Where have I been this past month?  Why have I denied you your bi-weekly ration of off-color humor interwoven with current events?  What possible excuse can I have for such a blatant shirking of my responsibilities?
 
Vacation.  And it was AWESOME.  I’m totally tanner than you right now.
 
So, I clearly have some ‘catch-up’ to do.  And by golly, there was so much fun stuff going on in the world that I couldn’t bring myself to cut out any of it.  They all won’t be as long as this one, I promise.Almost 1 in 10 mortgages in this country is in default.  800 banks are now on the FDIC’s watch list and some economists believe upward of half of them could fail.  Ben Bernanke came out and an­nounced that more quantitative easing (printing serious cashola) was being considered.  July’s existing home sales fell into the latrine.  Clearly you people didn’t fix everything while I was sunning on the beach.
 
Okay, things aren’t super-dee-duper quite yet.  However, I bring this up to reiterate that you need to filter the gloomy bold-faced headlines through a brain cell.  News networks and newspapers (from which I imagine a large proportion of you derive your worldly information) love negativity.  Because it sells.
 
Let’s take the deplorable existing home sales numbers for example.  Month over month they dropped by 27.2%.  Ouch.  Now, those out there who are looking for ratings might say “These numbers clearly demonstrate a massive continued weakness in housing” and then they would interview a billion so-called experts/random people from the street/everything in-between who would justify their ‘logic’.
 
Housing ain’t recovered yet.  No one is arguing that.  But many will gloss over the fact that June was the final month that you could close in and still reap that $8000 homebuyer tax credit.  So, it kinda makes perfect sense that a bunch of people flooded in while that offer was still on and then things cooled off the following month.  I’m not trying to say things are great, but I am saying that they might be less bad than everyone wants you to believe.