A couple of months ago, I noted that the housing market had a problem: there were too few homes for sale. Persistently low inventory means that there are a lot of frustrated would-be buyers out there, spending weekends at open houses. It also has led to home prices continuing to rise at a more than six percent clip from a year ago.
Read MoreThe better than expected June jobs report and Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s upcoming Congressional testimony is a good opportunity to review where the U.S. economy stands at the mid point of 2017. Economic Growth: The broadest measure of economic growth is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Over the past fifty years or so, the economy has grown by 3 percent annually. In the past decade, that rate has dropped to about 2 percent, with 2015 being the best year (+2.6 percent) and 2009 the worst year (-2.8 percent).
Read MoreBidding wars, no contingencies and frustrated buyers...the housing market is heating up! Existing home sales have jumped to their highest level since early 2007 and new home sale activity has been equally as brisk. Additionally, nearly a decade after the housing market peaked, foreclosure filings, which includes default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions, dropped to the lowest level since November 2005, according to ATTOM Data Solutions.
Read MoreGet ready for a Fed interest rate hike this week. The February jobs report showed that the US economy added a larger than expected 235,000 jobs, the unemployment rate edged down to 4.7 percent and annual wage growth bounced back from a revised 2.6 percent in January to 2.8 percent, ahead of the 2.7 percent average seen in the second half of last year. The increase in wages demonstrates that the labor market is tightening and that state-level minimum wage hikes are filtering through the economy.
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