The ASU Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI) continued to decline in June, but the numbers contained positive signals that improvement is the trend in the Phoenix metro real estate market.

It's said the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and some people sweating through the credit-market meltdown might agree. Underlying the wreckage are decades of regulatory and legislative decisions that opened the door to today's financial woes.

It's been called a crisis of confidence. It started with bad real estate loans and highly leveraged bets on those loans. Now it has frozen credit markets. Banks aren't lending to each other. Businesses can't get the short-term loans they need to finance day-to-day operations.

The daily headlines are alarming: homeowners are falling behind on mortgage payments at an increasing rate; foreclosures are up steeply. Has the situation ever been this bad before? Well yes, said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

In the last month, financial markets came as close to collapsing as they have since the Great Depression, and the root of their woes was frozen credit markets. The crisis sparked several weeks of furious and futile improvisation by U.S. regulators and lawmakers.

The collapse of the subprime residential real estate market last summer has Wall Street investment banks and international financial titans reeling.

Knowledge@W. P. Carey recently taped a discussion about the subprime market between Jeffrey Coles, chairman of the finance department at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Anthony Sanders, professor of real estate and finance at the school and Steven Davidson, vice president,

A first-time homebuyer with limited earning power and a sketchy credit history would seem to have little in common with a blue chip corporation. But thanks to some creative investment vehicles they've now been tied together.

Like ripples from a pebble pitched into a pond, the federal law passed to combat white-collar crime has resulted in booming demand for the specialists who can comb through financial records and follow a trail of evidence.

A controversial regulation creates a "safe harbor" from antitrust laws for certain aspects of the relationship between suppliers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in the healthcare industry.