1st California Real Estate Gain Since August 2007

Carpe Diem has some great news for the California real estate market. It seems that California’s real estate has stabilized and is showing signs of life.

The March 2009 median price rose 2.2% compared with February’s $247,590 median price. “The statewide median price showed the first monthly increase since August 2007, and has remained in the $250,000 range over the past three months,” said C.A.R.’s Chief Economist Leslie Appleton-Young. “A number of regions around the state also have registered monthly gains for one or more months since the beginning of this year. While these are welcome signs, it remains to be seen whether home prices have stabilized.

Obama and Student Loans

President Obama would like the government to stop backing private students loans. He would like the government to provide direct financial aid to college students.

Two market forces are at at work here, one is the market for student loans. If we take the private sector out of the process, student loans may cost more due to loss of competition. The second, if the government sells directly to students, there would be no middleman which could save money. Hopefully, the middleman savings outweighs the loss of private competition.

“Great” Recession vs. “Great” Depression

A chart comparing our current recession to the great depression. As you can see, they are not close.

Is California Driving Away Job Creation?

Here is Dan Walter’s opinion.

What is yours?

Good News for Jobs

Some good news on the job situation from CNN Money:

Initial jobless claims plunged to 610,000 in the week ended April 11, reported the U.S. Department of Labor.That’s a decline of 53,000 from the prior week, which the government revised to 663,000.Initial claims measure the number of people filing for unemployment benefits for the first time.

Lets hope this is the start of the job recovery!

Is Facebook Bad for Your Grades?

Looks like Facebook may be hurting your grades:

Facebook users typically ranged a full grade lower than those of nonusers — 3.0 to 3.5 for users versus 3.5 to 4.0 for their non-networking peers.

From an economic standpoint, it makes sense. Time is limited, if you spend less time studying because you are using Facebook, your grades should go down. I wonder if teachers on Facebook are less effective than those not on Facebook?

Will We Ever Learn to Manage Debt?

Some very valuable debt management lessons. Right now, the government is going further into debt to help bail us out of our debt, ironic indeed! Either way, we end up paying interest on debt.

 The Mess That Greenspan Made

Will We Return to Our Old Spending Habits

From CNN Money:

In-your-face consumption is so 2007

There is a lot of debate in this area. One side says we will return to our normal spending ways after this recession ends. The other side says there has been a fundamental shift in our spending habits and values.

What do you think? Do  you plan to spend as you did before this recession started?

Unemployment at 8.5%

Some highlights from the Financial Times:

US unemployment hit 8.5 per cent, its highest level since 1983, as the recession continues to savage the labour force.

Non-farm payrolls shed 663,000 jobs, in line with economists’ expectations, bringing the losses since the recession began in December 2007 to 5.1m. Almost two thirds of the decrease happened in the last five months.

The grim employment situation was hitting many not counted in the official unemployment figures.

“Adding in discouraged adults who have left the labor force and part-time workers who would prefer to work full time, the real unemployment rate is closer to 17 per cent,” said Morici.

The number of disenchanted workers, people who wanted work but had not looked for a job in the previous four weeks, hit 2.1m, an increase of 754,000 compared to a year earlier. And the number of people who could find only part-time work increased by 423,000 in March to 9m.

The unemployment rate is fast approaching recent government estimates for the full year. In January, the Federal Open Market Committee predicted that unemployment would hit 8.5 to 8.8 per cent in the fourth quarter, before falling to 8.0 to 8.3 by the end of 2010.

The last paragraph shows how hard it is to predict unemployment rates!

Recession Might Be Ending

From the Associated Press:

New signs emerge that recession might be near bottom

Notice we don’t hear much about a depression any more. There is more talk about a bottom or a double-dip recovery.