In the spirit of everyone joining in the pumping for the election, Alan Greenspan did his bit for his patrons. “Most of the negatives in housing are probably behind us,” Greenspan said at a conference sponsored by the Commercial Finance Association “The fourth quarter should be reasonably good, certainly better than the third quarter.” Of course, his forecasting record is terrible. That’s why he went in to government, he couldn’t make it in the private economic forecasting business.
Noriel Roubini has a quite different forecast.

The new home sales report this morning showed a dramatic falloff in prices as builders hustled to unload their inventory and pipeline. Sales were up at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.075 million, relative to an August that was revised down to 1.021 million, from 1.050 million. Numbers for June and July were also revised down. This is a systemic problem with the Census Bureau that causes the initial release to be way overstated, and all revisions to be downward in a down market. For example, July was originally released at 1.072 million SAAR, but revised down today to 0.984 million SAAR, an 8% drop right there. So we won’t see the “real” numbers for September for a couple of months.

Calculated Risk has a nice piece on what this means for the economy. Just look at the pretty picture and draw your own conclusion on whether or not we are going to see another gray stripe (recession).