LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Julianne Moore is in early talks to join the cast of "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay," an individual familiar with the project has told TheWrap.

The Oscar nominee would play President Alma Coin - the leader of the autocratic society behind the gladiatorial games - in the two-part finale. Moore joins a cast that will include heavyweights Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jennifer Lawrence and heartthrobs Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson.

She previously co-starred with Hutcherson in the Oscar-nominated 2010 film "The Kids Are All Right."

Moore recently scored Emmy gold for her portrayal of a different politician, vice presidential aspirant and "you betcha" spouter Sarah Palin in last year's HBO film "Game Change." She next stars in a remake of "Carrie" and the medieval action adventure "The Seventh Son."

"Mockingjay" will be released in two parts, with the first installment hitting theaters on November 21, 2014, and the second chapter debuting on November 20, 2015.

Moore is represented by CAA and Management 360.

Deadline first reported her attachment.

Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, said the eurozone's unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage point in May to 12.1 percent. April's unemployment rate was initially estimated to be 12.2 percent, but it was revised down to 12.0 percent thanks to new data, particularly from France.

The figures will make sobering reading for the region's politicians as they gather in Berlin this week to tackle the problem of youth unemployment nearly one in four people aged under-25 are out of work and the damage it is doing to the eurozone's economy and social fabric.

Across the eurozone, there were 19.22 million people unemployed, 67,000 higher than the previous month a closer look at the figures show that Italy was largely behind the increase.

Even though the monthly rises outside of Italy were relatively modest, analysts still expect unemployment in the eurozone to continue to rise as the region remains stuck in recession that started in late 2011.

Figures next month will show whether the eurozone continued to shrink in the second quarter of the year for the seventh quarter in a row. Even if the region escapes the grip of recession, unemployment is likely to carry on rising for a while as the labor market is a lagging indicator of economic activity. In the U.S., for example, unemployment didn't really start falling until a couple of years after the end of the recession there in 2009. In May, the U.S. rate was 7.6 percent.

Most economists think it will be a close call whether the eurozone's recession comes to an end this quarter. While countries such as Germany and Austria have seen their economies prosper and their unemployment rates dropping in May to 5.3 percent and 4.7 percent respectively, those at the forefront of Europe's debt crisis, such as Greece and Spain, continue to see economic contraction and job losses on a massive scale.

These countries have suffered wave after wave of austerity measures in order to get their public finances back into shape following the financial crisis that hit the world economy in 2008/9.

Greece and Spain also have the highest unemployment rates in the eurozone. Spain's unemployment is just higher at 26.9 percent than Greece's rate in March its statistics are compiled on different timeframes of 26.8 percent.

Both countries are also mired in a youth unemployment crisis. Whereas the youth unemployment rate for the 17-country eurozone as a whole is 23.8 percent, the proportion of Spain's 15-24 year olds out of work is 56.5 percent while Greece's stands at 59.2 percent. By contrast, it is 16.3 percent in the U.S., where the age range is 16-24.

Over recent months, policymakers across Europe have at least paid lip-service to the amount of young people out of work.

As well as being a burden to a country's coffers, sky-high levels of youth unemployment have an additional social cost of denying potential workers skills and experience that's a long-term cost to the region's economic potential as well as inflaming social tensions.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is hosting a meeting of EU labor ministers on Wednesday as part of a strategy to deal with the youth unemployment crisis, but there's very little hope that the EU as a whole will deliver anything substantial to deal with the issue.

Anna Zabrodzka, economist at Moody's Analytics, said the labour market in Europe is heavily skewed against younger people.

"Most EU nations effectively have dual labour markets, with permanent jobs typically protected by unions and held by people older than 35, and temporary jobs that are unprotected and held by younger workers," she said.

And a 6 billion euro ($7.8 billion) EU plan to tackle youth unemployment, confirmed at a leaders' summit in Brussels last week, was described as a "drop in the ocean" by the European Parliament's president Martin Schulz.

Neil Mellor, an analyst at Bank of New York Mellon, said the plan to promote workplace programs and help job seekers find work was insufficient to deal with a crisis of "endemic proportions" given the region's parlous economic situation.

