Mortgage Applications and Wholesale Inventories Weak.

MBA Purchase Applications (week ended 9/5/2014)

– Purchase Index Week/Week -3.0%. Previous weeks were -2.0%, +3.0%, -0.4%, -1.0%, -1.0%. +0.2%, +0.3%, -8.0%, +4.0%, -1.0%, -1.0%, and -5.2%.

– Refinance Index Week/Week -11.0%. Previous weeks were +1.0%, +3.0%, +3.0%, -4.0%, +4.0%, -4.0%, +4.0%, -0.1%, +0.4%, +0.1%, and -1.0%.

– Composite Index Week/Week -7.2%. Previous weeks were +0.2%, +2.8%, +1.4%, -2.7%, +1.6%, -2.2%, +2.4%, -3.6%, +1.9%, -0.2%, and -1.0%.

While the housing and mortgage markets have been hurting last week’s data contained a holiday which might have created distortion.

The fact that the housing industry continues to suffer long after the recovery is revealing.  The reasons are simple:  the recovery has not created jobs which pay enough to make mortgage payments and mortgage qualifying is tougher and the competition has been thinned by the high cost of compliance.

 

Wholesale Trade (July 2014)

– Inventories month/month +0.1%.  Previous revised from +0.3% to +0.2%.

This is part of GDP and this is weak.