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America got more great news on housing today. In April, existing home sales — which exclude newly built homes — hit their highest level in more than three years.

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Why might Yahoo want to buy Tumblr, as AllThingsD reported last night and Adweek confirmed this morning? Henry Blodget has a couple of ideas. For one thing, he says that “Yahoo wants to become hip and cool again, and Tumblr is hip and cool.” Tumblr also has a large following in the 18-29 demographic that Yahoo would like to capture (CFO Ken Goldman told a group of investors earlier this week that “One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic.”) In that way, the move is similar to last year’s Facebook/Instagram deal, which Ryan McCarthy described as “a $1 billion way to make your parents’ status updates more interesting.”

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Today something strange happened: a dreary, easily overlooked vote at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ended up on Gawker.

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At a conference in Chicago today, Ben Bernanke seemed like he was talking directly to his critics. In a speech on monitoring the financial system, Bernanke’s message was, essentially: we’re keeping an eye on things. (Shadow banking, in particular, is still a risk, he warned.)

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The US government is giving a whole new meaning to the term “price discovery”. Today, the federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services released a trove of seemingly basic data to the public for the first time: the prices American hospitals charge Medicare for the 100 most common inpatient procedures.

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One day after a downright cheery report on the housing market, Barack Obama has moved to replace the widely-criticized head of the FHFA. Mel Watt, a Democrat and longtime presence on the House Financial Services Committee, has been nominated to replace Ed DeMarco, who’s been acting head of the agency that regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2009.

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Apple has a long list of superlatives to its name; this week, it added two more titles to the roster. It’s now the world’s biggest dividend payer, and also the company behind the largest investment-grade corporate-bond offering of all time. Today’s $17 billion in bonds, which attracted an order book of $50 billion, constitute Apple’s first debt issuance since 1994; the company ended up raising more money than even the Facebook IPO did.

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The leaders of the G20 met in Washington today; their official communique was sent out, like any grand pronouncement, as a Word document posted on a Russian website.

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The ur-text of the international austerity movement may have a few damning errors in it — including, it seems, some silly Excel mistakes. Mike Konczal set off a near-riot in the econoblogosphere today with this post, which summarizes a new paper that takes aim at seminal 2010 work by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. The paper concludes that R&R made significant errors in their work:

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Ron Johnson’s disastrous tenure at JC Penney ended on Monday with the company’s stock down roughly 50% during his tenure. The former Apple and Target exec, an acknowledged retail star, is out after just 17 months — a 25% drop in sales will do that to you.