THEY'RE HIRING!!

NEW YORK, March 26 (Reuters) -
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp plans to hire as many as 138 new workers to address the potential for rising bank failures, the Wall Street Journal said in its March 26 edition.

An agency spokesman said the FDIC plans to boost the number of workers in its Division of Resolutions & Receiverships to as many as 380 from the current 223, the newspaper said. The division is authorized to have 242 workers, so hiring may involve 138 new positions, of which half will be temporary, it said. Last month, speaking at the Reuters Regulation Summit in Washington, D.C., FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said she expected bank failures to rise, but mainly among smaller institutions. The FDIC is also hiring because of the expected retirement of some employees, the newspaper said. At year-end, the agency had put 76 FDIC-insured banks with $22.2 billion of assets on its "problem list," up from 65 institutions with $18.5 billion of assets at the end of the third quarter. Only five U.S. banks have failed since 2004, including two this year. Analysts have predicted the failure rate will grow as losses from soured mortgages and other loans mount, and as regulators crack down on lenders that take too much risk. There are 8,535 banking institutions insured by the FDIC. Of these, 7,266 are commercial banks, 1,258 are thrifts and 11 are U.S. branches of foreign banks. More than 2,000 banks nationwide failed in the decade ending in 1992, encompassing the heart of the savings-and-loan crisis

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"A Dead Housing Bounce" - Wall Street applauded a glimmer of hope from a national home sales report on Monday, even though experts cautioned that the beleaguered real estate market is far from reaching its bottom.
The National Association of Realtors said 2.9 percent more homes changed hands in February than in January - the first time since July that sales volume increased month-to-month. That surprising news, combined with a higher sale price for struggling investment bank Bear Stearns, was enough to spark a stock market rally, despite the fact that home prices continued to tumble and year-to-year sales volume plunged. No one else was breaking out the Champagne. "It's a dead housing bounce," said Ken Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley, referring to the "dead cat bounce," a slight, temporary increase in a stock price that has already plummeted. "It is not a recovery. It is wrong to interpret it that way. Wall Street will grasp at any straw." Indeed, the rest of the national real estate report was grim, while a separate report on California home sales also was largely downbeat. Nationwide, a seasonally adjusted total of 5.03 million existing homes (including single-family, townhouses, condos and co-ops) closed escrow in February, NAR said. That was down 23.8 percent from 6.6 million homes in February 2007, but up 2.9 percent from 4.89 million units in January. Even the perpetually upbeat Realtors group declined to crow about the report. "You don't want to read too much into one month's number," said Paul Bishop, managing director of research for the trade group in Washington, D.C. Still, he said, it's a good sign that monthly national home sales have hovered around the 5 million mark since September. "Short of some other unexpected events that irk the housing market, that may be a sign we're scraping along the bottom before we experience a little stronger growth later in 2008 or early 2009," he said. Rosen said the report's most important finding was that February's national median sales price was $195,900, down 8.2 percent from $213,500 a year ago. "The (continued) house price decline is really bad news," he said. "Mostly the market is still in freefall." In addition, the median is lower because sellers are pricing their homes more realistically, foreclosures on the market are selling for big discounts, and the mix of homes sold is tilting more toward inexpensive houses. The national Realtors group said total housing inventory fell 3 percent in February to 4.03 million existing units for sale, representing 9.6 months worth of inventory, down from a 10.2-month supply in January. That means that at the current rate of sales, it would take 9.6 months to sell every house now on the market.