Our Week In Review: "See Wimauma Property"

WIMAUMA, FLORIDA, SIX ACRE HOME, BARN, FENCED REDUCED FOR SALE

$329,900.00

PALM CITY'S HORSETALK:   by Horsetalkgirl

OVERVIEW ~ June 7 through June 11 ~ The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) began the week at 9931.97, having declined in the face of the prior week’s disappointing employment report and on-going concerns about debt issues in several of the world’s nations. By the end of the week, though, the DJIA had risen 2.8%, to 10211.07, in the face of very little news that would support its climb. A plausible explanation for this is that the DJIA has a tendency to rise when the general belief is that the economic recovery is continuing in spite of many concerns.

The price of gold gave contrary signals, also; it began the week at a very high 1239.30 and, despite the ups and downs of the stock market indices, the price of oil and the exchange rate of the euro, gold remained above 1220 for the remainder of the week. In other words, even as a rising DJIA signaled a bit more willingness to invest where the risk is a bit higher than it is in gold, the strength of gold still suggested that a large number of investors were unwilling to move their wealth out of this safest of safe investment havens.

FOCUS ~ Retail Sales (where the economy moves from Wall Street to Main Street) for May showed a marked decline of 1.2%.

Consumer purchases make up about two-thirds of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product. Without strong retail sales, we cannot have a strong economy. Indeed, analysts frequently assert that we need better employment figures to have better retail sales data. And to have greater real estate sales volume we need both strong employment growth and retail sales figures.

These retail sales figures, we should remind ourselves, represent only one month. We need more data before we try to reach definitive conclusions. March and April figures, for a slew of technical reasons, may have been higher than they should have been, and the current numbers turn out to be 7% higher than their year-ago levels.

Still, the report raises more unanswered questions about the strength of the recovery, precisely the kind of questions that made this week’s numbers jump around so much.