A few words on Realtytrac's new housing and foreclosure data for this month. Interesting snippets from the press release:

• The report shows that one in every 374 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing in
  April, shattering records throughout the land.
• Much of April's activity is at the initial stages of foreclosure, suggesting that many lenders are cracking down on delinquent loans that had been delayed by government-imposed and industry-embraced moratoria. [My note: we'll see how those fare when they hit the market later this summer.]
  
• The states with the highest foreclosure rates were Nevada, Florida, California, Arizona, and Idaho. Other states rounding out the top-10 list were Utah, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado and Ohio — although the foreclosure rates in Illinois, Colorado and Ohio were below the national average [emphasis mine].
  

Remember how all politics is local? So is all housing data. Although the foreclosure crisis has wreaked its havoc far and wide, it's worth reminding ourselves of just how local the inciting incidents actually were. The worst offenders of the housing crisis were concentrated in just seven states--seven states! Even the last three states on the top-10 list were pulling their weight in tugging down the national average.

This isn't necessarily great news or awful news, but it is instructive. I just got off the phone with the president of Clear Capital, a firm that tracks housing data for institutional investors, and he told me that smart investors are getting extremely granular in their analyses of housing data these days, going zip code by zip code and even, in extreme cases, block by block in deciding how to handle their troubled assets. If a certain development has seen pickup in the last six months, even while the county or state it's in has slumped, that development will still get attention from hungry investors in the boardrooms of Manhattan.

Whoever came up with that locavore credo--think globally, act locally--was more prescient than he/she probably knew.

Where Are Argentina's Coins?: This is for sure the strangest story of the week. Argentina is facing a mysterious coin shortage. Some small convenience stores would rather turn down business than give out change. Buying coins can require as much as a seven percent premium over face value, and markets owned by Chinese immigrants have banded together to issue their own currency.

America's AAA Rating Is At Risk: The U.S. has had the rating since 1917, but now Moody's is threatening to cut it. (How un-American.) I wonder, though, if anyone would care? Everyone knows the U.S. is the most financially reckless borrower in the world at the moment, but other countries still give us money hand-over-fist.

Are the Saudis Recession-Proof?: Perhaps not so much as we think.

Big Ships, Little Business: File it under fascinating: Near Singapore, "one of the largest fleets of ships ever gathered idles just outside one of the world’s busiest ports, marooned by the receding tide of global trade...Hundreds of cargo ships — some up to 300,000 tons, with many weighing more than the entire 130-ship Spanish Armada — seem to perch on top of the water rather than in it, their red rudders and bulbous noses, submerged when the vessels are loaded, sticking a dozen feet out of the water."