TMFEditorsDesk (< 20)

Home prices up-ish, Confidence, Pre prices and B of A employee count down

July 28, 2009 – Comments (0) | RELATED TICKERS: BAC , PALM.DL

Like the elevator business, we've all got our ups and downs.  Here are a few from today:

Up/Down: Headlines blare "Housing Prices are Up!"...the reality is that the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index was up 0.5% in May but was down 0.2% if you seasonally adjust.  Either way, the prices are down 17.1% year over year...the lowest drop in 9 months, but still hardly that impressive (see Eric's statistical rant from earlier today). You can see a nice city-by-city sortable chart from the WSJ. If you're not a subscriber, you can go straight to the original data itself. 

Down: Consumer confidence fell to 46.6 from 49.3 in June.  Economists expected 49.  Meanwhile, my Happiness index fell to 745.34 from 1,801.33 in June. Economists expected a reading of pi.

Down Temporarily: Thanks to a Best Buy snafu, you could have gotten a Palm Pre for $99 recently...but it's too late now...back to $199.

Down: Bank of America branches. Originally reported as a 10% cut, B of A has clarified that it plans "modest" reductions short of 10%. OK.

-Anand