FT brings European home price indices under one roof - Financial Times
With property one of the biggest businesses in Europe and one of the largest sources of wealth, the Financial Times today breaks new ground by bringing together all European house price indices in a single place. The property market is important to

Trouble at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Stirs Concern Abroad - New York Times
For more than a decade, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , the housing giants that make the American mortgage market run, have attracted overseas investors with a easy pitch: the securities they issue are just as good as the United States government’s

Unemployment to hit 2m for first time under Labour - Daily Telegraph
The number of people out of work will reach two million for the first time in a decade of Labour rule, as the housing market downturn leads to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the wider economy, an influential analysis warns. The rising number

Paulson Braces Public for Months of Tough Times - ABC News
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sought to reassure an anxious public Sunday that the banking system is sound, while also bracing people for more troubled times ahead. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson testifies on the economy, Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Home Sales, Durables Orders Probably Fell: U.S. Economy Preview - Bloomberg
July 20 (Bloomberg) — Home sales in the U.S. probably declined in June as the housing slump headed for a third year, undermining the economy and prompting businesses and consumers to trim spending, economists stated before reports this week. Combined

Sec. Paulson Warns of More Tough Times - Washington Post
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. sought to reassure an anxious public yesterday that the banking system is sound, while also bracing people for more troubled times ahead. “I think it’s going to be months that we’re working our way through this

Bush: Congress could take steps to ease gas prices - Chicago Sun-Times
CRAWFORD, Texas—- Responding to Americans’ anger over gas prices and the housing bust, President Bush is stepping up pressure on Congress to open up offshore oil exploration and work to restore confidence in the housing finance industry. “This is a

Fed’s Stern says don’t wait to raise interest rates - Marketwatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Federal Reserve policymaker Gary Stern says the central bank shouldn’t wait for housing and financial markets to stabilize before it begins raising interest rates, according to an interview with Bloomberg News. Stern

2,000 flats to be built for elderly - Guardian Unlimited
New housing developments providing more than 2,000 flats for old and vulnerable people will be built on 25 sites around England, it has been announced. The Government has allocated £80 million of funding for “extra care” housing schemes aimed at

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chareverie writes “Researchers at Harvard University have been working towards a goal of replacing some types of heart surgery with injections of cells that would grow into blood vessels for damaged hearts. The cells that would be used are progenitor cells obtained from the blood or bone marrow, as opposed to stem cells that are obtained from human embryos. The research team was successful with their tests on growing heart blood vessels in mice. Joyce Bishoff, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard and senior author of the report, says, ‘Our next goal down the line is to use them in humans.’ She also notes that more studies need to be done on animals to see how these cells would react and behave with other types of tissues. A similar human experiment was done two years ago in Germany, during which a few people from a group of 75 heart attack victims were given injections of progenitor cells from their own bone marrow or blood. The report concluded that there were improved heart functions.” Reader w1z4rd points out related coverage with some more information at BBC News.

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Geoffrey.landis writes “A Purdue University panel investigated allegations against nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, finding that he had in fact committed scientific misconduct in his work. Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation — a finding that would be groundbreaking, if true, but one that apparently couldn’t be replicated by other researchers. The allegations against Taleyarkhan were made in March of 2006. A local Indiana paper gives the full list of allegations against Taleyarkhan, and the resolution of each by the panel. The full report (PDF) is also available. Of the nine specific allegations, only two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee ‘could not find any other instances of scientists being able to copy Taleyarkhan’s results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,’ but notes that this comes ‘just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan’s results were fraudulent.’” We’ve discussed this gentleman’s work and the scrutiny it has received several times, and members of the scientific community seem to have given him the benefit of the doubt in many cases.

