August 2009 homes sales fall
Existing-home sales in August gave back some of their strong gain in July but remain above year-ago levels, according to the NAR National Association of REALTORS®.
Total housing inventory at the end of August fell 10.8 percent to 3.62 million existing homes available for sale, which represents an 8.5-month supply at the current sales pace, down from a 9.3-month supply in July. Unsold inventory totals are 16.4 percent lower than a year ago.
The housing crisis simplified
Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the past few months, it’s clear there’s a credit crisis that’s been very costly for US taxpayers — in short, we’ve had to “save” companies too large to fail. There’s a lot of debate about what could and should have been done instead of bailing out these companies, as well as discussion concerning what we should do now that we’re knee-deep in this financial crisis.
How we got here is pretty simple, from a financial standpoint: the cause was a combination of greed and complex financial instruments, which even senior people on Wall Street didn’t understand. Credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations allowed risk-averse funds to invest in high return assets that were supposed to remove the risk. As people know now, this all fell apart and caused a global financial crisis.