USA Today reports that the National Association of Realtors (NAR) is unhappy about new regulations that require that appraisals be picked independently of the realtor or the bank issuing the loan. According to the article, the NAR complains that the appraisals are being down by inexperienced appraisers who don't understand the local market in which they are evaluating prices.

If this is true then it would be expected that there would be more variance in appraisals, but there is no reason that appraisals should come in consistently low. There is no reason to believe that these appraisers would have a bias towards issuing low appraisals.

--Dean Baker

In the real world this would be difficult, but not on NPR. Morning Edition had a lengthy segment on the deficit with David Walker, the president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an organization founded by Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire Wall Street investment banker and Commerce Department secretary in the Nixon Administration. Walker was allowed to give his account without any alternative perspectives.

In discussing the December jobs report the Post repeated some of the silliness about productivity that is currently circulating among people who imagine themselves to be knowledgeable about the economy. It told readers that:

"Employers slashed positions more dramatically in the past two years, squeezing more productivity out of remaining workers. That has led many analysts to expect a substantial increase in the number of jobs in the early months of 2010, as companies must hire again just to keep up with demand for their products."

Several news stories noted the revisions to prior months' data now show a 4,000 job gain for November. It is important to note that this is not especially positive news. The job gain no reported for November is entirely attributable to the fact that the job loss for October was revised upward by 16,000. The net effect of the revisions to the data for the two months was to show 1,000 more lost jobs than indicated in the prior release. It is difficult to see how this can be viewed as positive.

--Dean Baker

A Washington Post article discussed predictions around the December employment report that will be released on Friday. It noted predictions that employment will actually be shown as increasing in this report, noting several pieces of relatively good news, including the fact that the number of weekly unemployment claims had fallen to their lowest level since August of 2008.

The plunge in the Pending Home Sales index in November should not have been a surprise to analysts. The Mortgage Bankers Association applications index for purchase mortgages went into a tailspin in late October, as people could no longer be assured of closing by November 30th, the expiration date for the original first-time buyers tax credit.

The NYT highlighted the slowdown in the growth rate of national health care spending in 2008 to 4.4 percent, compared with 6.0 percent in 2007 and an average of 7.0 percent in the decade from 1998 to 2008. There really is not very much to tout in this story. The slowdown was roughly proportional to the decline in GDP growth. As a result, health care spending measured as a share of GDP rose by 0.3 percentage points, roughly the same rate of growth that it had averaged over the prior decade.

The affordability of health care will depend on its growth as a share of GDP and a growth rate of 0.3 percentage points annually cannot be sustained indefinitely.

--Dean Baker