"Reform is indeed essential, but as we have argued, this goes to the heart of the chicken-and-egg debate over its feasibility without first stimulating growth," Mellor said.

Elsewhere, Eurostat said inflation picked up to 1.6 percent in the year to June, up from 1.4 percent the previous month. Higher food, alcohol and tobacco costs and unfavorable annual energy comparisons lay behind the increase in inflation.

The increase is unlikely to cause too much concern among policymakers at the European Central Bank, as the rate remains below its target of keeping price increases just below 2 percent.

The ECB is meeting this Thursday to decide what more it can do to shore up the eurozone's economy. However, a reduction in the main interest rate, which stands at a record low of 0.5 percent, is not anticipated.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than a dozen FBI agents are assigned to a criminal probe into Internal Revenue Service scrutiny of conservative political groups, FBI Director Robert Mueller said on Wednesday.

"It's a high-priority investigation and it needs to be handled with care, but it also needs to be pushed aggressively," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing.

Mueller spoke as Tea Party conservatives rallied outside the U.S. Capitol in the sixth week of a controversy that prompted President Barack Obama to fire acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller.

At least 1,000 protesters gathered at an "Audit the IRS" event organized by the Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group of the anti-Washington movement whose members favor lower taxes and less government spending.

Republican Representative Dave Camp of Michigan told the crowd that the IRS investigation will take time, but it will get answers.

"We will hold those responsible accountable," he said.

Carol Bolling, a Tea Party organizer from Georgia, said the IRS should be abolished. "I want something done now. There's enough proof to know what they did," she said of IRS officials.

The IRS came under fire starting on May 10 when a Washington IRS official apologized for the handling by agency employees in Cincinnati of applications for tax-exempt status submitted by some Tea Party-aligned conservative groups.

The Cincinnati agents, before deciding whether to grant tax-exempt status, had sent some of the non-profit groups' applications to a special unit for closer scrutiny to see if the groups respected legal limits on political activity.

PARTISAN DISPUTE

Republicans have alleged that the IRS targeted the groups because of their politics and have tried to link the activity, without success so far, to officials in Washington.

Democrats have said the law on non-profit groups' political involvement needs clarifying and said there is no evidence of political involvement from Washington in the IRS doing its job.

Attorney General Eric Holder said last month the FBI had opened a criminal investigation. Holder said the investigation would be wide-ranging, examining whether the IRS violated civil rights laws or other protections.

The investigation is being run out of the FBI's Washington Field Office, Mueller said. He declined to say whether it could lead to charges against individuals at the IRS.

A report last month from the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, an IRS watchdog, criticized the way the IRS screened the applications, picking out ones with words in their names such as "Tea Party."

This put the IRS' political impartiality at risk, said the audit report from the watchdog.

AGENCY EMBATTLED

Several congressional panels are looking into the matter. At least a half-dozen IRS employees, including at least two Washington officials, have sat down for lengthy interviews with investigators from the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is leading the probe.

Separately this week, two Republican senators blasted the IRS for paying bonuses to employees at a time of across-the-board spending cuts in the federal government.

In a letter dated on Tuesday, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah requested information from new IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel on how the agency is handling merit pay.

The IRS in a statement said the agency is under a legal obligation to comply with its collective bargaining agreement with its union. Grassley contends that the union contract allows for reshuffling of funds in the event of a budget shortfall.

(Additional reporting by Kim Dixon; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Xavier Briand)

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LUCERNE, Switzerland (Reuters) - Billionaire Marc Rich, who invented modern oil trading and was pardoned by President Bill Clinton over tax evasion, racketeering and busting sanctions with Iran, died on Wednesday in Switzerland aged 78.

Rich fled the Holocaust with his parents for America to become the most successful and controversial trader of his time and a fugitive from U.S. justice, enjoying decades of comfortable privacy at his sprawling Villa Rosa on Lake Lucerne.

