In Cyprus, a decision was made to screw savers with a 6.75% to 9.9% "Tax" on deposits. Supposedly this move was made to "avoid unsettling investors in larger countries and sparking a new round of market contagion." In reality, the action was mandated theft, imposed by EU officials to protect senior bondholders. How can such an action do anything but cause contagion? Why would any rational thinking Spanish person keep any money in Spanish banks? They shouldn't and I suspect they won't. Rest assured there is going to be vengeance over this action.....and deposit fear will spread everywhere.

Hank Paulson badly botched the Lehman Brothers crisis of 2009. But at least he had an excuse. Panicked by the speed of Lehman's meltdown, he had no time for second thoughts. By comparison the German-led group of EU officials who engineered this weekend's Cyprus bank bailout don't have a leg to stand on. Although they had years to consider their options (Cyprus's problems are closely related to, and have long been almost as obvious as, those of Greece), they have opted for a "solution" that amounts to probably the single most inexplicably irresponsible decision in banking supervision in the advanced world since the 1930s. As my colleague Tim Worstall has pointed out in a well argued contribution yesterday, they have weakened - perhaps catastrophically - the principal pillar sustaining modern banking. This pillar is deposit insurance.

The month of February normally sees Contract Activity in the "mid-800s"

In both the Manhattan and Brooklyn markets, inventory in most neighborhoods has plummeted in the last few years, and there is not much indication that the situation will be changing any time soon. Of all the neighborhoods, inventory seems to be thinnest on the Upper West Side. For example, buyers for large prewar co-ops on Central Park West quickly learn that there is literally nothing to see. And there was also nothing to see last month, or the month before. Asking prices all over town are escalating in response to this scarcity, and it seems increasingly likely that buyers will be responsive and pay more to obtain a place to live when there are so few options. That said, and while 5% to 10% year over year increases seem steep but possible, I doubt that most buyers will purchase properties which are coming on at 20% over last year's prices. Even in today's scarce inventory environment, pricing still needs to have some relationship to the comparables and price history of similar units. In a seller's market like this one, well priced inventory moves fast.

Yields on mortgage securities that guide U.S. home-loan rates jumped to the highest in almost four months as the minutes of a Federal Reserve meeting signaled the central bank's bond buying may end this year. A Bloomberg index of yields on Fannie Mae-guaranteed mortgage bonds trading closest to face value rose 0.07 percentage point to 2.34 percent as of 3 p.m. in New York, the highest since Sept. 12.

"First, a word about the deals themselves. The conventional wisdom about summer sales did prevail when it comes to dollar value. While the market was extremely active in August, most of those deals were not big deals. Those big deal buyers actually ARE at the beach. But all summer long we have seen acceleration in the market for $2 million and under. Equally interesting, and more unexpected, is the acute lack of inventory throughout the sales marketplace."

AS YOU INTRODUCE MORE VARIABLES, YOU DEGRADE THE QUALITY OF THE COMPARABLE SALES ANALYSIS