“Sales of new one-family houses in February 2009 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 337,000. This is 4.7 percent above the revised January 2009 estimate of 322,000.”
“New orders for manufactured durable goods in February increased $5.5 billion or 3.4 percent to $165.6 billion.”
I am very tempted to simply let these quotes from the Census Bureau stand alone, chalk up these releases in the “good news” column, and move right along. The pessimist in me is constrained to point out that the housing inventory is still more than a year’s worth of sales, that durables shipments, inventories, and unfilled orders books all shrank in February, and that the only other news due out this month will be a re-confirmation of the crappy GDP numbers for the fourth quarter of 2008.
With the caveats thus out of the way, good news has diffused through 44.4 percent of the top-side data released thus far this month. Even allowing for the projected bad “news” about GDP, our good news index (GNI) is poised to have nearly doubled between February and March.
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