The Department of Housing and Urban Development has left elderly borrowers vulnerable to abusive lending practices because of shortcomings in programs that offer reverse mortgages, according to a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office.
Reverse mortgages, which are usually backed by HUD's Federal Housing Administration, enable seniors to withdraw equity from their homes. The loan and the accumulated interest do not have to be paid back until the owner dies or sells the home. But the upfront costs are substantial....
Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's
staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout
application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish
and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.
The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a
program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks.
The firm's losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary
regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided
that it didn't meet the criteria for receiving a favorable
recommendation and had forwarded the applica
The new hallucination for most strapped McMansion owners is that they'll "rent the house for a year and then sell when the market comes back."
The happy theory here is that, yes, prices are temporarily depressed, but when the green shoots really take hold, we'll go roaring right back to 2006 levels again.
Most real-estate agents will be eager to tell you that they agree with this theory. What they won't be able to tell you, as Mark Hanson of the Field Check Group points out, is why.
Metro areas posting large gains were: Bend, Ore., where the jobless rate rose to 15.2 percent, an increase of 8.8 percentage points; and North Carolina's Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton saw its unemployment rate rise to 15.4 percent...
If no plan is adopted by 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, the state plans to issue IOUs to contractors, vendors, local governments and taxpayers expecting refunds beginning Thursday.
Americans saying jobs are "hard to get" increased to 44.8 percent from 43.9 percent the previous month, while those saying jobs are "plentiful" slid to 4.5 percent from May's 5.8 percent.
California is preparing to issue IOUs to its creditors this week as it grapples with an unprecedented cash crunch and prepares to begin its new fiscal year deep in the red.
Once the US’s richest state, California now has the dubious distinction of having the worst credit rating in the country.
It
is facing a budget deficit of $24bn (€17bn, £14.5bn) yet Arnold
Schwarzenegger, its governor, and the state assembly cannot agree on a
budget that would address the shortfall.
California’s fiscal year
ends on Wednesday but as the state’s cash reserves are empty, IOUs will
be issued to a range of creditors, including contractors, such as
information technology companies and the food service groups that cater
for prisons.
“On Wednesday we start a fiscal year with a
massively unbalanced spending plan and a cash shortfall not seen since
the Great Depression,” said John Chiang, the state controller.
“Unfortunately, the state’s inabilit
If a new General Motors
emerges from bankruptcy as planned, U.S. financial aid for the company
will expand to nearly $50 billion, but neither the government nor the
company is forecasting how much of the public money will be repaid.
It's sure to be a stretch. For the United States to fully recover
its investment, the value of General Motors stock will have to reach
levels it has never before attained.
I joked that with public spending out of control and the piling
on of the international bailout bill, economic collapse seems to be the
goal of Congress. It is getting harder to joke
about such a thing however after Congress passed ....
U.S. District Court Judge Denny
Chin sentenced Bernard Madoff to the maximum 150 years in prison today
for running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, calling the crime:
“extraordinarily evil.”
“Symbolism is important,” Chin told Madoff at a New York sentencing hearing.
Earlier, Madoff spoke for the first time about the scam, telling
Chin: “I will live with the pain and torment (of hurting people) for
the rest of my life.”
“I cannot offer an excuse for my behavior,” Madoff said. “How to do
excuse deceiving investors? How do you excuse lying to your sons? How
do you excuse lying to your two brothers? How do you excuse lying to a
wife who stood by me for 50 years.
“There is no excuse for that,” Madoff told the court. “I made a
terrible mistake. . . . I’ve left a legacy of shame for my children and
grandchildren. I will live with the pain and torment the rest of my
life.”
Then, the scammer turned to victims in the courtroom and
What makes her fiscal crisis relevant to us all is not only that California is our most populous state, with one in eight Americans living there, but California has a gross domestic product larger than Canada's.
President Obama
praised the energy bill passed by the House late last week as
an “extraordinary first step,” but he spoke out against a provision
that would impose trade penalties on countries that do not accept
limits on global warming pollution.
