The US housing crisis looks sets to deepen after S&P’s/Case-Shiller Home Price index showed that home prices in 20 US cities fell almost 13% in February from a year earlier. This from AP:

“Month-to-month, it gets consistently worse,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P, noting that February also marked the sixth straight month that all 20 cities experienced declines. “The slope is one direction. There is no sign of a bottom.”

As the subprime crisis bites, experts predict that as many as 300 US lenders will go out of business in the next two to three years. This from MarketWatch:

At least 150 banks will fail in the US during the next two to three years, according to a projection by Gerard Cassidy and his colleagues at RBC Capital Markets.

US foreclosure filings climbed 65% and bank seizures more than doubled in April from a year earlier as mortgage industry efforts to modify loans fell short, reports Bloomberg.

More than 243,300 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, began in January 2005. One in every 519 households received a filing and Nevada, California and Florida had the highest rates. Filings rose 4 percent from March.

Data from the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index released today reveals that US house prices are rapidly accelerating on their way down.

According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The group’s 10-City Composite index covering major U.S. markets traced the same trajectory, falling 13.6 percent in February, 11.4 percent in January and 9.8 percent in December.

“Sales of new homes plunge to lowest level in 16½ years,” reports the Commerce Department, throwing another log of bad news onto the burning housing market. And by the time you read this, we’re sure another story of the weak housing market will hit the newswire. It’s what makes the current strength in shares of Home Depot so interesting.

It’s amazing how rapidly the prospective losses from the credit crunch keep climbing.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the G7 said that losses from sub-prime would rack up at $400bn. A week or so later, another analyst had piped up with $500bn as the likely toll.

Now this morning’s Telegraph quotes a Credit Suisse analyst as putting a $600bn figure on the final reckoning.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson yesterday said that plans to bailout Americans caught in the housing crisis would do more harm than good.