Belgian-born Rich, whose trading group eventually became the global commodities powerhouse Glencore Xstrata, died in hospital from a stroke, spokesman Christian Koenig said. He is survived by two daughters and six grandchildren. A third daughter died previously of leukemia.

"He will be brought to Israel for burial," Avner Azulay, managing director of the Marc Rich Foundation, said by telephone. Rich will be buried on Thursday at Kibbutz Einat cemetery near Tel Aviv.

Many of the biggest players in oil and metals trading trace their roots back to the swashbuckling Rich, whose triumph in the 1970s was to pioneer a spot market for crude oil, wresting business away from the world's big oil groups.

To his critics he was a white-collar criminal, a serial sanctions breaker, whom they accused of building a fortune trading with revolutionary Iran, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, apartheid-era South Africa, Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania, Fidel Castro's Cuba and Augusto Pinochet's Chile.

In interviews with journalist Daniel Ammann for his biography, "The King of Oil," the normally secretive Rich admitted to bribing officials in countries such as Nigeria and to assisting the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.

Explaining Rich's route to riches in an interview with Reuters in 2010, Ammann said: "He was faster and more aggressive than his competitors. He was able to recognize trends and seize opportunities before other traders. And he went where others feared to tread - geographically and morally."

A U.S. government website once described Rich more simply, as "a white male, 177 centimeters in height ... wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Marshall Service." In 1983, he was on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list indicted for tax evasion, fraud and racketeering. At the time, it was the biggest tax-evasion case in U.S. history.

FLED POSSIBLE LIFE SENTENCE

Rich, who valued trust, loyalty, secrecy and persistence, always insisted he did nothing illegal and among those who lobbied Clinton on his behalf for his pardon were former Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres.

On learning of the indictment plans, Rich fled to Switzerland to escape the charges, which included exploiting the U.S. embargo against Iran, while it was holding U.S. hostages, to make huge profits on illicit Iranian oil sales.

"Marc Rich is to asset concealment what Babe Ruth was to baseball," said Arthur J. Roth, New York state commissioner of taxation and finance.

He remained under threat of a life sentence in a U.S. jail until Clinton pardoned him during the last chaotic hours of his presidency, a move that provoked moral outrage and bewilderment among some politicians. He never returned to the United States.

Rich's ex-wife, Denise, had donated funds for Clinton's presidential library. The former president later said the donation was not a factor in his decision and he had acted partly in response to a request from Israel. He regretted granting the pardon, calling it "terrible politics."

"It wasn't worth the damage to my reputation," he told Newsweek magazine in 2002.

There was also scrutiny over the role of Eric Holder, now the attorney general and then a deputy attorney general who recommended the pardon.

Rudolph Giuliani, who had worked as a prosecutor on the Rich case before becoming New York Mayor, said in a statement: "Mark Rich committed serious crimes against the United States and then fled the country when he was called to account for his conduct. He should never have been pardoned."

"The fact that Bill Clinton and Eric Holder engineered a pardon for him - without input from me, as the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted him, or Janet Reno, as Attorney General, will forever be a blemish on our justice system," Giuliani said.

'ARTISTRY OF A POOL SHARK'

In one biography, "Metal Men: Marc Rich and the 10-Billion-Dollar Scam," author A. Craig Copetas described Rich as "a beautifully sinister executive who could frame deals with the artistry of a pool shark."

Rich inherited his business acumen from his father, who became a millionaire by setting up an agricultural trading firm after emigrating to the United States.

Born Marcell David Reich in Antwerp on December 18, 1934, Rich started his career at Philipp Brothers, a top global commodities trader after World War Two.

Posted to Madrid in the late 1960s, he found ways to bypass the "Seven Sisters" major oil companies that controlled world oil supplies. Rich was one of the first to loosen their grip, becoming a middle man who bought cargoes of oil from one company to sell to another on a short-term basis, helping give birth to the dynamic market that exists today.

While at Phibro, Rich foresaw the huge price increases imposed by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1973, earning big profits for the firm.

