Some housing bubble news from Wall Street and Washington. Bloomberg, "The U.S. median price for a single- family home dropped 7.7 percent in the first quarter, the biggest decline in at least 29 years, as values tumbled in two-thirds of U.S. cities, the National Association of Realtors said. The median was $196,300, down from $212,600 a year ago, the largest decline in records going back to 1979. Sales of single-family houses and condominiums fell 22 percent to 4.95 million at an annualized pace, the slowest in a decade, the group said."

"'Prices have fallen in neighborhoods with a wide prevalence of subprime loans, because more foreclosed properties are being sold at discounted prices,' said Lawrence Yun, the realtor group's chief economist, in today's report."

The Associated Press. "In California, Sacramento prices plummeted 29.2% to $258,500 compared with last year and Riverside prices fell 27.7% to $287,100. Prices in Las Vegas fell 20.2% to $247,600 and those in Phoenix dropped 15.4% to $222,200."

"The worst hit market was the Sarasota area, where condos dropped 35% over the past 12 months to $268,500. Sacramento condo price cratered 33.4% to $147,200. In Miami, prices fell 26.4% to $176,100."

"Toll Brothers Inc., the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, reported its eighth consecutive quarterly decline in revenue as demand for new homes tumbled."

"The company said it may incur pretax costs of as much as $375 million to write down the value of real estate, more than the $245.5 million it had last quarter. 'The just-completed spring selling season was quite weak in most markets as buyers remained on the sidelines,' CEO Robert Toll said in the statement."

"Customers canceled 25 percent of contracts in the three months ended April 30, the lowest rate since the same quarter a year earlier, when they withdrew from 19 percent. The net value of contracts fell 58 percent from a year earlier. The order backlog, or homes under contract that have yet to be sold, declined 50 percent. The average price of the canceled contracts was $760,000 per house."

The Philadelphia Inquirer. "The average price for a new home contract signed in the quarter slipped to $590,000, from $711,000 a year ago, and $634,000 in the first 2008 quarter."

"Toll Brothers attributed lower average home prices to several factors, including an increase in sales in lower-priced communities, and fewer sales in high-priced markets such as California and Manhattan."

"Toll's chief financial officer, Joel H. Rassman, said the builder expects to 'continue to face challenging times.'"

"Orleans Homebuilders Inc. yesterday reported a hefty loss for its third quarter, with orders for new homes down 40 percent. The company saw its cancellation rate - buyers who back away from signed contracts before closing on the homes - soar to 31 percent from 20 percent a year earlier. The largest increase in cancellations was in Florida."

"The company said that buyer confidence was extremely low this winter. Mortgages were at a standstill, and cancellation of new homes 'spiked up much higher than we had ever seen,' it said."

The Charlotte Observer. "Beazer Homes USA, formerly a major Charlotte-area builder, on Monday revealed more problems in its recently closed mortgage unit and said it suffered heavy losses last year as the housing market faltered."

"Since last year, the Atlanta homebuilder has been the subject of federal investigations triggered by Observer reports that the company arranged loans some buyers couldn't afford and violated federal lending rules."

"Beazer said it lost $411 million in the year ended Sept. 30, compared with earnings of $369 million a year earlier. The losses included nearly $612 million for writing down the value of inventory and abandoning land options. Sales sank to $3.49 billion, down 35 percent from $5.36 billion the previous year."

The BBC News. "The number of house sales in Northern Ireland during the first three months of 2008 dropped to its lowest in almost 25 years, a new survey has revealed. The University of Ulster quarterly house price index report said some of the 120 estate agents surveyed reported no sales at all."

"The economist Alan Bridle, head of research at Bank of Ireland which produced the survey in partnership with the university, said the local housing market was 'technically in recession' for the first time since the early 1990s."

"'As an observation we may have something of a stalemate, with vendors looking to sell at 2007 prices and potential buyers deferring purchase in anticipation of lower prices and easier access to credit later in 2008 or 2009,' he said."

"In the latest survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), 82% of surveyors saw prices fall in the three months to April."

"That figure was up from 66% in March, with all surveyors in East Anglia, and the North and North West of England, reporting price falls."

"There was also downbeat news from two UK house building firms on Tuesday. Redrow said the number of reservations so far in 2008 was half that seen the previous year. while cancellations of reservations, which had been running at about 20%, had seen 'a marked increase' since Easter."

"Rics said that regions where prices had still been rising until recently have now been caught up in the general decline. In Scotland, which had bucked the UK trend, the house price 'balance' also turned negative last month."

"'The real issue is the collapse in the number of housing transactions,' said Rics spokesman Ian Perry. 'Large numbers of distress sales - either repossessions or sales from those attempting to avoid the repossession process - have not yet appeared in the market place.'"

"'This has very real implications, not just for the property industry but also the High Street and the wider economy,' he added."

"London's property market had the most widespread price declines in at least 14 years last month as the slump in financial services deepened and banks curbed lending."

"The number of residential property agents and surveyors saying prices fell in the capital exceeded those reporting gains by 94 percentage points in April, the lowest since records began in 1994, the Rics said today."

"The U.K. capital has 'caught up with the rest of the country,' Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at the London-based surveyors' group, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. 'There has been a sea change, and it's not wholly surprising given the impact of the financial-services industry.'"

"London banks will cut 10,000 jobs by 2011 after losses from credit-market turmoil climbed above $329 billion, an Experian Group Ltd. report last week showed. London will bear the brunt of 40,000 job losses in U.K. financial services in the next three years, a report by Experian, the world's largest credit-checking company, showed."

