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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Four years after the onset of the financial crisis — in March 2008 Bear Stearns was rescued from failure — we still lack a clear understanding of the underlying causes. Hundreds of studies and books have given us an increasingly detailed picture of what happened without conclusively answering why. Conventional wisdom has advanced competing theories: Wall Street types took too many risks, encouraged by lax government regulation; or pro-homeownership policies eroded mortgage-lending standards and created the housing bubble.
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The United States added 227,000 jobs in February in the latest display of the economic recovery’s surprising breadth and brawn. The country has put together the strongest three months of pure job growth since the Great Recession.

The unemployment rate stayed at 8.3 percent. It was the first time in six months it didn’t fall, and that was because a half-million Americans, perhaps finally seeing hope in the economy, started looking for work.

The Labor Department also said Friday that December and January, already two of the best months for jobs since the recession, were even stronger than first estimated. It added 41,000 jobs to its total for January and 20,000 for December.
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Could the US face a European-style debt crisis? It seems an odd question to ask given that ten year US Treasury bonds yield a mere two per cent. But figures released next week by the US Treasury might give cause for concern.

These are likely to show that foreign demand for US debt is not as strong as it once was. The latest numbers show that, in the 12 months to December, foreigners bought $378.3bn of US Treasuries. That’s less than half the amount they bought at the peak, in the 12 months to September 2009.

Should we worry about this? Two things say not.
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