If It's Thursday...

...for once there's actually some slightly good news. Jobless claims actually fell drastically from last week to 610,000. That's still a lot, but a better than what it was. Maybe it's a one week burp, who knows. However, the number of people on unemployment crossed the six million mark, and that's only going to keep going up. We're adding another million people to the rolls every six weeks or so, at this rate we're going to easily have more than ten million by the end of the year.

Housing starts dropped like a rock too. That's actually good news. It would in fact be better news if housing starts actually fell to almost zero however. There are just too many homes on the market and not enough buyers, and builders are still churning out 500,000 plus new housing starts a month.

Home prices therefore will continue to drop. The pain will continue to spread.