Infuriated by his pay and trading strictures, he left in 1974 along with a fellow graduate of the Phibro mailroom, Pincus "Pinky" Green, and set up Marc Rich and Co AG in Switzerland, a firm that would eventually become Glencore Xstrata Plc.

ANGER AND AMBITION

His aim, according to Copetas, was "to grind Philipp Bros. into oblivion," and he poured all his anger and ambition as well as his charm and gracious client demeanor into the new venture.

It became a highly successful trading firm and a much feared adversary in energy, metals, minerals, grains and sugar markets.

Thomas Gloor worked for Marc Rich for about seven years, starting out in the finance department straight from university and moving to trade futures and options before growing disillusioned with the firm and leaving in 1986.

"Ethics didn't really matter to them. They would trade anything with anyone ... It was all about just making more and more money," he said.

Rich later sold that company, which became Glencore International AG, and set up the Marc Rich Group. Rich was known for charitable donations through his Doron Foundation to Zurich's Jewish community.

Glencore Xstrata Chief Executive Ivan Glasenberg said: "He was a friend and one of the great pioneers of the commodities trading industry, founding the company that became Glencore."

As well as his villa on the Swiss lake, Rich maintained houses in Marbella in Spain and in Israel.

Rich described himself as a keen tennis player, skier, alpinist and patron of the arts. Those who knew him said in private Rich was calm and charming with a sense of humor.

In later years, Rich's fortune dwindled after his property portfolio was hit by the Spanish housing crisis.

"I invested a lot of money there and because of the crisis also lost a lot, at least on paper," he told Swiss economic magazine Bilanz. Forbes put his wealth at $2.5 billion.

He also invested with Bernard Madoff, the financier later convicted of operating a huge pyramid scheme. Rich told one magazine that he had had a "strange feeling" about the investment and "got out with everything," although he said he lost some money through "indirect participation".

Rich once told Fortune magazine he was a normal person with an image problem. "I've been portrayed in a horrible way," he said, "as a workaholic, a loner, a money machine. It's not a true picture."

Nevertheless, to his enemies he remained a symbol of the monomaniacal pursuit of vast wealth.

"The smoking gun is greed," said Ken Hill, a U.S. Marshall who hunted Rich around the world for more than a decade. "This is what Marc thrived on - the greed of those who had commodities and were in positions of influence and power."

Those who knew him say Rich never lost his appetite for a deal. He traveled to London earlier this month and had a dinner with several old friends, an old acquaintance told Reuters.

"He was doing well. He told me he was doing a little bit of business. 'I enjoy doing business,' he said."

(Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom, Ron Bousso, Caroline Copley, Emma Thomasson, Clara Ferreira-Marques, Dmitry Zhdannikov, Emma Farge, Tom Miles, Josephine Mason and David Sheppard; Writing by Peter Millership; Editing by Philippa Fletcher, Peter Graff and Prudence Crowther)

The country seen as likeliest to shelter the National Security Agency leaker seemed determined to prove it could handle any repercussions, with three of its highest officials calling an early-morning news conference to "unilaterally and irrevocably renounce" $23 million a year in lowered tariffs on products such as shrimp and frozen vegetables.

Fernando Alvarado, the secretary of communications for leftist President Rafael Correa, sarcastically suggested the U.S. use the money to train government employees to respect human rights.

Obama, meanwhile, sought to downplay the international chase for the man he called "a 29-year-old hacker" and lower the temperature of an issue that has raised tensions between the U.S. and uneasy partners Russia and China. Obama said in Senegal that the damage to U.S. national security has already been done and his top focus now is making sure it can't happen again.

"I'm not going to have one case with a suspect who we're trying to extradite suddenly be elevated to the point where I've got to start doing wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues, simply to get a guy extradited so he can face the justice system," Obama said at a joint news conference with Senegal's President Macky Sall.

While the Ecuadorean government appeared angry over U.S. threats of punishment if it accepts Snowden, there were also mixed signals about how eager it was to grant asylum. For days, officials here have been blasting the U.S. and praising Snowden's leaks of NSA eavesdropping secrets as a blow for global human rights.

