Emphasis needs to be placed on the ECRI weekly leading index as you have mentioned.
Thx for kudos IV. I'd love a dashboard of all significant macro to micro factors for US, Aus etc. I started to build one for Aus that pulled data from RBA and ABS, but then RBA changed web access rights and some data scraping didn't work.
It's a time consuming process to set up, and it seems others are evolving what I envision anyways.
Another expanding economics data
source is tradingeconomics. good data and time series charts from what I've seen so far.
This is a short article that discusses what might kick the US recovery off. There's only 4 things that can do it - h'holds, business, govt, foreign sector.
Regarding how low US house sales can go, the really big lesson Aussies need to take home from what is happening there is housing prices are primarily a factor of credit supply. This is why I have been making so much noise about Australia's growing reliance on foreign credit to prop Aus prices up. How much lower US prices can go will be dependent on two things:
1. when private US lenders are prepared to take US houses onto their balance sheets again.
2. when/if the US govt determines they cannot wait for private lenders to pick up that risk, they do as Bill Gross recently suggested and direct Fannie and Freddie or a new govt lender, to lend at low interest and govt guarantee to home buyers.
These are the two options that will put a floor under housing prices. For various reasons, I don't see the private sector will lead funding of resi mortgages, and neither does Bill Gross. The govt is going to have to wear that risk.
(This should underline that asset valuation via mark to market is dependent on the market having access to credit. Take the credit away and the market can only price houses via the cash in the economy which is a hell of a lot less than credit money. Hence why broad money and credit money is important to track. )
The US's problem is that for 2 decades at least, growth was being fueled by unsustainable growth in credit.....and it maxed out. No one is prepared to extend the previous level of credit to households or business, so imo, the domestic economy must contract to a smaller size. That especially applies to the services and construction sector. The S&P500 is masking a lot of this contraction because so many US companies are expanding earnings in foreign markets....but that is not helping the domestic economy significantly.
edit: a q
uality interview with Shiller and Zillow's chief economist Tues 24.8.10.