Real Story: Earnings, M&A and Housing Drama

"The situation Horton is facing is homebuilders are aggressively cutting prices because they bought way too much land, spent too much on it and now have to get rid of it," Yulico says. "That means more impairments" or write-downs of the land value are coming. (Yulico and Task discussed the implications of what the write-downs mean for homebuilders' book value in an accompanying video for TheStreet.com TV, which can be found here .)

MDC Holdings (MDC Quote) has "cleared out a lot of higher-priced land" and thus seems to be in better shape on that front vs. competitors, says Yulico. Meanwhile, Toll Brothers (TOL Quote) is exposed to high-end consumers who appear to be holding up better than low- and middle-income Americans.

Still, all the builders face a macro environment where "lending is getting tighter and the jobs report last week means we now may not have a rate cut," he says. "What fueled the boom was loose lending and low interest rates -- it doesn't look good" for builders on either front.

Outside of housing, Task discussed the day's corporate news, including ImClone's (IMCL Quote) announcement that its study of Erbitux in pancreatic cancer failed. He also discussed M&A activity involving United Rentals (URI Quote), Cemex (CX Quote) and BCE(BCE Quote).

In the remainder of the podcast, Task discussed the implications of dollar weakness and provided some speculative suggestions for listeners participating in TheStreet.com's "Beat the Street" contest, a fantasy trading game.

Click here to listen to the entire podcast.