Property taxes highest in New York-New Jersey area

A study by the U.S. Census Bureau came out recently, revealing which of the 775 most populated counties in the nation pay the highest property taxes. More than half of the top 35 counties on the list are in New York. New Jersey has the second highest rate. Westchester county, the most expensive, has homeowners paying an average of nearly $7,400 a year in property taxes. Niagara, Monroe, Onondaga, Wayne and Chautauqa counties round out the top five.
(Click to read the full story)

Group: Housing prices expected to fall

Moody's Economy.com, a private research firm, is projecting that housing prices will decline in more than 100 metropolitan areas, with the Northeast, Florida and California being hit the hardests. Median sales prices will decline, they project, by 3.6 percent in the next year. If this prediction becomes true, which we must stress that it's only an well-educated guess, it would be the first decline for an entire year in home prices since the Great Depression in the 1930's. (Read the full story)

Where's the Weekend Recap?

After a couple weeks of negotiations, long hours and too many Dominos pizzas, the Weekend Staff has decided that simpler is better when it comes to our recaplets. So instead of clogging up the main page with flashy graphics and mindless filler, we're just going to give you the bare bone facts. And you no longer have to go searching for the information you want. Over the weekend and the first part of the week, the box office and stock information will be located at the top of the sidebar. It's cleaner, simpler and requires about an hour less amount of work for me to do. And that, my friends, it news worth noting. (Hey, I had to work that graphic into here somehow.)

New Weekend Feature: The Market Recap

Welcome everyone to the Market Recap, your weekly magazine dedicated to keeping you informed on the financial world going on around you. Our goal isn't to force you to buy stocks or support a mortgage firm or anything. The mission of this weekly is to give a brief synopsis on what happened in the financial world over the past week.

Long-time readers of TDIN might recognize that we used to do this type of feature at the beginning of our signature Weekend Recap piece. So why did we break up that happy union? To give that piece it's own energy, it's own funk, without being bogged down with information of a completely different genre. So from now on, the Weekend Preview and Weekend Recap will focus solely on entertainment, while this feature will focus solely on the markets. This isn't a demotion for our stock features. Rather, it's a step up. By giving the Recap a offshoot to deal entirely with this genre, we have the option to go more in-depth into financial stories without having to worry about making sure that we leave enough room for the movies to get their limelight as well.

So without further ado, let's get on to the news from this past week.

The week started off with trades taking in some profits, with all the major markets losing a few points across the board. But all in all, losses and gains were kept to a minimum this week as traders layed low. Bad news from the housing sector came out this week as existing home sales for July were reported to be down 4.1%. New home sales had fallen a near-identical 4.3%.

The Justice Department ended their investigation of Fannie Mae this week. Pharmacy giant Rite Aid bought Eckerd and Brooks. This upcoming Friday, the new unemployment numbers for August will be out. Apart from that, it sounds like September will continue it's historic trend of being a relatively sluggish month for the economy. Sounds like the perfect month to launch a market magazine!

If all these words just don't do too much for you, don't worry. As part of the deal brokered when setting up this separate branch of the Weekend brand, we were able to get the Weekly Stock Report scoreboard to use for weekly publication. After spending a lot of time to figure out how to get the new colors to work for the Market Recap, we applied a fresh coat of polish and put it out here for all to see. Making it's grand and glorious first appearance in this magazine, ladies and gentlemen, here is your Weekly Stock Report.

(Source: Yahoo! Finance)

And that's going to do it for the Market Recap for this weekend. Thanks for clicking by. Stay tuned for later on when the Weekend Recap goes online with the latest numbers from the box office. Until then, thanks for reading and have a smart weekend.