Remember how this whole financial mess started? Here’s a clue: house prices fell by a record 16.3% y-o-y in July.

Investors have fled the real estate market over the last year. But Andrew Snyder says the best time to invest in a sector is when it’s beaten down and oversold.

REIT Associated Estates Realty (NYSE:AEC) allows investors to bet on the housing recovery without the need to buy and sell property. It also pays healthy dividends in the meantime.

Barack Obama and John McCain are scrambling to respond to the financial crisis on Wall Street. Both are calling for greater oversight and regulation of the banking sector. But neither is inspiring confidence in his ability to deal with the crisis. Few will admit it - and fewer still in Washington - but the answer to the current crisis does not lie in greater regulation. In fact, as Frank Holmes argues in The Daily Reckoning, legislation such as Sarbenes-Oxley is making matters worse…

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the core insurance business units of AIG (NYSE:AIG). The company’s downfall was an accumulation of misplaced bets on credit default swaps.

“The creature that destroys value.” This is how Republican Congressman Ron Paul described the Federal Reserve on CNBC’s Kudlow & Company.

Paul also calls the Fed and “illegal institution” and “an immoral institution.”

For the most part, the mainstream press seems to have decided that the Fed- and Treasury-led bailouts of Wall Street finest are scary but necessary. But the big picture, says Paul, is that the dollar, once backed by gold and then by Treasury bonds, is now backed by junk mortgage securities that nobody wants. And this is a nightmare scenario for the dollar…

Yesterday, central banks launched a coordinated effort to flood global money markets with U.S. dollars in hopes of easing strained financial systems in danger of freezing up entirely. However, many analysts see this as only a short-term solution that will lower overnight lending rates but fail to assist financial institutions with longer-term cash needs, says Jason Simpkins  in Money Morning.