It's been a slow news week with little to blog about. With the change of the guard in DC there's not much going on there either. The market is still taking a beating and the Dec retail numbers are due out tomorrow. Those sales numbers are expected to be dismal. The market seems to be expecting that so I doubt there will be a serious decline, but ya never know these days.
On the housing front Beazer announced that sales were down 53.2%.
Home closings for the quarter ended December 31, 2008 totaled 938, a 53.2% decline from 2,006 homes closed during the same period in the prior fiscal year. Net new home orders totaled 551 for the quarter, a decrease of 56.0% from 1,252 net orders in the first quarter of the prior fiscal year. Net orders declined 48.9% in markets where the Company maintains a presence and 93.9% in markets the Company had previously announced it was exiting. The cancellation rate for the first quarter was 45.6%, compared to 46.6% for the same period in the prior year.
Ouch, that's gotta sting......
3 comments:
The retail sales report for December came out today. It was the worst holiday season since 1969. Analysts had predicted a 1.2% decline it was more than double that coming in at -2.7%. Wall street took it better than I would have thought. I was expecting a drop but with the report being so bad I'm surprised it didn't tumble 500 or 600 points.
Ditto - I thought the market would have been allot lower - but I think what's helping a bit its the anticipation of Obama in the White House here in less than a week...I think it's only "hope" that is savig the market's #'s from being worst.
Denial has been keeping the market afloat. Most investors only make money when the market goes up, so they favor optimism to a fault.
Public works jobs were a suitable replacement for farm labor and low paying, low skill jobs fifty years ago, but they can't replace the skilled manufacturing and high tech jobs we've lost over the past thirty years. We're looking at massive underemployment (pay and skill relative to education and ability) for years, even decades to come.
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