Similar figures from the US housing and services sectors suggest the recession is unlikely to end soon.
This was particularly bad news following reports earlier this week regarding the dire condition of the US housing market.
The bank's chief financial officer Bruce Thompson added that the bank was now leaving the US housing market crisis behind.
The reasons for optimism have been sound, from a turn-around in the Chinese economy to the US housing recovery gaining steam.
The US housing market rebound gained steam in November, new data suggests.
Not only are prices going through the roof, but, as was the case with the US housing bubble, there are basically no downpayments.
However, it may also reflect the bottoming-out of prices and activity in the US housing market following the collapse of last decade's property bubble.
It started to weaken around August when the market began to really get worried about the US housing bubble and the fall of Bear Sterns.
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News that sales of new homes in 2012 were the highest since 2009, sparked hopes that the US housing market turned a corner last year.
She has not lost total faith in the US housing market.
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In notable economic news this week, the Commerce Department announced that US housing starts increased by 2.3% in August to the seasonally adjusted rate of 750, 000.
The UK stock market has risen 10% since the start of 2013, and is now higher than it has been since the US housing market bubble burst in 2007.
Frederic Drevon, the managing director at Moody's, admitted that he was "not satisfied" with the performance of its ratings of products based on the US housing market.
To truly fix the US housing market business owners and the board members for corporations need to be informed to invest more of the profit into their employees.
Could we have used our knowledge of tulip mania to prevent the 2000 Nasdaq collapse or the 2008 global financial crisis sparked by the decline of the US housing market?
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The collapse in prices will hurt investors with large gold holdings such as John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who made billions betting against the US housing market during the financial crisis.
Some economists suggest the slowdown in the US housing market is already playing a role in reducing the number of immigrant workers, as many choose to return home when there is no work.
Indeed, it is possible to find entirely respectable economists (Robert Shiller for example) arguing that it was the lack of options and futures markets in housing that failed to prick the US housing bubble before it blew.
The world downturn will be led by problems in the US housing market, but the IMF warns that excessive house price inflation in some European countries, including Spain, Ireland and the UK, has made them more vulnerable to a slowdown.
It is roughly five years since the US housing market bubble started to deflate, helping to tip the economy into recession and exposing the extent of the sub-prime mortgage scandal in which many people took out loans that they had little prospect of repaying.
With most of the country's major lenders discovering billion-dollar losses linked to bad mortgage debt as the US housing market collapsed, investment banks such as Bear Stearns needed government funds ahead of being sold off cheaply, while another, Lehman Brothers, was ultimately closed down.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, although someone should revise it and add new chapters on the Nifty Fifty bubble of the 1970s, Japan bubble of the 1980s, Asia financial crisis of 1997, dotcom bubble of 2001 and US housing bubble of 2007.
But in this recession, the US housing construction industry - which largely collapsed between 2006 and 2010 - has failed until now to recover, in large part due the difficulty in obtaining a mortgage, and a glut of cheap repossessed homes dumped on the market by the banks.
Indeed, the last time we saw anything even approaching a 49-month double digit rate string was the 36-month string that gave us the housing boom turn bust turn Great Recession.
You know Bernanke, the same Federal Reserve Chairman currently nurturing a monetary bubble already larger than the one that gave us the housing bubble turn bust turn Great Recession (see HERE ).
The current monetary inflation that is the Bernanke boom-bust-to-be is already multiples larger than the monetary inflation that produced the tech bust and, at this point in the boom-bust cycle, even larger than the inflationary surge that gave us the housing bust turn Great Recession.
In the US, existing housing sales, housing starts, and initial claims and leading economic indicators beat market expectations.
And sometimes it is not, but engineering homeownership for non-homeownership candidates has already given us a catastrophic housing and mortgage market collapse.
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Looking ahead, the investment firm said the global economic outlook remained "fragile", despite some encouraging data from the US labour and housing markets.
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