But they also have repeatedly insisted that they are nowhere close to making a decision on whether Snowden can leave Moscow, where he is believed to be holed up in an airport transit zone, for refuge in this oil-rich South American nation.

"It's a complex situation, we don't know how it'll be resolved," Correa told a news conference Thursday in his first public comments on the case aside from a handful of postings on Twitter.

The Ecuadorean leader said that in order for Snowden's asylum application to be processed, he would have to be in Ecuador or inside an Ecuadorean Embassy, "and he isn't." Another country would have to permit Snowden to transit its territory for that requirement to be met, Correa said.

WikiLeaks, which has been aiding Snowden, announced earlier he was en route to Ecuador and had received a travel document. On Wednesday, the Univision television network displayed an unsigned letter of safe passage for him.

Officials on Thursday acknowledged that the Ecuadorean Embassy in London had issued a June 22 letter of safe passage for Snowden that calls on other countries to allow him to travel to asylum in Ecuador. But Ecuador's secretary of political management, Betty Tola, said the letter was invalid because it was issued without the approval of the government in the capital, Quito.

She also threatened legal action against whoever leaked the document, which she said "has no validity and is the exclusive responsibility of the person who issued it."

"This demonstrates a total lack of coordination in the department of foreign affairs," said Santiago Basabe, a professor of political science at the Latin American School of Social Sciences in Quito. "It's no small question to issue a document of safe passage or a diplomatic document for someone like Snowden without this decision being taken directly by the foreign minister or president."

The renunciation of trade benefits was a dramatic but mostly symbolic threat. The U.S Congress was widely expected to let the benefits lapse in coming weeks, for reasons unrelated to the Snowden case. And if they continued, it appeared highly unlikely that the Ecuadorean government would be able to unilaterally cancel tariff benefits that went directly to their country's exporters.

Behind Ecuador's mixed messages, some analysts saw not confusion but internal divisions in the Ecuadorean government.

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank focused on Latin America, said many in Washington believed that Correa, a leftist elected to a third term in February, had been telegraphing a desire to moderate and take a softer tack toward the United States and private business.

Harder-core leftists led by Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino may be seeking to maintain a tough line, he said, a division expressing itself in confusing messages.

"I think there really are different factions within the government on this," Shifter said. "Correa wants to become more moderate. That has been the signal that has been communicated in Washington."

Embarrassment for the Obama administration over the surveillance revelations continued as documents disclosed Thursday showed the Obama administration gathered U.S. citizens' Internet data until 2011, continuing a spying program started under President George W. Bush that revealed whom Americans exchanged emails with and the Internet Protocol address of their computer.

The National Security Agency ended the program that collected email logs and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it decided it didn't effectively stop terrorist plots, according to the NSA's director, Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command. He said all data was purged in 2011.

Britain's Guardian newspaper on Thursday released documents detailing the collection, though the program was also described earlier this month by The Washington Post.

The U.S. administration was expected to decide by Monday what export privileges to grant Ecuador under the Generalized System of Preferences, a program meant to spur development and growth in poorer countries.

Although the deadline was set long before the Snowden affair, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said Thursday that Ecuador's application to add a handful of products such as artichokes and cut flowers the latter a major industry here would not be decided immediately but would remain pending. That gives the U.S. additional leverage over Ecuador while Snowden's fate remains uncertain.

More broadly, a larger trade pact allowing reduced tariffs on more than $5 billion in annual exports to the U.S. is up for congressional renewal before July 21. While approval of the Andean Trade Preference Act has long been seen as doubtful in Washington, Ecuador has been lobbying strongly for its renewal.

On Wednesday, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pledged to lead an effort to block extension of U.S. tariff benefits if Ecuador grants asylum to Snowden, who turned 30 last week. Nearly half of Ecuador's billions a year in foreign trade depends on the United States.

The Obama administration said Thursday that accepting Snowden would damage the overall relationship between the two countries and analysts said it was almost certain that granting the leaker asylum would lead the U.S. to cut roughly $30 million a year in military and law enforcement assistance.

Granting asylum to Snowden would cause "great difficulties in our bilateral relationship," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said. "If they take that step, that would have very negative repercussions."

