Off on vacation tomorrow, so blogging will probably suffer.

A couple of notes, though. First is a report on yet another homebuilder CEO - Standard Pacific Homes CEO Stephen Scarborough - who said Friday that he doesn’t foresee a huge recovery in the national new-home market at least for a year or more. In general, the homebuilders have been pretty clear that they don’t see any recovery yet. But their shares are being bought as if the crisis were over. In my view, it is yet to come.

Alan Abelson in Barron’s: “The dismal disclosure of just how effectively Jane and John Q. are spending more than they earn has been greeted with the usual serious sophistry from the usual Panglossian pundits. Their contemptuous claim is that benighted worrywarts like ourselves who fret over such inconsequentials as a negative savings rate are just plain silly. And, it grieves us to confess, after carefully mulling their arguments, we do feel, well, just plain silly.

For how could we overlook the fact that savings as officially defined don’t include the equity in houses and investment in stocks. And, as we all know, it is decreed that house prices can go only one way — up. Pay no heed to minor variations in that sacrosanct trend; they probably won’t last more than five, six years at the outside.”

The graph is from Stephanie Pomboy’s MacroMavens commentary. As she observes, “For all the bragging about the $6 trillion in cash households have sitting on their balance sheets, relative to household debt, this cash cushion is at a record low!”

In addition, the households with the cash are not the ones with the debt. The top 1% of householders hold 30% of the assets and 7% of the debt, while the bottom 50% hold a mere 6% of assets but 24% of the debt.