Place Yer Bets for Bank Failure Friday & Existing Home Sales

Calculated Risk has a sortable table of troubled banks on their website. This is not official, but from public sources. It's massive and appears to be a unique list to CR, so I just give the link for you to check it out.

So now we can place bets on which banks will be seized on our reoccuring series, Bank Failure Friday, which announced this week's bank failures almost like Pizza night.

Then, on home sales. The National Association of Realtors has released their monthly statistics.

Existing-home sales – including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – rose 7.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate1 of 5.24 million units in July from a level of 4.89 million in June, and are 5.0 percent above the 4.99 million-unit pace in July 2008. The last time sales rose for four consecutive months was in June 2004, and the last time sales were higher than a year earlier was November 2005.

Any way you cut this (and we will more below!) this is an uptrend and good news. Taking a graph from the MTGM blog post, Existing Home Sales Surge, Tim astutely shows the home inventories in addition to sales.

existing home sales
Src: Mess That Greenspan Made

The Big Picture has some interesting details on the statistics. Ritzholtz has 6 major detail points but #6 is the one I find most interesting:

Indeed, on a NON-seasonally - adjusted basis, National existing home sales were up a mere 12k units.

I don't know where he is getting that but if true, it evaporates this blockbuster report!

The Gold Standard of detailed posts and graphs on the housing market, Calculated Risk has a host of analysis on the NAR report, all graphed, tabulated.

Finally, graph of the day (h/t Calculated Risk)! I think we have found another good blog with some nice graphing analysis via Don Short. The below graph compares the Dow Jones during the Great Depression, other recessions, to our current Depression Recession Recovery.

Dow Jows, recession compare
Src: Don Short, click on graph to enlarge

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