For those who want to sell their houses this spring, they will be disappointed by where home prices are going.

According to the S&P/Case-Shiller Index published today, home prices in 20 largest U.S. metro areas have fallen for 9 straight months at the end of March. The current downward trend started last July, shortly after the $6,500 homebuyer tax credit expired. The government incentive, which originally took effective in 2009 when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 became law, helped end home prices’ 26 consecutive monthly decline from April 2007 to June 2009. But, while the tax credit boosted home sales for a few months, it’s now quite clear that the tax credit can only do so much. There’s no fundamental change in the housing market even as the economy slowly recovers from the worst recession in decades. Last week, Realty Trac, the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, issued its latest foreclosure sales report, and in the report, Realty Trac noted that about 28% of all U.S. residential home sales in the first quarter of 2011 were houses owned by banks. That’s the highest percentage in a year. With some many foreclosed homes on the market, sale prices were pushed down hard. According to Realty Trac, in the first quarter, average price of foreclosed houses  was nearly 27% below the average sales price of properties in normal sale. With more than 1.9 million homes already taken back by banks, Realty Trac says it will take about three years just to clear up this huge inventory. Until then, don’t expect home prices to show any significant improvement. And many economists have said that the economy won’t truly recover until the housing market recovers.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Composite-20 Index covers 20 metropolitan areas. The plot above shows year-over-year change of the Composite-20 Index from 2001 to March 2011. Among 20 cities traced by the Index, only Washington DC shows a year-over-year prices increase. Minneapolis has the largest one-year price decline of 10%.

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Has the job picture really improved?

If you look at recently employment reports, you probably have the impression that the nation’s employment situation may have turned around. Last Friday, the government reported that January unemployment rate fell to 9.0% from the 9.4% in December 2010. Then this morning, figures from the Labor Department showed that weekly initial jobless claims decreased 36,000 from the previous weekly to 383,000, the lowest since July 2008.

From the above chart, the overall trend of initial claims since peaking in early 2009 does seem encouraging. However, you may want to take the latest numbers with a grain of salt. The 9.0% unemployment rate, while a piece of good news for the administration, was likely a result of a smaller number of people actively seeking work instead of more hirings. And for the initial jobless claims, bad weather in a large part of the country last week could have played a big role in the reduction in claims.

Until we see solid job creations, I guess we can’t really declare things have turned around.

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Another piece of disturbing news came from the Census Bureau yesterday. In its annual report, Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States 2009, to the Congress, the Census Bureau said that the worst recession since the Great Depression has pushed millions of Americans into poverty. According to the report, the poverty rate was at 14.3% in 2009, which translates to a total of 43.6 million people ,or 1 in every 7 Americans, living in poverty, up from 39.8 million, or 13.2%, in 2008. The annual increase of poverty rate from between 2008 and 2009 was the second largest on record since 1973. Only the increase between 1979 and 1980 was higher.

As you can see from the figure blow, the 14.3% poverty rate is the highest since 1994 when the percentage of people living in poor was 14.5%. The definition of poverty in 2009 was a pre-tax income of $10,830 for an adult or $22,050 for a family of four.

2009 was the last year when the survey was conducted. With unemployment hovering around 10% most of 2010, the picture could be even gloomier in the 2010 report.

The Census report also showed the number of people without health insurance increased to 50.7 million in 2009 from 46.3 million a year earlier, leaving 16.7% of the population without health care coverage.

Here are some other statistics in the report:

• State with the highest poverty rate: Mississippi 23.1%, with the lowest poverty rate: New Hampshire 7.8%
• Poverty rate by regions: Northest 12.2%, Midwest 13.3%, South 15.7%, West 14.8%
• Poverty rate for men: 13.0%,  for women: 15.6%
• The poverty rate for non-Hispanic whites: 9.4%, for blacks 25.8%, for Hispanics 25.3%,  for Asians 12.5%
• Median household income for White, no Hispanic $54,461, Black $32,584, Asian $65,469, Hispanic origin $38,039

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The economy has grown again, but the labor market showed no sign of improving. Actually, if you look at the the unemployment report released this morning, you will probably feel things are getting worse, not better.

In the latest job report, the government said that the nation’s monthly unemployment rate reached 10.20%, the highest level in more than 26 years. For a long time, we have been warmed that the unemployment rate may reach double-digit, but it seems that it came a little earlier than expected.

Despite the huge amount of money the government has spent to pull the economy out of the deepest recession in 70 years, the job market is still very weak. In October, U.S. employers shed 190,000 non-farm positions. The number of jobs lost in a month is the lowest so far in 2009, but the number of unemployed person increased 558,000 in October, pushing the total number of people without a job to 15.7 million. Since the recession began in December 2007, more than 8.2 million workers have lost their jobs.

The economy may be recovering (GDP grew 3.5% in the third quarter), but we probably won’t feel any real improvement until we all have jobs.

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It was October 3, 2008 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above the 10,000 level at 10,325.38. In the following five trading sessions, the widely watched index lost 1874.19, closing at 8,451.19 on October 10, 2008. Actually, October 3, 2008 was right in the middle of a steep plunge of the Dow. The index closed at 10,850.66 on September 30, 2008. Eight consecutive losing sessions cost the benchmark 2399. 47 points. That’s more than 22% in eight trading days, one of the worst declines of the index in its history.  Since then, the Dow was in a downward spiral amid the worst recession since the Great Depression. The decline accelerated early this year when big banks like Citigroup and Bank of America needed billions of dollars taxpayer money to survive. On March 9, 2009, the Dow closed at 6,547.05, a bottom that we can call only when looking back at the history.

Though the Dow has gained 3,468.81 points since its March low, it is still more than 4,000 points off its peak reached in October 2007. But, as it has already happened, these shouldn’t be any doubt that the initial rally was real now.

The question is: Did you miss it?

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