markets

Stocks leaped on Monday on news that for the first time in seven months, the number of homes sold in the United States rose.

The National Association of Realtors has suggested that the improvement shows a stabilizing market. But as traders like to say, even a dead cat will bounce if you drop it from high enough. As of February the median home price had fallen by 8.2% year-on-year, the largest decline on record. Of course a few bargain-hunters have ventured back into the fray.

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Desperate to inject liquidity into the market, the Federal Reserve has been unusually willing to lend money.

William McChesney Martin, the longest serving Fed chairman, once remarked that the job of a good central banker is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going. Over the last week, Ben Bernanke seems to have reversed that dictum: he's the host wandering from guest to guest with a tray of Jell-O shots. MORE

El Cheapo kidneys, get them while they're warm

In the grossest violation of the Hippocratic Oath since Mengele, a gang of surgeons in Gurgaon, India, allegedly rounded up beggars and day-laborers, drugged them, and sliced out their kidneys.  Other poor Indians surrendered their kidneys to the doctors for handfuls of cash. In all, the gang bought or stole as many as 500 organs in a nine-year medical crime-wave -- then installed them, for a price, in the renally-diseased bodies of rich Indians and foreigners. Leaving aside the surgery-at-gunpoint and the forcible anesthesia, two gruesome facts stand out.