ann acquires plutonic mine form barrick, page-24

"5) What happens WHEN the US economy continues to improve and the AUS $$ stops offsetting the POG and it dips below $1,000?? All speculation buts its a possibility."

My comment:
Your post implies that the US economy is improving. It is not. What is improving is the spin and manipulation of economic figures being released.

"Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Today's New Home Sales Report For November: Complete Fiction

I'll have a lot more in-depth detail in a couple days, but suffice it to say that today's new home sales report, prepared and released by the Government's Census Bureau, goes beyond the bounds of all credibility.

Please note: the headline number is a seasonally adjusted annualized number. We have no idea how they statistically engineer that final number but there's no way it's even remotely accurate. To begin, the Government significantly revised higher the numbers originally reported for September and October. Does it make sense that October had new home sales that were higher than for June - June being the seasonally strongest month for home sales? It gets better. Based on the revised numbers for Sept/Oct plus today's number for November, the 3 month average for Sept-Nov was a 447,000 seasonally adjusted annualized rate. It exceeds the 3 month average for June- Aug by 44,000. Is it even possible for that to happen considering the strong seasonality of housing, with June-Aug being by far the strongest seasonal months? Sorry the numbers are not believable.

Layer onto that the Government shut-down, which seems to have affected every business statistic out there negatively except a few that are being reported by the Government. In addition, mortgage purchase applications have plunged over the last three months. Purchase applications have declined in 9 of the last 13 weeks. How can new home sales possibly be higher when 90% of all new homes are purchased using mortgages? If you take just the estimated actual number for November of 33k homes sold and simply annualize it, you get a 396,000 annualized rate. This would overstate the actual rate because November is typically a slow seasonal month. I have no idea where the Government's 464,000 estimate came from and I doubt anyone else does either.


Getting back to mortgage applications, here's a chart for purchase applications.

The Government wants us to believe that new homes sales increased despite that sharp fall off in applications for mortgages used to purchase new homes, which finance 90% of all new home sales. Finally, interest rates have been climbing steadily higher since early October. In fact, 30-yr fixed rates have spiked up from 4.10% at the end of October to their current 4.47%. And that rate is for a 20% down mortgage and perfect credit.

So I'll leave it up to you to decide if you think the Government new housing report is even remotely believable."

At http://truthingold.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/todays-new-home-sales-report-for.html