Housing starts came in at 926,000 vs a consensus estimated of 1,040,000, bouncing along the bottom of the 12-month range.
This is a special kind of disappointment: the two-month discrepancy between the consensus forecast and the actual data prints is the biggest in the past 10 years! It’s even worse than during the worst days of the housing bust in 2008-2009.
The Cargo Cult of Macroeconomics (what the distinguished economist Reuven Brenner calls macro-astrology) gets it wrong again. Never in the course of economic events have so many been so wrong about so much.