EconomicCrisis.US

Housing starts in the U.S. hovered in February near a three-year high and building permits rose, adding to signs that the industry at the heart of the last financial crisis is stabilizing.

Builders broke ground on 698,000 homes at an annual rate, in line with the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and down 1.1 percent from a January pace that was stronger than previously reported, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. Building permits, a proxy for future construction, climbed to the highest level since October 2008.
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The U.S. economy may have achieved a sustainable pace of growth that eases pressure on the Federal Reserve to buy more bonds while giving it time to fine tune how it informs the public about the outlook for interest rates.

“Recent economic data takes away some of the urgency for the need to engage in a new round of quantitative easing,” said Michael Feroli, a former Fed economist who is now chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. The Federal Open Market Committee “can say, ‘Let’s wait and see if this is going to build on itself.’”
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Consumer confidence snapped back more than forecast in November as Americans turned less pessimistic on the outlook for jobs and wages, one reason why spending has jumped at the start of the holiday season.

The Conference Board’s index increased to 56 from a revised 40.9 reading in October, the biggest monthly gain since April 2003, figures from the New York-based private research group showed today. The gauge, at a four-month high, exceeded the most optimistic forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

The improvement in sentiment may help sustain household purchases, which account for about 70 percent of the economy, after sales climbed on Nov. 25 and Nov. 28, so-called Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Another report showing home prices continue to drop raises the risk that, without a pickup in hiring, consumers will retreat in early 2012.
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The Federal Reserved reached into public funds — about $1.2 trillion — to help bail out banks during the 2008 financial crisis, a new report reveals.

A Freedom of Information Act request put together by Bloomberg has allowed for the hard numbers to finally be made available to the public about the loans the Fed dished out to keep financial firms afloat in the midst of an economic collapse.

The Federal Reserve has refrained from disclosing info on the loans, which began in August 2007, and as one economics professor told Bloomberg, “was supposed to be secret and never revealed.” The Fed argued in court for two years that revealing the names and terms of borrowers and their loans would damage stocks, and some of the biggest banks involved asked the US Supreme Court last year to withhold some of the information. The Fed attested that revealing the secretive loans to the public, or even being disclosed to the Government Accountability Office, would expose the weakness of the American economy. Nonetheless, their appeal was declined and data released, at nearly 30,000 pages, shows 21,000 transactions occurring over the course of three years.
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