Existing home sales, which are completed transactions that include single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, dropped 27.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.83 million units in July from a downwardly revised 5.26 million in June, and are 25.5 percent below the 5.14 million-unit level in July 2009.

In our continuing series on the ever-present and exponentially accelerating cultural decay of the West, we now move from the Justin Bieber mania and plastic surgery to, you guessed it: Kids on leashes! Yes they make such things so you don’t even need to retrofit your dog leash for said purpose. Amazon.com has a delightful [...]

So while Linda McMahon is a flip-flopping opportunist, Peter Schiff has always preached fiscal restraint and small government and his long career provides ample evidence he will follow through on his word. He will work to shrink government, stop the bailouts and endless debt-financed spending. He will work to protect the Constitution. He’ll help to get an audit of the Federal Reserve (something Linda knows little if anything about). He opposed the Iraq War at the time

The sheer amount of time people spend on these sites updating their status via cell phone about their drive to work, writing witty remarks on other people’s status’ about their drive to work, installing some random application and whatever spyware it has attached to it, sending mass invitations to some raging drunkfest, joining groups about how much they like going to raging drunkfests or poking someone they want to have sex with is simply becoming ridiculous.

Although back testing has been popular among software developers and some forex traders as a means of testing the efficiency of a strategy in a risk-free environment, its track record as an arbiter of a strategy’s potential is dismal. There’s nothing surprising about that, however, since back testing is a useless tool in most of the roles where it is most frequently utilized. Here are some of the many reasons.

In the modern era of online money transfer transactions, gold can now be traded, transferred and held in accounts as a “Digital Gold Currency” or DGC. As such, it trades independent of exchange rates, although DGC deposits do fluctuate in value depending on the price of gold in your base currency.

As the foreclosures started to go through the courts later in the decade, we began to uncover why so many were able to get loans that they couldn’t afford. It all started with the mortgage brokers giving out loans to those who had no intention or didn’t have the funds to pay the loan off.

But the trend typically involves some high status male who gets caught cheating and then forks over some obscene amount of money in divorce. Tiger Woods is simply the most obvious example and I should also note that Michael Douglas’ ex accused him of having an affair. Or hell, just think of the Democratic leadership of recent decades: Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and now Al Gore. Al Gore is way beyond infidelity. He’s facing sex abuse charges, which is probably the fault of global warming… he couldn’t control himself, it was just too damn hot.

It’s certainly quite strange that Krugman would pick the extremely un-libertarian policy of a government cap on tort liability (a regulation) to take a shot at libertarianism. After all, it’s the exact opposite of what Milton Friedman would have supported.

Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do to get a job in a down economy: