The American people truly hate what has happened to the economy, and they are desperate for change. Unfortunately, our long economic slide just continues to get even worse.  In fact, we just got some new numbers that are simply staggering.

Let me start with the housing market.

On Thursday, we learned that pending home sales in the United States have dropped to the lowest level ever measured…

High mortgage rates and elevated home prices combined to crush home sales in January.

Pending sales, which are based on signed contracts for existing homes, dropped 4.6% from December to the lowest level since the National Association of Realtors began tracking this metric in 2001. Sales were down 5.2% from January 2024. These sales are an indicator of future closings.

Just think about this for a moment.

Pending home sales were not this low at any point during the Great Recession.

And pending home sales were not this low when everybody was being locked down during the pandemic.

Nobody can deny that the housing market is in a depressed state, and there is no indication that this is going to change any time soon.

Meanwhile, jobless claims spiked even more than expected last week…

First-time applications for unemployment benefits rose much more than expected last week, a likely indication of some "noisy" data, but also a potential worrisome hint that cracks may be forming in America's long-solid labor market.

There were an estimated 242,000 jobless claims filed last week, according to seasonally adjusted data released Thursday by the Department of Labor. That's an increase of 22,000 from the prior week's tally and a figure that landed well above economists' expectations for 220,000 claims.