If Cramer says it has, you know it hasn’t. The trouble with Jim Cramer and most of the media reporting on housing and the economy is that they’ve got to churn up a spectacular new story every day. So feints, small tremors and statistically insignificant dribblings become the next big news story.
The long view, the view you need to accurately forecast for your business, simply doesn’t exist anywhere in the mainstream media. Blogger Barry Ritholtz, who I linked to above, has consistently good analysis. In other posts on his site he’s made the case that housing prices are still to high and that we still have two or three years of liars loans, junk mortgages and balloon notes to flush out of the system before housing can begin to get healthy again.