Home Prices and Consumer Sentiment Slide

Home prices across the country continued to fall in January at record rates while one measure of consumer confidence reached a five-year low, sending Wall Street shares down in early Tuesday trading.

The value of single-family homes plummeted 10.7 percent in January compared with a year earlier, as measured by the Case-Shiller index, a closely watched survey of 20 major metropolitan regions.

It was the steepest year-over-year decline since the index began eight years ago, and economists said the slump was probably worse than at the height of the last housing recession in the early 1990s.

Read it all.