NEW YORK - March 27, 2012 - The housing market started off the new year with a thud. Home prices dropped for the fifth consecutive month in January, reaching their lowest point since the end of 2002.

The average home sold in that month lost 0.8% of its value, compared with a month earlier, and prices were down 3.8% from 12 months earlier, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index of 20 major markets.

NEW YORK (PNN) - March 27, 2012 - Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) single-family home prices were unchanged in January, suggesting the battered housing market continues to crawl along the bottom, a closely watched survey said on Tuesday.

LONDON, England (PNN) - March 21, 2012 - Spain has never been so close to default and Greece, Ireland and Portugal may need further bailouts, Citigroup Inc. chief economist Willem Buiter said.

“Spain is the key country about which I’m most worried,” Buiter, a former Bank of England policy maker, said in a radio interview Wednesday on Bloomberg Surveillance with Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt. “It’s really moved to the wrong side of the spectrum and is now at greater risk of sovereign restructuring than ever before.”

NEW YORK (PNN) - March 21, 2012 - Emirates, the biggest airline by international traffic, said more carriers will go bust this year as fuel costs and sluggish economies undermine profitability.

“We can reel off a whole load of airlines that are teetering on the brink or are really gone,” Tim Clark, the Dubai-based carrier’s president, said in an interview. “Roll this forward to Christmas, another eight or nine months, and we’re going to see this industry in serious trouble.”

DETROIT, Michigan - March 20, 2012 - Moody's Investors Service on Tuesday issued two downgrades to the city's tax debt that illustrate Detroit's weakening fiscal condition, as it fights to stave off a stake takeover.

NEW YORK - March 20, 2012 - David Tice, the former chief portfolio strategist for bear markets at Federated Investors, is bearish.

His 18-month target for the S&P 500 is 1,000, and he thinks gold is headed to $2,500 within the next two to three years.

WASHINGTON (PNN - March 13, 2012 - The majority of the largest Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) banks will continue to have enough capital to satisfy regulators, even if they suffer a financial shock that includes unemployment hitting 13% and a 21% drop in housing prices, the Federal Reserve said on Tuesday.