Housing Starts And Change YOY
Headline: Obama: Another year or more for housing turnaround
President Barack Obama said Wednesday that it will likely be another year or more before the housing market picks up and home prices and sales start rising.
But he said Washington, lately the target of public ire, can't make that happen on its own. He said consumers, banks and the private sector will need to help, too.
Obama spoke at a town hall in the western Illinois town of Atkinson on the third and final day of a bus tour of politically important Midwest states. His comments were in response to a question from the owner of a local real estate company, who said she had begun to see a turnaround in late spring. But her phones stopped ringing after last month's "debt ceiling fiasco," when the government came close to defaulting on its financial obligations.
"We have no consumer confidence after what has just happened," she told the president. "I should be out working 14 hours a day and I am not."
Obama agreed that the lengthy, last-minute negotiation over lifting the debt ceiling was a "self-inflicted wound" that shouldn't have happened. "It was inexcusable," he said.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
