Economy/Ecommerce

Euro-zone panjandrums met over the weekend in Brussels for the 13th “crisis-management summit” in less than two years, and perhaps made progress on the vexing problems of national debt in Greece and elsewhere.

Existing homes sales saw a 3 percent slide in September to an annualized rate of 4.91 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Home starts experienced an unexpected uptick in September, increasing 15 percent to an annualized rate of 658,000 units.

It’s probably a case of “nowhere to go but up,” but even so it counts as good news that homebuilder confidence rose four points to 18 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index for October.

Germany and France are still at odds about the best way to recapitalize banks who once thought that Greek and Irish and Portuguese and even Italian debt would be a good investment.

According to Commerce, spending was up month-over-month by 1.1 percent, the largest gain since early this year.

Foreclosure specialist RealtyTrac reported that foreclosure filings dropped a little less than 1 percent during the third quarter of 2011 compared with the second quarter.

The Federal Reserve released the minutes of its Sept. 20-21 FOMC meeting on Wednesday, and to some extent they showed a central bank uncertain about how to handle the unexpected halt in the recovery in mid-2011.