It’s the last Tuesday of the month, and that means it’s S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index Data Release Day. This month’s dollop continues the recent upswing we have seen in the past few months, so is not very newsworthy. (According to official 
media sources, to be newsworthy it must either be a change in direction from the month before, or be down. Ideally both.)
In case you haven’t seen the numbers, which is likely, I’ll pass along the highlights. The 20-city composite was up 1.6% for July. That’s three up months in a row. The index is now up a not inconsiderable 3.6% since April.
Of course, that gain is dwarfed by the loss that went before. From July 2006 to April 2009 the index lost 32.6%. This little uptick leaves us 30.2% below the peak. And we are still down 4.2% for 2009.
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The Great Recession began, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, on December 1, 2007. But it didn’t become Great until September 15, 2008. That’s the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and when what might have been a garden variety slowdown became an all-out panic on Wall 
Street.
Now that the GR seems to be abating, and on the occasion of the first anniversary of the meltdown, journalists, pundits, and even bloggers have spent a lot of time lately summarizing the lessons we have learned from the experience.
Phillip Moeller at US News & World Report gave us 6 Money Lessons of the Great Recession. The first is that "the experts are often wrong." Apparently many used to think that the term expert meant an omniscient seer of the future. Moeller also tells us that "everything is negotiable."
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I feel a little silly doing this, but it seems like I need to make that case that house prices are important.
You might recall that the Great Recession started with a fall in house prices. A mountain range of bad mortgages and the bonds that they were packaged 
into got most of the attention, but let’s remember that the whole sub-prime accident-waiting-to-happen wouldn’t have existed without a decade long run up in house prices. And if that run up had by some miracle continued, the accident would be still waiting. (And getting worse.)
But even if American house prices hadn’t recently been the rug that got pulled out from under the global economy, it’s a topic of huge importance in the world of personal finance. More than two thirds of American households own the place that they live in. For nearly all those households, the house is the largest single asset and one bought with mostly borrowed money.
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Yesterday at 9 AM Standard and Poor’s released the latest Case-Shiller Home Price Index data, showing that existing homes actually increased in price in May, for the first monthly rise since July 2006. All the major media outlets ran with it as their lead story, the stock market zoomed up more than 5%, and Fed
Chairman Bernanke announced that the recession is now officially over.
Okay, I made most of that up. But the C-S 20 city composite really was up for the first time in 33 months. And that’s really a big deal, not that anybody seems to have noticed. This is not an index that changes direction often. Before the run of 33 down months was a run of 55 consecutive up months going back to January 2002. (In fact, other than small declines in December 2001 and November 1998, the 10 city index was up every month from March 1997 to June 2006.)
Obviously, there is no guarantee that this will be the start of a long run of positive months, but a change in direction is a comparatively rare event and ought to be newsworthy. All the more so given the centrality of house prices in the causes of the Great Recession. And yet this isn’t apparently a big story.
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How screwed up are things in Mortgage Land just now? In a Florida dispute over a house in foreclosure, Wells Fargo is suing itself. Apparently, the bank holds both the first and second mortgages. Acting as the first mortgage holder, it is suing all the other lien holders, itself included. They’ve hired two 
different law firms and Wells Fargo (defendant) is disputing the claims of Wells Fargo (plaintiff). What’s really screwed up is that everybody involved seems to think that this is normal.
Nationwide, the tidal wave of foreclosures continues. We’re on pace to clock 3.5 million of them by the end of the year. That sounds pretty bad. But wait, I hear you saying, didn’t the government start a program a few months ago to fix this?
Well, yes it did, sorta. In March the Obama Administration made a big splash with the Home Affordable Modification program. As I wrote at the time, it was greeted with rather a lot of feigned enthusiasm. Under the surface there was much concern that it wouldn’t work, and more than a few doubts about whether or not it was a good idea in principle.
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media sources, to be newsworthy it must either be a change in direction from the month before, or be down. Ideally both.)
Housing, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
September 29, 2009 4:33 pm | 
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