Home sales are down, after an uptick in July. From the National Association of Realtors: Nationally, existing-home sales–including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops–declined 2.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.91 million units in August from an upwardly revised pace of 5.02 million in July, but are 10.7 percent below the 5.50 million-unit [...]

Nouriel Roubini thinks hedge funds are toast. A friend of mine in the business e-mails a different view: RE: MS and GS becoming banks and the SEC’s role: the SEC, if it has not permanently discredited itself w/ lack of action (perhaps not wholly its fault), may get a new lease on life by regulating [...]

In the comments sections, WilliamBanzai7 shares with us his latest subprime-debacle-inspired poem. The creative-writing major in me thought it worth a full post. TARP, you’ll keep in mind, stands for Troubled Asset Relief Plan–what we heretofore have referred to as “the $700 billion bailout.” Charge of the TARP Brigade (inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Charge [...]

We didn’t get much into Montana Democrat Jon Tester’s questions in the liveblogging of the Senate Banking hearing, but he was pretty entertaining. Plus he asked this (from Andrew Leonard): Why do we have one week to determine $700 billion that has to be appropriated, or this country’s financial systems go down the pipes? Wasn’t [...]

The news late Tuesday that Warren Buffett was buying $5 billion in Goldman Sachs preferred stock was hailed in some quarters as a sign of a market bottom. It’s certainly likely to send Goldman shares skyrocketing tomorrow (they were up 6.5% in after hours trading) and will probably help the overall stock market as well. [...]

As others have noted, one interestingly unexpected moment in today’s bailout hearings came when SEC Chairman Chris Cox mentioned the lack of any over-the-counter-derivatives regulation/oversight/disclosure as a possible cause of some of our current problems. OTC derivatives, such as the credit default swaps so much in the news lately, are contracts between financial institutions that [...]

David Cay Johnston thinks maybe we don’t need this bailout after all—and that journalists aren’t asking the right questions. That we’re at risk of “repeat[ing] the failed lapdog practices that so damaged our reputations in the rush to war in Iraq and the adoption of the Patriot Act.” On a web site of Harvard’s Neiman [...]

The majority of Americans say they favor a Wall Street bailout, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has just reported. The question asked was: As you may know, the government is potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure. Do you think this is the right thing [...]

Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke (and Chris Cox and James Lockhart, but do you think anybody really cares what they say?) are guests of the Senate Banking Committee this morning. Paulson’s opening statement is here. Bernanke’s is here. They contain nothing newsworthy. Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and ranking Republican Dick Shelby are being feistier in [...]