FYI: The story of the day Thursday was the massive miss in housing starts. For a detailed breakdown of individual data series, please see our blog post “Housing Starts Buried”. At right, we show the headline Housing Starts series which missed by a mile: 897,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate starts in February versus 1,040,0000 expected. Digging into the data, this was a weak report, as we discussed in our previous post. While permits (less volatile and a strong leading indicator) were stable and actually beat expectations (1,092,000 versus 1,065,000 expected), single family permits declined sharply; there’s no way to spin this report as positive.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.bespokepremium.com/think-big-blog/the-data-behind-the-weather-housing-starts-miss-in-february/
