i have put together a few toys in my day. there you go. if you re skilled with the welding, any of this stuff here s the thing, though. this time, it feels a little bit more like it s for real. remember we had that gigantic drop with the great recession. a lot of people who were in construction went on to other different jobs which is one of the reasons we ve got this amazing shortage of jobs where that means wages start to go up. if you re a carpenter, a roofer, equipment operator, these are all good gigs to have right now. good gigs to have. we had the construction numbers in this morning the u.s. construction numbers for last month. it was amazing. manufacture up 22%. commercial up 14%. office, lodging amusement parks all up huge. also interesting phenomenas, distribution+e centers, everyone orders things on google, amazon, they have these gigantic distribution centers and storage centers, general merchandise storage centers, through the roof. i m worried a little bit abou
almost harkens back to the early 2000s. another thing that is leading the mcmansions it s a larger home so your seeing an increase in the amount of square footage that builders are building for affluent buyers and one thing leading to this are a lot of generations are now living together, and i think as a demographic of hispanic folks in the united states, also continues to increase, we re beginning to see that add to these mcmansions. the hispanic family household is a tightknit community and live together and that s drying this, and the affluent buyers are building dream homes. we just saw the numbers come in today and we re continuing to see a year over year increase of prices, even though they did slow down, and i think they ll continue to rise maybe into next year, but economists are saying that the boost will really be in april of 2014, and until then i think we re going to see those construction numbers go up
you housing market? that s the flip side. e-mac, explain this one. yes, it s bad because look, about 11 to 12 million homes are in negative equity. meaning that s 25% of all mortgages out there that are tipping, and there s he a basically a big fat inventory of homes set to be defaulting or delinquent. i propose a new green job program, rehab and refurbish dilapidated old homes and that s how air going to get job creation in this country because we have a problem of suburban poverty right now from these derelict homes that are not being taken care of. morgan, are we supposed to get depressed about good numbers. no, i don t think we are. going back to e-mac s point, good news it s happening in the private sector the one fueling that, but i actually feel we need to put the construction numbers into perspective for a second. even though they ve come up and the highest that we ve seen since 2008, they re still 70% off the 2006 peak and they re still almost 60% down from healthy leve
job creation trailing the pace of last year through the first six months of the year. steve moore, senior economics writer at the wall street journal and joins us now. steve, 80,000 jobs, 0,000 jobs created. where did those jobs come from? well, jenna, a pretty lousy report overall. a lot of people expected 100 to 150,000 jobs so we re all very disappointed. yes, those jobs created came from, we did see an increase in white-collar hiring. so businesses for, what we call business services, increased their employment. we did see a small increase in manufacturing. we don t know if we can keep that going because manufacturing numbers were down last month. we actually did see an increase in temporary hiring. people, hiring part-time workers but those are, since they re part-time, jobs they re not paying full-time salaries. so overall, and by the way, if you look at the construction numbers and other areas of the economy like retail sales, just no
we would like. consumer spending, however, up 2.9% compared to 2.1% the quarter before. but consumer savings is down. so we ll have to see if this is sustainable. okay. how about the encouraging signs we have to report on? the housing market, pending home sales are on the rise. do you think the housing market is finally turned the corner? until unemployment changes, until those numbers change, we may not see a ton of demand. here s what happened here. this is new home numbers. up 17%, new home sales, we have the lowest inventory of new homes, 144,000 on the market since 1963. a lot of this has to do with the fact of construction did not happen during the recession the past four years. so unless folks start moving out of their parents house and we see more people who are forced to rent during the recession because they ve lost their jobs an had to sell their home, it s not going to build the housing market tremendously. we ve got to see more construction numbers and we have to see