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News In Brief

PODCAST: Home prices are up, consumer confidence is down

Katharine Crnko Jun 28, 2011

Here are today’s top headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report and from around the web.

Home prices are up for the first time in eight months according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Prices are rising in 13 of 20 cities including Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Atlanta. On the flip side, six metro areas are still falling and have fallen to their lowest levels in years. Those are Chicago, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami and Tampa.

Consumer confidence fell in June to the lowest point since November 2010 on concerns about the slack labor market and sputtering recovery, according to a private sector report released Tuesday.

Another big strike in Greece today to protest the budget cuts the government there needs to get more bailout funds.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said this morning the United States supports the French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde to be the next head of the International Monetary Fund. That makes it all but certain that Lagarde will be named the new IMF chief perhaps as soon as today.

To the online world. A new study from IDC that finds the world’s information is doubling every two years. If you’re keeping count — 1.8 zettabytes will be created this year alone. How much is that? Imagine everybody in the U.S. sending three tweets every minute for 26,976 years.

Conventional wisdom tells us when the economy’s in the dumps people steal more stuff. So the National Retail Federation’s new report showing shoplifting on the rise could be construed as bad news… Nope. As retail thinking goes it’s food news, because a lot of those shoplifters are store employees. Here’s the rationale: Employees are taking more chances to steal things because they don’t fear for their jobs as much. All hail the recovery.

You can read the rest of today’s stories from the Marketplace Morning Report here.

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