1115.org

Last month, we took a look at Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s take on housing and the economy:

“All the signs I look at” show “the housing market is at or near the bottom,” Paulson said. The U.S. economy is “very healthy” and “robust,” he said.

Just a few days later, the “very healthy” and “robust” US economy was announced to have grown at the slowest rate in four years.

Now the other half of Paulson’s perfecta is getting away from him:

Home prices are expected to finish down for the year, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) said Tuesday, which would mark the first drop since the group started tracking values in 1968.

NAR projects a 1 percent decline in the median price of an existing single-family home, to $219,800. The group, in a forecast made a month ago, had previously been expecting a 0.7 percent decline. Prior to that, it had expected a gain of 1.2 percent.

The number of home sales is also expected to dip from 6.48 million in 2006 to 6.29 million in 2007, a drop of 2.7 percent.

From +1.2% to -.7% to -1% in just a few months. I wonder if Paulson would care to put some of his credibility (or more importantly, some of his personal fortune) on the line on the direction of the next revision?