and in February 2013...
What does 0.1 of a housing start look like?
(back to math school)
a big problem at zerohedge is that folks don't check the information for themselves.Believing ALL gummint data has been corrupted, doesn't get us any nearer the truth. Just another form of anti-propaganda, therefore we have to think more for ourselves.
FWIW at least the figures issued appear to average out over 12 months (so the adjustment is up and down & nets out at zero) The manipulation is more subtle than that.
I'll wait until houses correct downward another 30-40% before I'm suckered into that Nightmare again.
Unbelievable, simply unbelievable...now tell me again about the governments assurances on my deposits because rules don't seem to mean much to this government either when backed into a corner.
All homes are being bought at distressed levels by "flippers", fixed up, then sold as apartments at home prices. :)
I think I've just found my new favorite double-talk (from the census report fine print, attached to all the numbers claiming percentage gains):
* 90% confidence interval includes zero. The Census Bureau does not have sufficient statistical evidence to conclude that the actual change is different from zero.
lol Krugman was right, it's the broken-window effect (Jersy Shore effect?).
Majic.
Dog houses are probably included - only reasonable explanation. Propaganda machine is in full swing in the last couple of weeks, preparing the soil for Ben to begin his exit somehow, Stage left.
what happened Nov-Feb last year? a lnk to archival reports would be useful..
there is a weighting of the most recent 5 years in making that seasonal adjustment, and therefore, the earlier year's seasonal adjustment would have included conditions in years prior to the recession, and this years would have just included early 2008, when the economy was already heading south, and subsequent years, when economic conditions have been less than robust...so that might generate a bias in the adjustment process that understated earlier years and overstates seasonal adjustments in this year and beyond...