WASHINGTON (AP) -- Buyers purchased the fewest number of new homes last year on records going back 47 years.
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Sales for all of 2010 totaled 321,000, a drop of 14.4 percent from the 375,000 homes sold in 2009, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. It was the fifth consecutive year that sales have declined after hitting record highs for the five previous years when the housing market was booming.
The year ended on a stronger note. Buyers purchased new homes at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 329,000 units in December, a 17.5 percent increase from the November pace.
Still, economists say it could be years before sales rise to a healthy rate of 600,000 units a year.
Builders of new homes are struggling to compete in markets saturated foreclosures. High unemployment and uncertainty over home prices have kept many potential buyers from making purchases.
Home prices fell in November in 19 of 20 major cities measured by the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index, and nine of those cities fell to their lowest point since the housing bust.
Economists expect prices will keep falling through the first six months of this year.
Free trade for capital once England’s and then Americas strength as a manufacturing power in the end de-industrialised and destroyed American competitive manufacturing .
ReplyDeleteBut how will America get its industrial wealth and american housing dream back?
By “free trade” wars and bailouts ?
By protectionist re-industrialisation ?
After destroying the imperialist competitions industry in WW2 America emerged as the last man standing its manufacturing base intact and so trumpeted a “free trade” regime in world trade.
During the golden age of the 50s and early 60s America itself had a two level wages system one for white labor, even its unskilled labor getting better wages and conditions ,work related healthcare and pensions and access to credit for housing in a developing a mostly White suburban labor aristocracy.
And another level of wages and benefits for the Blacks , still receiving on average in the late fifties and early sixties 30% less wages than Whites and living in inner city ghettoes.
The profits of racial discrimination ,that 30%, were the prime source of profits in America .
Internal Black resistance struggles against racial discrimination and economic oppression and external imperialist wars, led to the civil rights movement and concessions to head off internal revolution with Johnson’s “Great society” ,with the official granting of equal wages and an attempt at real economic integration of the Blacks into the American dream.
But this destroyed the economic basis of profitability of US industry, beginning the process of de-industrialization, the export of industry and jobs to cheaper labor countries in the “free trade” for capital.
Since these reforms ,wages level in real value terms for all workers have stagnated.
Meanwhile the western Europeans and Japan kick started and partially re-industrialized by exported American direct capital investment, had rebuilt and provided competition to American industry in the world markets .
Success in over -accumulating profit to be reinvested as capital in the home market leads first to monopolies and cartels dominating the internal market and so requires in the competition the export of excess capital seeking new markets for manufactured goods , cheaper raw materials and cheaper labor, in a world market dominated by multinationals with imperialist military backing for trying to exclude international competition in the colonies or politically controlled neo- colonies managed by local compradors.
The state capitalism of the Soviet Union model ,with its internal universal healthcare and state provided housing competed in the world for the hearts and minds of the worlds peoples in “peaceful competition” with the US .
China with its national independence self reliance for building socialism emphasis in opposition to perceived soviet economic domination ,also served as an inspiration to the poorer countries in fighting colonialism and imperialist domination ,as with a peoples war strategy in Vietnam.
America even though Nixon was forced to abandon the gold standard and default on the old dollar value ,was still able to cobble together a sort of oil backing for its dollar with the help of the OPEC oil monopoly pricing of oil in dollars the Saudis at its center.
The oil backing creating demand for the fiat dollar allowed America to develop a dollar hegemony dominance in world trade and finance .
In the end the Great Ponzi economy was exchanging Fiat paper for real commodity value imports from countries like China.
America and its government was running on foreign supplied credit and deficit spending , its banking sector exported $ trillions in dud bonds creating a massive property bubble implosion , a dead dollar and unproductive debt peons .
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ReplyDeleteditto
also traitors in congress selling out america
and the delusion everything will get better
and wars lies
buy gold beeches
oil 200 a barrel will be nasty.
won't come back. today they announced the years deficit will be near 500billion more then previously estimated, although next year will be better...
ReplyDelete..they used green shoots and others..wonder what fancy term they'll think up next
America always THINKS big?
ReplyDelete