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Robert's research is impeccable and message compelling. How can this information not have impact on policy makers? It deserves the widest possible sharing.

For the week of November 17th, New York's initial unemployment claims dropped by -30,603. That's almost a halving of their claims, raw numbers not seasonally adjusted for that week were 32,689. New Jersey did not recover, their claims, same week were 45,631 and before the storm, October 27th's, NJ's initial claims were 9,360.

So, assuming we have about 35k initial claims due to New Jersey and Sandy, that puts this week's figure 393,000 to bout 360k or so. That said, Sandy counts and the number of businesses wiped out by Sandy is huge so those initial claims implying jobs were lost probably isn't temporary for many of those businesses. Not good.

Since a “sale” is defined as a deposit taken or sales agreement signed, this can occur prior to a permit being issued.

So, a sale is a fairly solid commitment. The Census is saying someone has put down the money without signing the agreement, or has signed the sales contract without the money down and sales can happen before even the permit to build the actual house has been processed.

So, the next question is what does the Census do with canceled contracts and sales?

From the website:

The Census Bureau does not make adjustments to the new home sales figures to account for cancellations of sales contracts.

The Survey of Construction (SOC) is the survey used to collect all data on housing starts, completions, and sales. This survey usually begins by sampling a building permit authorization, which is then tracked to find out when the housing unit starts, completes, and sells. When the owner or builder of a housing unit authorized by a permit is interviewed, one of the questions asked is whether the house is being built for sale. If it is, we then ask if the house has been sold (contract signed or earnest money exchanged). If the respondent reports that the unit has been sold, the survey does not follow up in subsequent months to find out if it is still sold or if the sale was cancelled. The house is removed from the "for sale" inventory and counted as sold for that month. If the house it is not yet started or under construction, it will be followed up until completion and then it will be dropped from the survey.

Since we discontinue asking about the sale of the house after we collect a sale date, we never know if the sales contract is cancelled or if the house is ever resold. Therefore, the eventual purchase by a subsequent buyer is not counted in the survey; the same housing unit cannot be sold twice.

As a result of our methodology, if conditions are worsening in the marketplace and cancellations are high, sales would be temporarily overestimated. When conditions improve and these cancelled sales materialize as actual sales, our sales would then be underestimated since we did not allow the cases with cancelled sales to re-enter the survey. In the long run, cancellations do not cause the survey to overestimate or underestimate sales.

So, in bad times one would seemingly have high overestimates for a period of months that eventually will be dropped and the survey evens out.

Explains why even more this statistical release has such wide variance and error margins.

Thanks for asking this question. I share your frustration with the new Census site and they moved the FAQ to some ridiculous crappy aggregate thing. Please complain about it. They offshore outsourced the website design via IBM (who hires H-1B guest workers, fires Americans plus offshore outsources) and clearly it shows in such crappy design changes.

I personally find it disgusting that the Census, who probably has the most data to present of any government agency, would not hire regular Federal employees to deal with website design and instead would take taxpayer money and hand it to evil, crappy, offshore outsourcer IBM.

They should have all of this, in house, permanent, full-time Federal employees or U.S. citizen contractors only.

in your discussion of sandy effects, it occurred to me that i dont know when a "sale" is recorded by census; is it the signing of a contract, or something else in the process?

the census FAQs didnt help much...

Daily experience shows there are a decreasing number of jobs to even apply to. They simply aren't there, anywhere. And this includes the ability to travel anywhere, including overseas, at a moment's notice. Private, public, jobs in area trained for and jobs far afield. That's how ridiculous the situation is. No amount of lies or pep talk or "retrain, learn to become a short-order cook or brainsurgeon or space shuttle commander and relocate here or there for $10/hr." can change the fact that there are decreasing jobs. I knew nothing would change following the election, and nothing has. This endless fiscal cliff talk is a nice distraction both D & R enjoy so no one has to talk about unemployment and increasing numbers of hopeless Americans with no working future until the fiscal cliff is put off again in December or Jan. 2013. And then it will be endless talk about Iran or Syria or somewhere else, anywhere else but the US desperate workers. And the obsession in the media about housing starts or sales? Even assuming the stats weren't dubious or NAR wasn't trying to sell a house to everyone (even when most people are struggling or looking to find jobs and post-housing collapse), how do housing starts or sales matter when median wages are falling when people have jobs, increasing numbers of Americans can't find jobs no matter how many skills and degrees they have, and a house in this day and age is merely a debt ball-and-chain around someone as companies expect everyone outside the boardroom to move anywhere within 24 hours to serve their increasingly insane whims.

Just at the peak of the bubble I remember there was a new product introduced specifically to immigrants (even with no proven residency status) who didn't even have a credit rating. And you are right - Wall Street, including pools of rich investors, are buying up properties to flip them because they made some money doing that at the bottom of the market in Las Vegas and Miami when banks were dumping properties at below market prices. It doesn't seem like the uptick in housing prices we are now seeing is anything more than a dead cat bounce. One thing I am hearing from people in construction is that the flippers want only cosmetic work done and want to be out in 45 days at the most. This is certainly not going to promote neighborhood stability. Another thing I am seeing is that the banks are reaching again for poor credit risks, not just in housing loans, but auto loans and student loans. We are back a bit to 2006. Did you notice General Motors repurchased GMAC? Talk about deja vu all over again.

and their continually pounding with pundits who make 7 figures to boot on empty, meaningless arguments on all cable channels, plus the press clearly puts out misinformation blizzard snow. It's mind numbing and their audience is supposedly the people who know what's going on.

Oh, how far we've fallen. And that's why the people in charge want everyone to stop thinking, stop reading (except for Us and People) and to buy the newest i-crap and play Angry Birds or buy endless apps (for only $.99 - what a deal to kill brain cells). The people in charge aren't brighter, they're more self-serving, and some cases, just narcissistic psychos that need a dumbed-down populace that doesn't question their orders. There was an episode of the new "Twilight Zone" (awful compared to the original) in which kids were tested for IQ scores at a certain age in a dystopian society. A couple's kid took the test. He came back home and was so proud because he crushed it. The parents looked sad and horrified upon hearing this. The reason - the kid didn't know that in the future people that were too bright were seen as a threat to the powers that be and were imprisoned or killed. And that's what makes the "Twilight Zone" (especially the old ones) so effective. It's possible.