USA still faces a rocky road to recovery says top economist

The U.S. residential market still faces a long and “rocky road” to recovery, Karl Case, the co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller Index of property values said this week as prices feel more steeply than expected.

As one of the most influential independent housing indicators in the States, the S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities has just revealed that prices declined by 3.7 percent in November 2011 versus November 2010, after decreasing 3.4 percent in October year-on-year.

This was worse than the 3.3 percent drop predicted by a group of leading U.S. economists for a Bloomberg News survey this month. And any sort of recovery is being hampered by yet another wave of foreclosures that threatens to keep the prices under pressure, Bloomberg reported this week.

The news comes as the U.S. Federal Reserve put out a statement saying that that the American housing sector “remains depressed.” The view is that more stability in housing prices will be required before investors start to take advantage of the country’s record-low mortgage rates.

Source: OPP.org.uk