Finding a measure of stability in the housing sector has been viewed as critical to halting economic decline and pouring a foundation for some measure of recovery. By now the evidence for bottoming and mild housing market recovery is pretty convincing. It was informed by the latest Case-Schiller Index data on prices published this morning. Home prices were up 1.2% in the major metropolitan regions covered by the survey, making it four months of upward movement in a row.
The $8,000 first-time-buyer home credit may be playing a role in boosting the housing market's fortunes. Some figure it is one of the few pieces of government stimulus programs that is actually producing tangible results. In an editorial today, however, The New York Times opines that the home credit is too narrowly focused and only helps with activity that would have happened anyway. This is not to say that the Times is anti-stimulus. Anything but: the editorial calls for more government stimulus, hewing to a line of thinking regularly advanced by the paper's Paul Krugman:
Without another round of effective stimulus, the worst recession in modern memory will likely become — at best — the weakest recovery in modern memory. Another boost to federal spending that is targeted and timely should not be too much for politicians to deliver.
