WILL HE OR WON’T HE? The guessing about whether the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy committee will continue to ratchet interest rates upward has not stopped with the retirement of the enigmatic Alan Greenspan. The clues provided by the financial markets, says Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, “are not at all clear-cut . . . The bottom line for policy appears ambiguous”.

So, concludes the chairman, he must rely on “multiple sources of information,” one of which is surely data on the housing market. Experts waiting to hear the “pop” of the housing bubble will have to wait awhile longer. Sales of existing homes rose by 5.2 percent in February, after five consecutive months of decline. And average prices continued to rise at double-digit rates, despite relatively high inventories of unsold homes. Surveying the trends in incomes, interest rates, and inflation, William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, concludes that “housing activity will stabilize and remain at a high level this year.”