Word: marche
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Warren Buffett said that the real estate business his company Berkshire Hathaway owns is seeing a small improvement in housing demand. The National Association of Realtors seemed to confirm his observations when it announced that the index for pending home sales went up in March. This data helped send the stock market higher as it stays true to form by rising on the most modest news...
...dropped does not even begin to offset that. Qualifying for a mortgage is harder than ever. Banks have reason to be cautious. One of the large credit bureaus just released a report that says 4.7% of payments for bank-issued credit cards were late sixty days or more in March, an increase of 38% over the same month last year. According to Reuters, "In March, lenders closed 20 million card accounts, sending the total down by 58 million since the peak in July 2008 to 380 million." Banks will not be lending to consumers as long as there...
...Talk of "green shoots" is everywhere. The stock market is up 34% since early March. Credit market conditions are easing too, if less dramatically. Housing sales are picking up in some of the hardest hit markets, though prices are still dropping. Measures of business activity and consumer sentiment are returning to levels last seen before the great global financial panic of last fall. (Read about the impact of swine flu on the pork market...
...governments are already moving. In March, Madrid pledged $1.3 billion to modernize Spain's tourism infrastructure in a bid to fight off competition from sunshine destinations like Turkey and Egypt, which have become more competitive as the euro has appreciated. In Spain's Canary Islands, where tourism represents upwards of 60% of the local economy, the municipal tourism board recently began a series of seminars to help tourism workers cast off their perceived grumpiness; course materials advise cabbies to "ensure your taxis smell nice and don't drive too fast" and remind hotel staff that, "a smile costs nothing...
...same time, Mexican media outlets have begun to question whether health officials moved quickly enough at the end of March and the beginning of April, when strange flu cases began emerging, to get the strain identified. (See the 5 things you need to know about swine...