The Daily Mail. "The global credit crunch is claiming more than 300 jobs a week in the City. Some of the highest-paid executives in London's Square Mile and Canary Wharf have been sacked as the world's financial markets go into paralysis."

"A total of 6,500 people will be axed by next month but more than 4,000 have already gone, according to analysis by London's Evening Standard."

"Junior staff have been casually dismissed in the office lift and whole trading departments have been 'black bagged' - told to clear their desks and marched out by security."

"The bloodletting began in earnest in December when global giants such as Citigroup lost billions on bad mortgage debts in America. Thousands of jobs were lost as companies frantically reduced their workforces, dismissing everyone from heads of department down to junior traders."

"Now the second wave is beginning to bite amid the renewed fallout from the US subprime crisis. Top executives such as £1-million-a year Barclays boss Edward Cahill have also been hit by the most dramatic job cull in decades."

"People working in complex types of debt related to sub prime, such as Mr Cahill - in charge of 'collateralised debt obligations' - were among the first to go."

"There has been a general policy of last-in-first-out, such as the case of Charlie Roast, who was hired as an executive by Merrill Lynch from Deutsche Bank a year ago and touted as a hotshot only to be ditched last week."

"One managing director at JPMorgan said: 'The mood is pretty bad - no one really knows what is going to happen. Last year, when the credit crunch began, we still knew we were going to get decent bonuses because overall 2007 had been okay. This year everyone knows it's going to be terrible. What I fear is working until November and then being laid off, just before bonuses are due."

The LA Times. "Investors are increasingly throwing in the towel on Southern California-based savings-and-loan mortgage lenders IndyMac Bancorp, FirstFed Financial Corp. and Downey Financial Corp."

"Defaults keep climbing on the nontraditional mortgages made by the companies, and bond buyers still shun securities backed by such loans. The lenders are awash in red ink, and their stocks are down by about half or more since the beginning of the year."

"But the losses keep coming. On Monday, Pasadena-based IndyMac reported a loss of $184.2 million. To conserve cash, the company suspended dividend and interest payments on some preferred securities."

"Although CEO Michael Perry declined to predict when IndyMac would again turn a profit, he portrayed the thrift as on the upswing. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Frederick Cannon expressed skepticism, citing previous optimistic predictions by Perry, some of which have not come to pass."

"'Mike said today that they've turned the corner,' Cannon said. 'But he's said that so often that by now they've gone around the block at least once.'"

The New York Times. "Kenneth C. Griffin, who runs one of the biggest and most successful hedge fund firms, has a blunt assessment: 'We, as an industry, dropped the ball.'"

"The breakdown happened, Mr. Griffin contends, when big investment banks gambled away money and jobs during the late great credit boom. The bosses let all those young gung-ho traders take far too many risks and now everyone is paying the price."

"'As an industry, we have a responsibility to manage risk in a way that is prudent,' Mr. Griffin said matter-of-factly."

"He is upset that the investment bank Bear Stearns ran aground. He is annoyed at the big-name chief executives who took too much risk and then watched as billions of dollars of value vanished from balance sheets. He is anxious about high-priced finance jobs moving abroad."

"And he is particularly galled with regulators in Washington who have overseen what he calls 'the great depression on Wall Street.'"

"'When you read that UBS did not even view parts of its mortgage portfolio as having market risk, it becomes very obvious that a number of firms were not dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s when it comes to risk management,' he said while on (a) panel to a packed room."

"A problem, he says, is youth and inexperience — and that’s coming from a former child prodigy. 'Walk across any of the trading floors — they are full of 29-year-old kids,' he said. 'The capital markets of America are controlled by a bunch of right-out-of-business-school young guys who haven’t really seen that much. You have a real lack of wisdom.'"

"On top of that, many CEOs of big universal banks, the ones that combine all sorts of financial services under one roof, 'only understand a small part of the business,' Mr. Griffin said, suggesting too many of them come from sales backgrounds. Put those two things together, the traders and the chiefs, and you have the making of an outright debacle."

"The problem is compounded further by weak government oversight, he said. 'The unwillingness of the Federal Reserve and the S.E.C. to require working capital' limits, he said, only exacerbates the risk-taking environment because the banks are playing the equivalent of no-limit poker."

"'The sad truth of the matter is it didn’t have to be this way,' he said."

The Tennessean. "Homebuyers are finding it increasingly difficult to qualify for conventional mortgage loans in the Nashville area as mortgage insurance companies tighten their underwriting standards."

"MGIC Investment Corp., one of six major mortgage insurance companies in the nation, will further clamp down on borrowers in the Nashville area in June after adding the entire metropolitan statistical area recently to its list of restricted markets."

"The company's growing blacklist...now also includes parts of Utah, Connecticut and Kentucky. A second national mortgage insurance company toughened up on Clarksville recently."

"'There's no doubt that due to the mortgage crisis, everything has tightened up,' said the president of the Greater Nashville Association of Realtors, Mandy Wachtler. 'A year ago, if you could fog a mirror, you could get a loan.'"

"Months ago, mortgage insurance companies began refusing to insure home mortgages for borrowers with no money down. Now, many of them are further tightening standards to require 5 percent down payments or making other changes."

"For instance, in some cases homebuyers must come up with 3 percent down payments from their own funds, not gifts from the seller or family. Others are refusing to insure investment property or second homes in certain areas. Most are demanding more documentation, such as proof of income and more bank statements."

"One borrower described the process of getting a home loan these days as a colonoscopy, said Tim Davis, a mortgage broker in Nashville. 'If you're getting a mortgage these days, you better have the patience of Job,' he said."