The lede has to be the the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) statement.

While the rates remained the same, no surprise, you cannot drop rates below 0%, and rates won’t go up until the Fed sends a few months of signals, what is surprising is that the statement is more pessimistic than May’s statement:

The Federal Reserve acknowledged a faltering pace of U.S. economic recovery on Wednesday as it renewed its vow to hold benchmark interest rates exceptionally low for an extended period.

In a statement at the end of a two-day meeting, the Fed scaled back its assessment of the pace of recovery, taking note of pockets of weakness, and also issued a cautionary note about volatile financial markets in light of Europe’s debt woes.

Of course, it’s more than just unemployment and consumer spending, real estate appears poised to had back down the drain, with the AIA’s Architecture Billings Index declining last month, and mortgage purchase applications fell again this week.

But the real news in real estate is the continuing collapse in home sales, and we now know that new home sales have fallen to the lowest recorded number ever, a 300,000 annual rate, and records on this have been kept since 1963. (!)

The two bright sides here are that the numbers are seasonally adjusted, and that the monthly number is volatile, and was likely impacted by the expiration of the home buyer tax credit, but it is still grim.