Moments ago, in its latest update, Case Shiller pointed out that for another month "Home prices continue to rise twice as fast as inflation." Actually that is an understatement: in two-third of the tracked metro areas, the pace of home appreciation over the past year was 6% or higher, or equivalent to three times as fast as inflation. And with rents continuing to soar across the country, in many cases at a double digit clip, not to mention exploding healthcare costs, one wonders just what the BLS "measures" with its monthly CPI update.

In any case, for those lucky Americans who can afford to own a house instead of being stuck renting the New Normal American dream where they are prohibited from peddling fiction as their annual rent increases by 10% or more each year, here is the breakdown of the best and worst cities for housing in the U.S.

At the top, with annual price increases over 9% and as high as 11.9% in the case of Portland, we also find Seattle Denver and - of course - San Francisco. On the other end are Washington, Chicago and oddly enough, New York. We wonder if Case Shiller used the UMich "random" telephone directory to calculate that NYC home prices rose at precisely the rate of core inflation in the past 12 months while ignoring the dramatic moves in the ultra luxury high end segment.