Alvarado, the communications minister, said his country rejects economic "blackmail" in the form of threats against the trade measures.

"The preferences were authorized for Andean countries as compensation for the fight against drugs, but soon became a new instrument of pressure," he said. "As a result, Ecuador unilaterally and irrevocably renounces these preferences."

Alvarado did not explicitly mention the separate effort to win trade benefits under the presidential order.

He did suggest, however, how the U.S. could use the money saved from Ecuadorean tariffs to train government employees to respect citizens' rights.

"Ecuador offers the United States $23 million a year in economic aid, an amount similar to what we were receiving under the tariff benefits, with the purpose of providing human rights training that will contribute to avoid violations of people's privacy, that degrade humanity," he said.

___

Pace reported from Dakar, Senegal. Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Peter Orsi in Caracas, Venezuela, and Ken Thomas in Washington contributed to this report.

___

Follow Michael Weissenstein on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mweissenstein

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A shortage of properties could take some edge off home sales during the spring selling season, but the housing market recovery should remain intact.

The stock of houses for sale has declined rapidly in recent months as both investors and ordinary Americans rush to take advantage of near record low mortgage rates.

The surge in demand for houses, thanks to an improving labor market and the Federal Reserve's very accommodative monetary policy, is putting a firmer foundation under the economy as it deals with the headwinds from belt tightening in Washington.

In February, there were 1.94 million previously owned homes on the market, representing 4.7 months of supply. The inventory of new single-family homes available for sale during the same period was about 150,000, or 4.4 months' worth.

A six months' supply is normally considered as a healthy balance between supply and demand. With the busy spring selling season around the corner, realtors and economists are worried about the supply squeeze.

"If we don't see more people listing their properties, I don't think we will see the home sales volume increase that we are accustomed to seeing," said Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate group Redfin, based in Seattle.

"There are far more buyers than there are sellers on the market. We would have a huge boom spurred by low interest rates if there were more inventory on the market."

The National Association of realtors expects existing home sales to rise between 7-8 percent this spring from a year ago. For the full year it forecasts sales advancing 7 percent to an annual pace of about 5 million units. Sales are currently running at a 4.98 million-unit pace.

The flow of foreclosed homes coming on to the market, which had been both a source of supply and a key obstacle to the sector's recovery, has dropped significantly in recent months.

According to Kelman, supply was now mostly coming from homeowners and that was not much, as most of the homes were still worth less than what their owners owed banks.

Data from CoreLogic last week showed so-called shadow inventory - homes either in foreclosure or being held from the market by banks - dropped 15.4 percent to 2.2 million in January from a year ago. That was well below the cycle peak of 3 million units in January 2010.

Economists said while homes were still falling into foreclosure, delays with the paper work meant those homes were not coming onto the market. Even where they had been repossessed by the banks, they were also not hitting the market.

"Banks tend to remember the experience of 2008 when they rushed to sell off properties all at once and that caused a downward spiral in house prices," said Andres Carbacho-Burgos, an associate director at Moody's Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

"They are trying to be cautious about selling off too many properties all at once."

HOMES SELLING IN HOURS

The inventory crunch is most acute in areas like Washington D.C., New York, and the coastal California cities where, according to Kelman, "homes are selling in hours."

The months of supply in coastal California has dropped to 30 days from between six and eight months last year. Even in places like Atlanta and Philadelphia, where the housing market has been slow to recover, inventory is also tightening.

"The demand for properties is insane. The bidding wars that are going on, there is not enough inventory and it has become truly a seller's market again," said Neil Garfinkel, real estate attorney at Abrams Garfinkel Margolis Bergson in New York.

But in cities like Detroit, where the population is declining and vacant houses are everywhere, the housing recovery will probably not happen this year or even next year.

Despite expectations of a relatively quiet spring season, the housing recovery is not expected to step back, largely thanks to investors, who make up roughly a fifth of home sales and account for most of the cash sales.

Cash sales account for about a third of transactions. Wall Street investors, who were very active in the housing market over the past 1-1/2 years, are now competing with ordinary people looking to make money from real estate.

