Home prices falling five times faster than in the last housing slump

Guess what? The Fed's interest rate cuts are hurting more than they're helping. Since August 2007, the Fed has cut interest rates from 5.25% to 2%. It thought that these cuts would help the housing market and unfreeze the credit markets. But all it's accomplished has been to fuel inflation thanks to a dollar that's lost 72% of its value since January 2001 when it traded at 92 cents to the Euro compared to $1.58 today. Have you been to a gas station or supermarket recently?

So this morning's report from Reuters -- that home prices fell five times faster than during the last housing recession -- did not come as great news. Specifically, single-family homes plunged a record 14.1% in the first quarter from a year earlier, marking a pace five times faster than the last housing recession, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller national home price index. Economists expected prices for the 20-city index to fall 2.0% on month and 14.0% from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the Fed's interest rate cuts don't seem to be helping much. That's because they don't treat the basic problem at all -- they're just fueling inflation. The basic problem is that banks have hundreds of billions of junk -- $500 billion in Level 3 assets to be technical about it -- on their balance sheet and they can't raise enough capital to write off those lousy assets. So they aren't lending to consumers, businesses or each other.

By the way, do you know who was president during the last housing recession? George Bush. Quite a legacy for that family, for America, and for the next president...

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.