This is how ridiculous government data has become: in the same month in which both Housing Starts and Existing Home sales significantly missed expectations, misses which were promptly blamed on the weather, the Census Bureau moments ago released a stunner of a New Home Sales number, which supposedly rose from an upward revised 500K to 539K, smashing expectations of 481K, a 25% spike from a year ago and up 7.8% from January, which incidentally is also the highest number since February 2008, even as the median home price dropped to the lowest since September.
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And a close-up on the divergence...
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Thanks to the biggest beat since 2005...
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All of this would be great... if it was remotely credible. It isn't, for three reasons.
First, as Census always admits in the fine print, the 90% confidence interval on the 7.8% increas is +/- 15.2%
Second, as we reported last year [8], after reported relentless beats in the middle and late part of 2014, Census would downward revise the data for 6 months in a row!
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Third, and final, the reason why today's data is just absolutely seasonally-(un)adjusted garbage is because somehow, even when all the other housing data woul dhave us believe the NOrtheast was a barren wasteland of snow and freezing soil, New Home Sales in February in the Northeast rose from 17K to 43K, an increase of 153%!
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And just like that the Census Bureau has itself also gone full retard.
