Consumer Confidence Climbs; Home Prices Record Plunge; Troubled Banks on the Rise; Oil Falls 7%; Slim’s Bank Buys Citi Stock; D.R. Horton Shares Vault

Expect more pain in the housing market next year, says Don Miller. Rising unemployment will keep the foreclosures coming. And as the backlog of inventories swells, Don says homebuilders still look ripe for shorting in this environment.

Embattled U.S. banking giant Citigroup Inc. (C) has agreed to buy back $17.4 billion of assets remaining in a series of funds known as structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, after it previously agreed to guarantee the liabilities in those funds.

Citigroup Inc. (C) today (Monday) unveiled plans to cut more than 50,000 jobs in the “near term” and slash expenses by 20% to preserve capital as it faces a global slowdown that’s expected to push well into 2009.

Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), the mortgage giants taken over by the federal government back in September, will lower monthly payments for hundreds of thousands of struggling U.S. homeowners as part of a plan to accelerate anti-foreclosure efforts, federal officials announced yesterday (Tuesday).

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to borrow a record $550 billion in the current quarter, and another $368 billion in the first three months of the New Year – money needed to fund the $700 billion bailout plan the government is using to battle the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Wall Street bond traders estimate that the U.S. government will have to borrow a record $1.4 trillion during the current fiscal year – an unprecedented amount of debt that’s nevertheless needed to cover a federal budget deficit that’s expected to approach $1 trillion for the fiscal year, CNNMoney.com reported.

(The government’s fiscal year differs from the calendar year, and actually began Oct. 1. The $700 billion bailout plan was approved by the…

Australia’s central bank took the hatchet to its benchmark interest rate Tuesday, cutting 75 basis points to 5.25%, the lowest since March 2005. Since the start of September, the Reserve Bank of Australia cut interest rates three times for a total of 200 basis points, in an attempt to insulate the economy from the global financial crisis. 

Federal Reserve policymakers yesterday (Wednesday) reduced the benchmark Federal Funds rate to 1.0%, an aggressive half-percentage-point cut that central bank Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s latest attempt to keep the widening financial crisis from tipping the world into a global recession.

Fear of a global recession is quickly becoming reality as world markets have lost $10 trillion in value in the month of October and the U.S. economy almost certainly contracted in the third quarter.

It’s panic time for U.S. legislators, regulators, banks and lenders. More than $24 billion worth of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) are expected to “re-set” to higher interest rates in November – boosting the likelihood of further home foreclosures.