The Toll on Home Values
ROBERTS: Oh, it's 22 minutes after the hour. New this morning. NASA is announcing some exciting news today. It's the latest findings from its Kepler Space Observatory, including information about, quote, "the discovery of an intriguing planetary system."</s>COSTELLO: Oh, why can't they just say new planet?</s>ROBERTS: Yes, because in an intriguing new planetary system.</s>COSTELLO: OK.</s>ROBERTS: These are the latest images from Kepler. Cutting through the geeks speak, here's why this is so exciting. Kepler searches for planets that, like earth, orbit stars and that sweet spot that can support life. Not too hot, not too cold. Just right.</s>COSTELLO: Oh, can you say aliens?</s>ROBERTS: It's like the "Goldilocks" planet, right? Just right.</s>COSTELLO: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, from the three bears. I remember that. Took me a little bit.</s>ROBERTS: Goldilocks. Goldie Hawn? No.</s>COSTELLO: Yes, Goldie Hawn. OK. A skydiving snag at the Texas Rangers ballpark at Arlington. Check this out. A member of the Golden Knights Army Parachute team got tangled on a flagpole on the way down to the field before the game. He was able to unclip himself. However, he climbed down the scoreboard and the fans cheered.</s>ROBERTS: Wow. What a surprise. Google setting its sights on Skype. The Internet giant announced that Gmail users can now make phone calls over the web. The landlines, all calls in the U.S. and Canada free for now. International calls range from two cents to 98 cents a minute.</s>COSTELLO: And remember the elderly woman who sued McDonald's back in '94 after she got burned?</s>ROBERTS: Oh, yes.</s>COSTELLO: Well, you know, she spilled the hot coffee all over her lap? Now a Chicago mother is suing the fast food giant because back in 2009, her daughter burned her leg after spilling her hot chocolate. The lawsuit states they bought the hot chocolate from a drive-through window and that the lid was not secured properly.</s>ROBERTS: Well, it's been a tough week for the real estate market. Existing new homes sales are down significantly. And now there are concerns about home prices and what it's going to do to the overall economy. CNNMoney.com's Poppy Harlow here with us this morning "Minding Your Business." This is a bad week for homeowners, people selling homes, builders, all of that.</s>POPPY HARLOW, CNNMONEY.COM: I think anyone when it comes to our economy, this is maybe the truest sign out there of how bad things really are. I mean, we learned this week that new and existing home sales fell dramatically in July. It was really the end of the sugar rush. There was this big government-induced tax credit that ended, and people realized how the housing market really looks, which is incredibly sour. But I want to tell you about a new report. Let's take a look at the graphics. You can see what's going on here because the big concern among economists now is what about home prices? This is a 2010 macro market survey. About 100 economists and real estate experts weighed in on this. They saw three main things. First of all, a massive weakening of confidence in the overall U.S. housing market. The fact that the majority, almost 80 percent of them did not expect that home prices will increase at all this year, and they said between 2011 and 2014, home prices are only going to go up modestly. Now, what you have, economists say, Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who's the head of the study, basically said you have buyers expecting prices will go up, but the experts don't. Well, of course, buyers right now expect the prices will go up. I think one of the other big headaches here is the fact that we have major problems across the economy. So let's look at some of the other problems weighing on the housing market in general. You have a glut of unsold homes. You have massive, massive foreclosures. That problem really isn't getting any better. There's an aid by the administration, but it's not getting a lot better. You have incredibly high unemployment, what the White House calls stubbornly high unemployment. And you have an incredibly volatile economic recovery. The stock market, the job market, the housing market -- nothing is showing us that the housing market in general should get any better.</s>COSTELLO: Can I just like, I don't know, throw maybe an optimistic note into all of this?</s>HARLOW: Absolutely.</s>COSTELLO: You know, as far as home prices are concerned, I mean, they had that tax credit thing going, so might this drop be kind of artificial?</s>HARLOW: I think that the boost was artificial. With the sugar ration, interest in that economist from Yale said to me on the phone yesterday, look, what we had from 2006 to 2009, home prices fell. Then there was this unusual government intervention that we don't usually see. We saw a rebound. Now, we're seeing the realistic fall, and that's here to stay. That's the concern for economists. We have some buyers coming in, but they're not real buyers in the sense that we're going to see it month and month again. What we're seeing now is the first real month of numbers. The big concern is going in to Friday.</s>ROBERTS: Yes, we got the GOP coming up.</s>HARLOW: Of course. You've got a horrible GDP number expected on Friday. And Ben Bernanke, the Fed Chairman, will talk for the first time tomorrow since the Fed meeting. Why does that matter? He's going to talk about the recovery, how's the effort going? What other stimulus programs might the government put forward? How might they intervene to turn around the housing market, the job market, et cetera?</s>ROBERTS: Poppy Harlow this morning. Poppy, thanks.</s>HARLOW: You got it.</s>COSTELLO: Easing a travel ban and opening up trade. Things could be warming up between Washington and Havana. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is in the Cuban capital right now. He'll join us live. It's 27 minutes past the hour.