"They are buying whatever they can get their hands on. Before they were more selective," said Kelman.

The properties are repaired and rented out. While some of the big money has started to leave areas like Phoenix, Arizona as the foreclosure inventory gets depleted, Atlanta is seeing a jump in sales and prices because of the Wall Street investors.

"Investors will start to exit only after either foreclosure inventories are significantly depleted or sale discounts have fallen off so much that it's like buying a regularly priced home," said Moody's Analytics' Carbacho-Burgos.

Analysts and realtors saw little chance of a repeat of the housing market collapse.

"Back in 2007 we had very leveraged investors. They were buying a home that they would sell for a higher price in six months," said Redfin's Kelman. "That's not happening now, the investors we see now are coming in with cash."

(Reporting By Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chris Reese)

The Deerfield, Ill., company missed Wall Street forecasts, and its earnings grew largely because of the comparison with last year's quarter, when a business split had hurt its performance.

Several analysts said they were surprised by a weaker than expected expansion in this year's quarter of Walgreen's gross margin, which is a basic measure of profitability. That could indicate that the nation's largest drugstore operator is losing faster than expected a key boost it had been receiving from generic drugs, said Edward Jones analyst Judson Clark.

An influx of generic medications has helped drugstore bottom lines for several quarters now because they come with a wider margin between the cost for the pharmacy to purchase the drugs and the reimbursement it receives.

The generic wave was driven by the expiration of patents protecting top-sellers like the cholesterol fighter Lipitor. But that benefit is expected to wane because there are fewer significant patent expirations waiting to refuel it.

That decreasing generic benefit plus a promotional push to boost sales in store front ends, or the area outside the pharmacy, could hurt Walgreen's profitability in future quarters, said Credit Suisse analyst Edward J. Kelly, who called the results released Tuesday "fairly disappointing."

"This quarter is not a great signal for the near-term," he wrote in an email.

Walgreen shares fell 5.9 percent, or $2.83, to close at $45.22 Tuesday, while broader trading indexes climbed slightly. But the stock price had already advanced 30 percent so far this year before Tuesday, and Clark said that gain is part of the reason shares fell so much after the company released earnings.

"We think this is still a good business and an appropriate price," he said.

Overall, Walgreen earned $624 million, or 65 cents per share, in the quarter that ended in May. That's up from $537 million, or 62 cents per share, a year ago, when the company had fewer shares outstanding.

Revenue rose about 3 percent to $18.31 billion.

Adjusted earnings amounted to 85 cents per share, excluding expenses such as acquisition and legal costs.

Analysts forecast earnings of 91 cents per share on $18.4 billion in revenue, according to FactSet.

Last year, Walgreen and the nation's biggest pharmacy benefits manager, Express Scripts Holding Co., had a contract squabble that kept them from doing business for about nine months. That hurt the drugstore chain's results as many Walgreen customers migrated to competitors for their prescriptions, at least temporarily.

The companies resumed doing business last September, and Walgreen says customers have been returning to its stores.

Walgreen said Tuesday that results in this year's quarter also were helped by its acquisition of a stake in European health and beauty retailer Alliance Boots. That contributed about 10 cents per share to the U.S. company's adjusted earnings.

Walgreen said revenue from stores open at least a year climbed 1.4 percent in the quarter, but front-end sales barely rose.

Company leaders said that did not meet their expectations. They said a soft economy has hurt those results, especially in stores in lower-income neighborhoods.

"I can assure you that improving our front end is a high priority," CEO Greg Wasson said.

He said the company has started to customize its advertising circulars more toward individual communities. Walgreen also is using buying trends it gleans from its Balance Rewards customer loyalty program to tailor its promotions. The program lets shoppers pile up points for purchases that they can then translate into cash rewards to use at company stores, and it also gives Walgreen more insight into customer buying patterns.

Walgreen runs 8,097 drugstores nationwide, or 207 more than it did last year. That's more than the totals for CVS Caremark Corp. and Rite Aid Corp.