Phillip's Blog

I saw this article in an email publication today and had to bring here. Not sure I agree...but then what do I know?  My only thought is that the pundit of this information is the "National Bureau..."  Kind of says it all right there.

The Recession Is Over

The recession was over in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, but some real estate practitioners might find that hard to believe.

The U.S. economy shrank 4.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2009, the biggest slump since the 1930s, revised figures from the Commerce Department showed in July.

Economists didn’t pretend that the recession was getting better fast. “In determining that a trough occurred in June 2009, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity,” the NBER said Monday in a statement.

Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University Channel Islands, sees continuing slowness in the housing market as a worrisome trend. "If it keeps sliding, it will pull the whole economy down," he said. "We estimate that one out of eight U.S. jobs depends on housing - construction, mortgages, things in and around the house."

Source: Bloomberg, Steve Matthews (09/20/2010) and The San Francisco Chronicle, Carolyn Said (09/21/2010)