The slumping Phoenix real estate market reached an ironic point in October where it was both "boring" and scary at the same time, according to Associate Professor of Real Estate Jay Butler, author of the W. P. Carey School's monthly resale home market report.

Leigh Dow, director of the Toolbox for IT at Toolbox.com, addressed the new developments in social media at a recent Showcase Series event sponsored by the Center for Advancing Business Through Information Technology (CABIT) at the W.nbsp;P.nbsp;Carey School's Department of Information Systems.

In many organizations, the internal audit and information security functions can't seem to get on the same communication wavelength.

Commercial real estate matters because it's a proxy for a city's economic health. When an economy grows, companies expand into new offices, warehouses and storefronts. Vacancy rates fall, property prices rise, and developers launch new projects.

The latest realty studies report for the Phoenix resale home market showed that the typical fall downturn began as expected in August. The 8,790 sales recorded were a decline from the 10,860 recorded at the peak in March, but this August was slow even compared to August 2009.

If you grew up in Arizona you probably remember learning about the five C's, an easy way of remembering the major components of the state's economy at the time.

The recession has caused all sorts of difficulties for CFOs: falling earnings, tumbling stock prices and, occasionally, knotty negotiations with lenders. For most of them, it has also brought tougher targets for earning their bonuses.

On August 16 the Japanese Cabinet Office announced that Japan's second-quarter GDP was for the first time smaller than China's. A media frenzy ensued, and analysis firms raced to predict when China would surpass the U.S.

Home prices in Phoenix have been on a welcome upswing for several months, but preliminary data for July shows no change from last July, according the W. P. Carey School's Karl Guntermann, who calculates the ASU-Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI).

We've heard since the middle of last year that the recession is over. Why, then, do people still seem so pessimistic? Why are consumers still so restrained? Why is the housing market still weak?