Drip, Drip, Drip

Saturday:

New orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods fell unexpectedly in August, dropping by their biggest margin in seven months, following a plunge in commercial aircraft orders, the government reported Friday.

The Commerce Department said durable goods orders tumbled 2.4%, the largest decline since January, after rising by a revised 4.8% in July. New orders for July were previously reported to have increased 5.1%.

Analysts polled by Reuters forecast orders rising 0.5% in August. Compared with the same period last year, new orders were down 24.9%.

Durable goods orders are a leading indicator of manufacturing activity, which in turn provides a good measure for overall business health.

Sunday:

Resales of U.S. homes dropped 2.7% in August to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.1 million, the first decline in five months, prompting the National Association of Realtors to again plead for more taxpayer subsidies for their business. …

“It is perfectly clear that realtors are scared to death of the tax credit’s expiration,” wrote Dan Greeenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co., noting the phrase “tax credit” appears six times in the group’s press release.

First-time buyers accounted for about 30% of sales in July and August, Yun said.

Without an extension of the taxpayer subsidy, the housing market could fall into a “double-dip” downturn, Yun said, which would stall the overall economic recovery.

The housing market is also being propped up by the Federal Reserve’s purchases of nearly $1.5 trillion in mortgage-related securities, accounting for about 80% of the market. The Fed said Wednesday it would slow its purchases and end them by next March.

Monday:

Despite [Obamedia-fabricated] signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.

Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

And even though the pace of layoffs is [NOT] slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.

Tuesday:

Federal regulators expect bank failures to cost the deposit insurance fund about $100 billion in the next four years and the fund to be running at a deficit Wednesday.

That is higher than an earlier estimate of $70 billion in failure costs through 2013.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. made the projections Tuesday as its board voted to propose requiring banks to prepay an estimated $45 billion in regular insurance premiums for 2010-2012. The proposal could take effect after a 30-day public comment period. …

Without additional special fees or increases in regular premiums, the insurance fund — at $10.4 billion at the end of June — will become “significantly negative” next year and could remain in deficit until 2013, the FDIC is now projecting.

Wednesday:

…The agency (FHA) acknowledged this month that a new but still undisclosed HUD audit has found that FHA’s cash reserve fund is rapidly depleting and may drop below its Congressionally mandated 2% of insurance liabilities by the end of the year.

At a 50 to 1 leverage ratio, the FHA will soon have a smaller capital cushion than did investment bank Bear Stearns on the eve of its crash. Its loan delinquency rate (more than thirty days late in payments) is now above 14%, or from two to three times higher than on conventional mortgages. Its cash reserve ratio has fallen by more than two-thirds in three years.

The reason for this financial deterioration is that FHA is underwriting record numbers of high-risk mortgages. Between 2006 and the end of next year, FHA’s insurance portfolio will have expanded to $1 trillion from $410 billion. Today nearly one in four new mortgages carries an FHA guarantee, up from one in 50 in 2006.

IOW, the self-same Democrat Financial Logic Bomb that got us into this mess in the first place.

Thursday:

First-time claims for jobless benefits increased more than expected last week, a sign employers are reluctant to hire and the job market remains weak.

And while consumer spending jumped by the most in nearly eight years in August due partly to the government’s Cash for Clunkers program, economists worry whether that rebound can be sustained with U.S. households facing rising unemployment, tight credit conditions and other obstacles.

The Labor Department said Thursday that initial claims for unemployment insurance rose to a seasonally adjusted 551,000 from 534,000 in the previous week. Wall Street economists expected an increase of 5,000, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

The increase comes after three weeks of declines. Weekly claims have been trending down since the spring, but the decline has been painfully slow. The four-week average, which smooths out fluctuations, dropped to 548,000, about 110,000 below its peak in early April.

Today:

[T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the unemployment rate hit 9.8%, with another 263,000 jobs lost in September....

Since Newsweek ran a cover piece declaring "The Recession Is Over!" 464,000 more Americans have become unemployed, and the unemployment rate has increased by four-tenths of one percent.

Thank the Lord Barack for Hogzilla, eh?  If it wasn't working out better than Slow Joe hoped, we'd all have long since starved to death, or spontaneously combusted, or been consumed from the inside out by pestilent frogs, or something....