OUR PERIPATETIC PRESIDENT apparently is allergic to Washington. Who can blame him? Getting Congress off its butt and moving even crabwise in almost any direction is slightly more difficult than herding a tangle of snakes. No offense meant to the snakes, who confine their expressions of displeasure to hissing or rattling, unlike our chosen representatives who fill the air with noxious blustery babble.

Mr. Obama, moreover, prefers to voyage abroad; quite understandable, too. He can usually count on adulation from the cheering multitudes in foreign climes who haven't succumbed to rhetorical fatigue — a condition brought on by being exposed to an overdose of oratorical flourish unleavened by substance — that increasingly seems to be afflicting the citizenry here.

As it happened, last week, the president didn't have to travel to the far corners of the earth (unless you are one of those who consider Pittsburgh and particularly New York as far corners of the earth). In a sense, the world came to our fair land (one of the penalties for debasing our currency).

There were not one but two gatherings of global leaders (and laggards; it's often hard to tell the difference): The G-20 bunch, who met in Pittsburgh to fix the world's economies, and the United Nations, which came to New York to mess up the traffic, indulge their logorrhea and take time out from emptying their countries' treasuries to have a high old time.

From what we can tell, the G-20 meeting was a great success; at the end of their somber deliberations, the world's economies weren't noticeably worse off. As for the get-together of the United Nations, it only reinforced our conviction that body should change its name to something more fitting. Like the Indig Nations.

For, as at most of these behemoth bull sessions, elbowing their way into the limelight were the likes of that renowned advocate of democracy, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, whose rant exceeded the allotted 15 minutes by more than an hour and left his listeners transfixed (or at least in a stupor); Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's election-rigger par excellence, who graciously cut his rancid remarks to only half an hour, addressing an audience mostly disguised as empty seats, and Venezuela's windbag strongman Hugo Chavez, who had a few words of praise for Mr. Obama (he really knows how to hurt a guy).

We must confess, though, that these get-togethers, especially when they're held on our home grounds, somehow always make us feel better after we've seen the participants close up. For whatever we think of our own political luminaries, they tend to look not half bad compared to most of their foreign counterparts. Or maybe it's that, contrary to the old saw, familiarity actually breeds a little less contempt.

What helped rattle the market last week was evidence that housing, which, when it crashed and burned, badly torched the rest of the economy as well, still faces a long, tough slog in its struggle to reach solid footing. It must really have pained the folks at the National Association of Realtors, who come hell or high water remain congenital optimists (you think it's easy peddling the illusion that every shack's a castle?) to report that sales of existing homes in August were lower.

The decline hurt all the more because the 2.7% drop to a 5.1 million annual rate broke a winning streak stretching back to March (which, perhaps not coincidentally, was when this explosive bear-market rally in equities began). As usual, economists, analysts and assorted camp followers had been confidently predicting a rise in sales. As usual, too, when, instead, sales fell, the economists, analysts et al. lickety-split hurried to point out that one month doesn't necessarily constitute a trend. And it doesn't, although on Wall Street that axiom somehow only applies when the month in question is a bummer.

All of which is preface to sharing with you a decidedly negative take on the outlook for housing by Amherst Securities Group, whose stuff we've quoted before and whose analysis is invariably first-rate. The report, dated last Wednesday, festooned with gory detail, focuses on the swollen overhang, the so-called shadow inventory, that has grown inexorably in the wake of the tsunami of default and foreclosure.

Amherst estimates this massive overhang at seven million units. That's the equivalent of 135% of a full year's existing-home sales and chillingly greater than the 1.27 million units that made up the overhang in early 2005, when the housing bubble had just begun its dizzying and more than a little lunatic ascent.