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Rising Costs Weigh on US Homebuilder Confidence

April 15th, 2013 by Alan Birch

Money News:

U.S. homebuilders are concerned that limited land and rising costs for building materials and labor will slow sales in the short term.

Still, their outlook for sales over the next six months climbed to the highest level in more than six years — suggesting the obstacles could be temporary.

The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo builder sentiment index released Monday fell this month to 42 from 44 in March. It was the third decline since January. Measures of customer traffic and current sales conditions both declined from March’s reading.

Editor’s Note: I Wish I Were Wrong — Economist Laments Being Right. See Interview.

Readings below 50 suggest negative sentiment about the housing market. The last time the index was at 50 or higher was in April 2006.

The recent declines come after the index had been trending hiring since October 2011, when it was 17.

Steady job creation, near record-low mortgage rates and rising home values have spurred sales over most of the past year. New-home sales fell in February after climbing to the highest level in more than four years the previous month.

In response to the improving demand, builders have stepped up home construction. They broke ground on single-family homes at the highest annual rate in 4 ½ years in February.

Still, the sudden rise in home construction follows a severe and prolonged downturn. And the effects of the crisis are now crimping the recovery.

During the roughly six years since the housing bubble burst, some 1.4 million residential construction jobs vanished, while land development — when raw land is prepared for home construction — slowed sharply.

In addition, suppliers of building materials sharply reduced their stockpiles and have been slow in adjusting to the resurgent demand for lumber and other goods.

As a result, homebuilders are facing higher construction costs and heated competition for ready-to-build land. They’re also paying more for labor, because many of the subcontractor firms that builders rely on are scrambling to find experienced workers, many of which have long since moved on to other types of jobs.

Many smaller builders also are having a difficult time getting loans to buy land.

“Supply chains for building materials, developed lots and skilled workers will take some time to re-establish themselves following the recession, and in the meantime builders are feeling squeezed by higher costs and limited availability issues,” said David Crowe, the NAHB’s chief economist.

Despite the hurdles, builders have grown more optimistic about sales this year. In this month’s confidence survey, builders’ outlook for sales over the next six months rose three points to 53. That’s the highest reading since May 2006, when it was 55.

In the near term, builders’ confidence dimmed since last month. A gauge of current sales conditions fell two points to 45, the lowest level since October. A measure of traffic by prospective buyers fell four points to 30, back to where it stood in September.

The latest builder confidence index, based on responses from 322 builders, comes as the critical spring home-selling season is under way.

Though new homes represent only a fraction of the housing market, they have an outsize impact on the economy. Each home built creates an average of three jobs for a year and generates about $ 90,000 in tax revenue, according to NAHB statistics.

Editor’s Note: I Wish I Were Wrong — Economist Laments Being Right. See Interview.

© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Source: http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/Homebuilder-Sentiment-confidence-housing/2013/04/15/id/499478

Category: Economy

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Zimbabwe Diamond Scandal Overlooked

by on December 9, 2012 in News


The Root
December 9, 2012

Perhaps understandably, a court ruling that a Zimbabwean mining executive must pay U.S. $ 10 million in defamation damages because of comments published by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks did not get much Western news coverage.

Andrew Cranswick, CEO of African Consolidated Resources, allegedly told U.S. diplomats that the country’s spy chief, Happyton Bonyongwe, and other officials were looting diamonds from the country’s diamond fields, according to U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks in 2009.

Cranswick says he never spoke to U.S. embassy officials. Still, Radio France International, which reported the judicial ruling last month, said the judgment was likely to encourage piling on by other officials linked to President Robert Mugabe‘s party. They, too, have launched lawsuits over WikiLeaks.

Closer to home, a military trial at Fort Meade, Md., has begun for Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and classified reports while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010. The cables involved the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as U.S. relations with Third World countries.

Left-wing groups have accused much of the mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, of downplaying the start of Manning’s trial.

On Wednesday, the New York Times public editor agreed. “In failing to send its own reporter to cover the fascinating and important pretrial testimony of Bradley Manning, The New York Times missed the boat,” Margaret Sullivan wrote. “. . . The testimony is dramatic and the overarching issues are important. The Times should be there.”

The media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting said Tuesday, “These dramatic developments, in particular the testimony from Manning (11/29/12), were mostly unreported in corporate media. The New York Times ran a brief Associated Press wire story (11/30/12). Manning’s story was mentioned by just one of the three big network newscasts (CBS Evening News, 11/29/12). There was a brief mention on the PBS NewsHour (11/30/12), mostly about suicide risk.”

What were these reporters missing? Eliza Gray wrote Wednesday for the New Republic, “Last week, in a Grisham-like courtroom scene, Bradley Manning — the Army private charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks — testified publicly for the first time since his arrest in May of 2010. For more than five hours, Manning described the two months he spent in a ‘cage’ inside a dark tent in Kuwait and the nine months that followed in 23-hours-a-day solitary confinement on a Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. In one theatrical moment, Manning got up from the stand and paced inside a 6 by 8 tape outline on the courtroom floor to demonstrate the size of his prison cell. In another, he donned the suicide smock he had to wear.”

The case is far more important than the fate of one man, however.

It places some members of the news media in collusion with what could be ruled an illegal act. It makes some journalists uncomfortable.

“The Times has always had a rocky relationship with WikiLeaks, Manning, and other leakers of state secrets,” Gray wrote. “After publishing the cables, Bill Keller, the Times executive editor at the time, wrote an 8,000-word New York Times Magazine story in which he compared Julian Assange,” editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, “to a ‘bag lady.’ ‘We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator,’ he wrote.” In Britain, “The Guardian, on the other hand, sought ‘partnership between a mainstream newspaper and WikiLeaks: a new model of cooperation aimed at publishing the world’s biggest leak,’ as Yochai Benkler described it in the Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review.”

The State Department would not detail the damage done by the released cables. A spokesman told Journal-isms by email, “The Department of State does not comment on materials, including classified documents, which may have been leaked. Any unauthorized disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks has harmful implications for the lives of identified individuals that are jeopardized, but also for global engagement among and between nations. Given its potential impact, we condemn such unauthorized disclosures and are taking every step to prevent future security breaches.”

Andy Greenberg, author of “This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free The World’s Information,” speaking in September on “The Diane Rehm Show,” an NPR program originating at Washington’s WAMU-FM, compared the WikiLeakers with the now-celebrated Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg released “The Pentagon Papers” on the Vietnam War in 1971, first to the New York Times, then to the Washington Post. That case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the government could not restrain publication even if there was some danger to national security.

The difference? “. . . Assange was just more interested in these record-breaking leaks, the act of leaking, than even the content of the information,” Greenberg said. “. . . I do believe that Manning erred in releasing this kind of unfiltered, just massive mega leak of information. I believe he should have done more what Ellsberg did, which is to read it all himself, to filter himself and not put these innocent sources in danger.”

In a piece Thursday in the Huffington Post, Assange asserted, “. . .The material that Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked has highlighted astonishing examples of U.S. subversion of the democratic process around the world, systematic evasion of accountability for atrocities and killings, and many other abuses.” Included was a revelation that two journalists, one a Spaniard, were killed during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq when a U.S. tank fired on a Baghdad hotel, and that the United States sought to have Spain drop plans to prosecute three U.S. solders who were involved.

“. . . It is the case that WikiLeaks’ publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better,” Assange wrote. Perhaps unaware of the case of the Zimbabwe mining executive, he added, “Two years on, no claim of individual harm has been presented . . .”

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Author: JGVibes
Source: http://theintelhub.com/2012/12/09/zimbabwe-diamond-scandal-overlooked/

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