Thanksgiving may have been a week ago but the turkeys were out in force in US stockmarkets over the past week. Just look at the way they have been plucked with three big rises in the market and one correction.

First we were told that shoppers opened their wallets in stores and online after Thanksgiving: they did, but the goods they were buying were heavily discounted, and many retailers probably just shifted stocks at a small margin. Wall Street rose on Friday.

Then it fell Monday when more bad news appeared from the sub-prime/housing crisis swamp.

On Tuesday there was the joke that a $US7.5 billion bailout of Citibank was “good news”; ignoring the fact that Arab investors were the “investors of last resort” and had charged a junk bond rate of 11% to allow the bosses at Citigroup to avoid cutting the dividend and facing calls for their sacking. Wall Street rose.

The deal will also enable Citigroup to avoid slashing bonuses to valuable profit producing staff in the US, Britain, Australia, Japan, the rest of Asia and Europe by paying at least half in bank shares, which have a falling value; which means the staff bonuses are actually not what was promised.

Then Wednesday there was the biggest joke of all: the 300-plus surge in the market with a confession from the second most senior man at the Fed that it would be “nimble” after it “had not anticipated” the slide in financial markets in the past few weeks.

Yesterday the market finished up a few points as interest rates again fell with investors taking their profits from the turkeys and retreating to bonds.

Why? Well new figures out showed new-home prices dropping by the biggest margin in 37 years, jobless claims hit a nine month record, new homes sales fell to an annual rate much lower than the pessimists had forecast, and the US economy grew at 4.9% in the third quarter, meaning a plunge in activity is now underway.

Analysts say all this means the Fed will again bail out Wall Street and cut interest rates, but the reality is that the Fed will cut merely to soften the blow of a sagging economy.

Take the growth figure: the first of three estimates a month was 3.9%, then as it became apparent exports were booming on the lower dollar, growth was upgraded and confirmed yesterday by Government figures showing it had hit 4.9%. But housing actually trimmed growth by 1.03% in the quarter alone.

Now, with the Fed forecasting 2008 growth to slow to the range of 1.8% to 2.75%, economists say the fall this quarter is underway and will be very sharp.

The US Commerce Department said the median price of a new house in the US fell 13%, to $217,800 in October from October 2006. Homes sold at an annual rate of 728,000 in October, less than the median forecast of 750,000 by economists in a Bloomberg survey.

The number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits rose to 352,000, the Labor Department reported.

New home sales actually rose 1.7% in October from September, but that was only because the September figure was revised sharply down, as was August’s estimate.That means new home sales are now much lower than previously estimated.

September new-home sales were revised down to a 716,000 annual rate, the lowest in almost 12 years, from the originally reported 770,000 rate. And foreclosure filings have nearly doubled from a year ago; more people could lose their homes in 2008.

According to the monthly survey from RealtyTrac there were 224,451 foreclosure filings reported nationally in October, up 94% from October 2006 and up 2% from September. In the month, 53,609 US homeowners were forced out of homes repossessed by banks, up from 20,768 a year ago, the firm said. Through October, a total of 309,557 homes have been repossessed by banks leading to forced evictions.

Now that doesn’t sound like an economy heading for solid growth next year, not when RealtyTrac says the situation will get worse in the early months of next year before there’s any sign of improvement.