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Dream of Gas Tax Holiday at End of Road - The Ledger
WASHINGTON | The political vision of a summer gas tax holiday died a quick death in Congress, losing to a view that federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel will have to go up if they go anywhere. Related Links: Agencies Band Together for

McCain spends down primary funds - Boston Globe
WASHINGTON - Faced with a spending cap for his fall campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain is aggressively spending more money than he is raising during summer months and methodically reducing his cash reserves. McCain raised more

How to get the best price in a property slump - News.com.au
Email article Printer friendly Text size + - Share Add to Digg Add to del.icio.us Post to NewsVine Post to Facebook What are these? Be realistic about what price you can achieve ,/li> Think about all reasonable offers More property news in our Money

Pensioners missing out on benefits - Western Telegraph
Over half of British pensioners are struggling to live on a low income and are missing out on thousands in pension credits, statistics have revealed. A report by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shows that 61% of single pensioners receive less

‘Rewards for medics’ excellence’ - BBC News
Medical teams could be rewarded with bonuses for successful operations under a plan being considered by the UK’s largest hospital trust. The Imperial College Healthcare Trust in London stated it is to launch a pilot scheme aimed at “rewarding

On stadium money, many options - Herald Tribune
SARASOTA - Besides location, the biggest question about luring the Boston Red Sox to Sarasota is whether a pair of cash-strapped governments can raise the money to pay for a stadium project estimated to cost at least $80 million. December 2006

The cost of animosity - News.com.au
Have your Say Add your comments or read what others are saying Read this article online at: http://news.com.au//couriermail/money/story/0,26844,24048540-5015825,00.html Email article Printer friendly Text size + - Share Add to Digg Add to del.icio.us

Economic woes need “months” to recover: Paulson - MSN MoneyCentral
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The economy will need months to recover from a growth slowdown caused by a home mortgage crisis, turmoil in financial markets and high energy prices, Treasure Secretary Henry Paulson stated on Sunday. Paulson also told CBS

The $20,000 question - Chicago Tribune
The state is squandering taxpayer money on dubious after-school allows, including many that rewarded one lawmaker’s political supporters, a Tribune investigation found. In a church on Chicago’s West Side, two homeless children fiddled aimlessly on

Woman stabs elderly man; he fights with pitchfork - Miami Herald
Authorities state a woman stabbed an elderly Manatee County man who fought back with a pitchfork. A sheriff’s office report says 25-year-old Sarah Moore and 72-year-old Robert Smith were fighting Saturday morning over money in the western city of

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Filed under: Forecasts, Bad news, Citigroup Inc. (C), Housing, Recession

The chairman of Citigroup (NYSE: C), Win Bischoff, said that housing in the U.S. and UK will probably fall for another two years. According to Reuters, “He also stated he expected the credit crunch could continue through until 2009.

What wasn’t stated is that there can probably be no banking recovery while housing remains in trouble. The value of mortgage-backed paper cannot stabilize. A housing “depression” will make it extremely difficult for GDP to do anything other than move down.

Housing and oil remain the two most critical factors in the capability of the economy to make any comeback. Oil is down some, but unless its stays well below $120, it is hard to imagine that gasoline and petrochemicals will drop to an inexpensive level.

The value of housing has such a powerful effect on sectors from retail to automotive that Bischoff is essentially saying the the present climate will get much, much worse.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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no1home writes “There is a story at Discovery Channel’s site about a new utility for mapping disease. The premise is to have bots crawl the web looking for stories about disease outbreaks and log them onto a map. ‘”We were originally thinking about how we could expand disease surveillance and pick up outbreaks earlier than traditional methods,” said John Brownstein of Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston, who created HealthMap in September of 2006 with Clark Friefeld, a software developer at Harvard Medical School.’ But then it was noticed by Google.org and has since grown into its own website, HealthMap Global disease alert map, and claims to be able to identify 95% of all disease outbreaks, some of them before WHO or CDC.”

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Statesman writes “The Los Angeles Times reports that an Arizona crime lab technician found two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles, so similar that they would ordinarily be accepted in court as a match, but one felon was black and the other white. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. Dozens of similar matches have been found, and these findings raise questions about the accuracy of the FBI’s DNA statistics. Scientists and legal experts want to test the accuracy of official statistics using the almost 6 million profiles in CODIS, the national system that includes most say and local databases. The FBI has tried to block distribution of the Arizona results and is blocking people from performing similar searches using CODIS. A legal fight is brewing over whether the nation’s genetic databases ought to be opened to wider scrutiny. At stake is the credibility of the odds often cited in DNA cases, which can suggest an all but certain link between a suspect and a crime scene.”

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