I'm no fan of the bernanke but he did say that the Fed will only look to raise rates once the unemployment figure reaches about 7%. And raising rates might not happen until several quarters after that threshold is reached. As we know, the official unemployment number is a bunch if B.S., manipulated to make the gvt's policies look as good as possible. But still, it could take 6-12 months to reach that 7% threshold for all we know. That means more QE printing and more support for the housing sector until we reach 7%. If the gvt acknowledged the more accurate "U6" unemployment figure, which includes people who are part timers who WANT full time jobs, instead of the always happy-happy-joy-joy "U3" figure, which doesn't include underemployed people or people who haven't looked for a job in 4 weeks, then we'd probably never see Ben's 7% threshold hit. Even so, it doesn't seem that our official employment numbers per month won't be doing much more than barely keeping up with what's required to not increase unemployment (we require approx 125k new jobs / month just to keep up with new people entering the labor force) for a very long time. Who sees any business friendly policies from D.C. These days? Tax increases, etc, generally business-unfriendly policies abound out there. The only support had been the Fed's money-printing. So I would predict we won't see the Fed begin to taper as soon as some are fearing today. You heard Ben, there was talk in the FOMC meetings of continuing QE into 2015 or even 2016. Even if they taper at the end of this year, they'll still be pumping 10s of billions of $ into the markets every month. I think that if there are any solid fundamentals supporting the housing rally, it will be able to sustain that momentum through the first couple of rounds of tapering.
