Pending Homes Sale Report: Housing Market Lurches Lower

Before I post my latest work on the housing market, I wanted to quickly follow up on my post about Syria from the other day. The AP is now reporting that both U.S. and U.K. intelligence officials are back-pedalling on their original assessment that the chemical attack in Syria was done by the Assad Government:

The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack is no "slam dunk," with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria's chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say.

Here's the link to entire article.

Funny how Obama and Biden were adamant that Assad launched the chemical attack. To reiterate, this situation reminds me exactly of Colin Powell giving his speech on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and all the proof the U.S. had of those. Turns out Powell was lying to entire the world. I don't know why he was never prosecuted for war crimes. It's just amazing what the American public is letting the Government get away with...

Yesterday the National Association of Realtor's Pending Home Sales Index was released. On the surface it was bad. When you dig through the whole report, it it further confirms my thesis that the housing market is re-entering its bear market downtrend:

The truth of the matter underlying the "dead cat" bounce in the housing market over the past 18 months is that since 2008 the Fed and the Obama Government spent a couple trillion dollars trying to revive the housing market. All they really accomplished was the transfer of a massive number of distressed homes from the big mortgage banks [JPMorgan (JPM), Wells Fargo (WFC) and Bank Of America (BAC)], and from Fannie Mae (FNMA.OB) and Freddie Mac (FMCC.OB), to some large private equity funds looking to speculate on housing and to individual buyers who got sucked into the momentum that was generated. The stimulus has now lost its effect and the housing market is headed back to an eventual lower bottom.

I'm still trying to figure out how the remaining housing market bulls think that bounce over the last 18 months can continue when more and more people are being down-graded from full-time jobs to part-time jobs, real disposable income is now declining, interest rates are in an uptrend and the economy is in decline. I guess for some people hope will always hold stronger than the facts which support the fundamentals.