What We're Hearing

In the early 1950s my parents bought a Levitt-built house in Wantagh, out in Long Island, paying about $8,000 for the property. (It was an FHA loan. My dad was in the Air Force.) They sold the home seven years ago for roughly $330,000, making a tidy profit. This past week I interviewed Kyle R. Walker of Home America, Lake Forest, Calif., whose specialty is buying REO properties -- including some from Fannie Mae -- for between $1,000 to $10,000. Some of the homes reside in inner city Detroit, a metropolitan area that is hemorrhaging residents. Stated differently: a home in Detroit today costs less (or about the same) as a newly built house in the potato fields of Long Island 60 years ago. What's wrong with this picture? Is this the buying opportunity of the century or is something else afoot? Meanwhile, the new jobs number is out. The government said the economy shed 20,000 jobs after losing 150,000 jobs in December. November was revised to a gain of 64,000, up from 4,000. Follow all that? The good news is that the jobless rate fell to 9.7% from 10%. Are there fears the economy is truly improving and that the Federal Reserve soon will hike interest rates? Don't bet on it. The yield on the 10-year Treasury is falling as I write this...