New Home Sales Data Goes Full Retard With Report Frozen Northeast Saw 153% Surge

This is how ridiculous government data has become: in the same month in which both Housing Starts and Existing Home sales significantly missed expectations, misses which were promptly blamed on the weather, the Census Bureau moments ago released a stunner of a New Home Sales number, which supposedly rose from an upward revised 500K to 539K, smashing expectations of 481K, a 25% spike from a year ago and up 7.8% from January, which incidentally is also the highest number since February 2008, even as the median home price dropped to the lowest since September.

All of this would be great… if it was remotely credible. It isn’t, for three reasons.

First, as Census always admits in the fine print, the 90% confidence interval on the 7.8% increas is +/- 15.2%

Second, as we reported last year, after reported relentless beats in the middle and late part of 2014, Census would downward revise the data for 6 months in a row!

Third, and final, the reason why today’s data is just absolutely seasonally-(un)adjusted garbage is because somehow, even when all the other housing data woul dhave us believe the NOrtheast was a barren wasteland of snow and freezing soil, New Home Sales in February in the Northeast rose from 17K to 43K, an increase of 153%.

And just like that the Census Bureau has itself also gone full retard.