- It’s been a wacky week for home sales. One day they’re up, the next they’re down. What gives?
- Regardless, home buyer tax credit clouds true housing demand.
- S&P 500 breaking through a 15-month high, but more importantly, watch financials as a gauge for future market performance, Bespoke says.
- Rising mortgage rates don’t present a serious concern, yet. “The big test will come with the turn of the calendar,” Tom Petruno says. “Come January, will investors figure that long-term Treasury yields are high enough to be attractive again – or still too low to compensate for the risks to bonds from a bona fide economic rebound?”
-The Blackberry outage has gotten a lot of attention. Maybe it’ll influence Research In Motion to incorporate a decent real-time status page where it can update users about any disruptions to its networks, Paul Kedrosky says.
- Fred Wilson also weighs in on the situation, suggesting RIM should stick to what it’s good at. “The Blackberry approach to providing services via the carrier networks is not ideal,” he says. “They are playing carrier, software provider, and hardware provider all in one. That’s not good.”
- On the bright side, the outage shows how attached people truly are to their blackberrys. “As discouraging to the company as no doubt such outages are, they do perversely prove the loyalty and dependence of the customer base. Not bad things for a business,” Neal Lipschutz says.
- It’s no secret the nation’s biggest banks have cut back lending dramatically. The reason also isn’t surprising. “It’s the rational thing to do,” Barry Ritholtz says.
- VIX below 20 doesn’t mean selloff is coming.
- Ratio of existing home sales to new home sales in November hit a new all-time high, Calculated Risk says.
- Here’s a glimmer of hope for the 2-26 NJ Nets. Their Brooklyn arena appears inevitable with financing deal.
