Wonder why construction jobs are hard to find? Nobody's buying new houses.
Today, the U.S. Census Department released its monthly New Residential Home Sales Report for August showing continued stunning weakness with sales remaining flat at an all-time low of 288K annualized units, the lowest level on record.
New single family home sales stayed flat since July and plunged a whopping 28.9% below the level seen in August 2009 while the monthly supply declined slightly to 8.6 months and the median months for sale declined to 10.3 months.
These results provide even more evidence that the government's housing tax scam policy was ultimately a complete and total failure accomplishing nothing but creating a temporary distortion of the underlying "organic" housing trends.
With numbers this weak, it could even be argued that the government's tax gimmick ultimately destabilized the nation's home markets by injecting a substantial amount of uncertainty, sponsoring feeble home buyers and preventing the natural market clearing mechanism from playing out.
The following charts show the extent of sales decline (click for full-larger version)
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