US homes sales fall, spending flat, while Asian output generally up

There was plenty of economic news yesterday.

In the US, the Commerce Department reported that sales of new homes fell 9.2 percent in January while the median price of a new home fell 13.2 percent to the lowest level since December 2003. According to Associated Press, analysts blamed "the worse-than-expected showing on bad weather in many parts of the country rather than any serious problems in the red hot housing market".

In another Commerce Department report, personal incomes, which had been bolstered by a large stock dividend payment by Microsoft in December, fell 2.3 percent in January. This was after rising 3.7 percent in December. However, without the dividend payment, personal incomes would have shown stable gains of 0.6 percent in December and 0.5 percent in January.

In the same report, personal consumption expenditure was unchanged in January after having risen by 0.8 percent in December. The price index for personal consumption expenditure excluding food and energy, a gauge of inflation, rose 0.3 percent in January, the biggest one-month jump in more than three years.

Meanwhile, business activity in the Chicago area expanded slightly in February. The latest Chicago purchasing managers index reads 62.7 percent compared with 62.4 percent in January.

Earlier yesterday, Japan had reported that its industrial output jumped 2.1 percent in January, beating economists' forecasts and raising hopes of an economic pickup there, while in South Korea, annual industrial production growth accelerated to 14.2 per cent in January from 4.6 per cent in December.

Less optimistically, Singapore's manufacturing output for January fell 7.6 percent on a seasonally-adjusted month-on-month basis. Output was mainly hurt by a fall in the volatile biomedical manufacturing cluster, which contracted by 8.6 percent over January last year.