Earn What You Spend

The Case-Shiller data for March was just released, and it, as expected, doesn’t look good. The NYTimes writes: 
Prices in 20 major metropolitan areas dropped in March by 18.7 percent from March 2008, according to the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Price Index that was released Tuesday. That was about the same as February and just shy of January’s record [...]

Foreclosures haven’t abated; if anything, they continue to pick up steam.  They vary significantly by region - hotspots like Phoenix and Detroit are facing true epidemics.  Other locations - like parts of NYC, for example - seem to be mostly bypassing the worst of things. 
Yet now we’re facing what some economists are calling the third [...]

The WSJ reports this morning that now over 20% of houses in this country are underwater - that is, the owners owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth:
The increase in the number of such “underwater” borrowers comes amid signs that falling prices are making homes more affordable for first-time buyers and others [...]

Today the S&P released the Case-Shiller numbers from February: 
In February, the price of single-family homes in 20 major metropolitan areas fell 18.6 percent from the year earlier, compared with a record drop of 19 percent in January … 
Half of the 20 metropolitan areas in the housing index posted record year-over-year declines. In all, the Case-Shiller 20-city [...]

does not re-inflate.  At least according to Charles Hugh Smith: 
It is simply a truism that bubbles never reflate, ever. Tulip bulb valuations did not rise to stratospheric heights after the Tulip Craze popped, and the Nasdaq dot-com bubble did not reinflate, either, for the very good reason that bubbles are never based on rational valuations–they [...]

Housing prices continued their descent - both housing resales and overall prices declined in January.  None of this is unexpected - especially as the stimulus plan, which contains a number of tax provisions directed at homeowners, was at that point still a plan, and not a law.  
Here are the raw numbers: home resales were [...]