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar declined the most against
the euro in a month and dropped versus the yen after China
repeated its call for a new global currency.
The Swiss franc declined against the euro and dollar this
week as foreign-exchange analysts said the central bank sold its
currency three times to support the economy. The greenback fell
against most of its major counterparts after the People’s Bank
of China said yesterday the International Monetary Fund should
manage more of members’ foreign-exchange reserves.
“The dollar’s status as a reserve currency is being
questioned,” said Benedikt Germanier, a foreign-exchange
strategist in Stamford, Connecticut at UBS AG, the second-
largest currency trader. “There are reasons to sell the
dollar.”
The U.S. currency fell 0.9 percent to $1.4056 per euro this
week from $1.3937 on June 19, the swiftest depreciation since
the five days ended May 29. The dollar fell 1.1 percent to 95.18
yen f
Notably, an experiment reported in March ... demonstrated that some of the brain’s decision-making circuitry showed signs of money illusion on images from a brain scanner.
But credit cards can also be a slippery slope. One misstep and you’ll tumble into the abyss of credit card debt hell, a mounting spiral of missed payments, fees, high APRs, and rate increases that will take years to recover from.
The unprecedented decline in room revenues combined with the jump in cap rates has resulted in a massive loss in values. We estimate that values are currently 50-80% lower than at the market’s peak in 2006-2007.
Five U.S. banks with total assets of about $1.04 billion were seized by regulators, pushing this year’s tally of failures to 45 as a recession drives up unemployment and home foreclosures.
This is a series of pictures which is gives a visual representation on what a Trillion dollars looks like. It is a series of slides that goes from 100 "dollars" all the way up to ONE TRILLION dollars. A Trillion Dollars is 1 followed by 12 zeros. to get an idea on how large a Trillion really is, take a guess now as to how many YEARS a trillion seconds is the answer will be provided at the end of the slide show. From all of us to all of you...ENJOY!! And while you are enjoying the pictures consider that your governmental overlords have indebted your children and your children's children to the tun of 50 TRILLION dollars. Be sure to share this with as many people as you possibly can!
"We are setting the stage for big pressures for states to restrict eligibility and benefit levels," McHugh said. "Those type of restrictive actions undercut the (Depression-era program's) economic and social stability purposes."
It’s largely due to two things: “Their retirement nest eggs have taken a hit,” and they are increasingly aware that “they might be one of the people who lives to — not just 80, but — 90, 95 or 100,” Zultowski explained.
Right. The government hands out money (which it taxes or borrows) and this is reflected in these numbers but taking money from one hand and giving it to another does not help GDP as it does not represent income produced...
California regulators delayed a decision on whether to
implement the nation's first statewide carbon fee on utilities, oil
refineries and other polluting industries. [100% of which would pass onto consumers.]
When most of the home owning voters cannot pay their major debt or have no incentive to pay their mortgage debt, there will either be a debtors revolt that society will sanction...
The point I am making is that the industry is obviously been run by sharps who have now forced the creation of new legislation to protect consumers from abusive practice. Anyway, this is the tip of the iceberg of what has happened to our formerly robust financial system.
What makes it particularly stupid, unless someone shows me different, is that the credit industry cannot go to the courts to successfully collect at all. Thus if credit card holders went of a mass revolt, the industry would not be able to ever recover. It is very much in their interest to coddle their customers who actually enjoy the service and will work hard to keep it in good order.
Going back from 1 to 3 years, Peter Schiff
predicts the adverse consequences that are likely to occur as
a result of government economic policies. Some of the economists
and investment advisors on the same shows mount no more of a response
to his prognostications than to giggle.
The number of people filing new jobless claims jumped unexpectedly last
week, and the total unemployment benefit rolls rose to more than 6.7
million.
The department said initial claims for jobless benefits rose last week
by 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 627,000. Economists expected a drop
to 600,000.
Over the past 10 years, the private sector has generated roughly 1.1 million additional jobs, or about 100K per year. The public sector created about 2.4 million jobs.
Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- decreased at an
annual rate of 5.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009...
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