U.S. Housing Starts, Building Permits drop. Canada CPI rises slightly.

December 18, 2007 - Forex Economic News

U.S. Housing Starts in November dropped 3.7 percent compared to October and is 24.2 percent less than recorded in November 2006 according to data released by the Commerce Department today on new residential construction. Single-family housing starts totaled 829,000 which was 5.4 percent less than October. Building permits statistics, a predictor of future construction, showed a decrease of 1.5 percent compared to October and were 24.6 percent below November 2006. Single-family permits totaled 764,000 which was 5.6 percent less than October. View the report(pdf).

Canada's consumer prices increased slightly in November to an annual rate of 2.5 percent compared to October's annual rate of 2.4 percent from data released today by Statistics Canada. Higher gasoline costs and mortgage interest costs pushed prices higher according to the report. Month to month CPI rose 0.3 percent from October to November after a decrease of 0.3 percent the previous month. Bank of Canada's core index rose 1.6 percent for the 12 month period starting from November 2006. This was the smallest annual rate increase since April of 2006 for the core index. View the report.

Tags: Building Permits, Canada CPI, Fundamentals, U.S. Housing Starts- Blog index