Thursday, December 8, 2011

Friday December 9 Housing and Economic stories

KeNosHousingPortal.blogspot.com

TOP STORIES:

Taxpayer to take on mortgage risks of first-time buyers - (www.telegraph.co.uk) Taxpayers will underwrite mortgages totalling hundreds of millions of pounds under plans to “unblock” the housing market and revive the flagging economy. The Prime Minister and his deputy, Nick Clegg, will unveil proposals to help first-time buyers of new homes by carrying part of the risk of their mortgages. They also propose subsidising the construction of 16,000 homes by giving £400 million of taxpayers’ money to property developers. In a further move, ministers are working on a scheme under which billions of pounds of money in pension funds will be used to finance the construction of power stations, wind turbines and roads.

GE Filed 57,000-Page Tax Return, Paid No Taxes on $14 Billion in Profits - (www.weeklystandard.com) General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked. The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. "GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions--it's legal," Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE's profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn't taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.

Good credit? Underwater jumbo mortgage? You're a walkaway risk - (www.burbed.com) Owe more than your house is worth? Is your credit otherwise good? Do you have few credit cards but pay them on time? Congrats. You’re a likely candidate for strategic default, according to FICO (formerly Fair, Isaac), the company synonymous with credit scoring. And now Moody’s took a look at the mortgage market and said the most likely homeloaner to default is sitting on an upside down jumbo mortgage. Why? Because the subprime mortgages already shook out the people who couldn’t pay, the prime market has some risk of strategic default, but the Jumbo pool lost the highest quality mortgages due to refinancing. Most mortgages left didn’t refinance because they couldn’t. And this is spooking the PrimeX, the index fund of prime RMBS (Residential Mortgage Backed Securities).

Foreclosure Crisis Not Even Half Way - (www.responsiblelending.org) “Lost Ground, 2011” is based on an analysis of 27 million mortgages made over a five-year period. Here are our top-line findings: The nation is not even halfway through the foreclosure crisis. 6.4 percent of mortgages made between 2004 and 2008 have ended in foreclosure, and an additional 8.3 percent are at immediate, serious risk. Foreclosure patterns are strongly linked with patterns of risky lending. Foreclosure rates are consistently worse for borrowers who received high-risk loan products that were aggressively marketed before the housing crash.

Lobbyists Plan to Smear Occupy Wall Street Protestors - (www.google.com) A top US lobbying firm tied to the financial industry pitched a $850,000 plan to smear the Occupy Wall Street movement and discredit sympathetic politicians, MSNBC television reported Saturday. A memo written on the letterhead of well-known Washington lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford urged the American Bankers Association (ABA), a client, to conduct "opposition research" on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct "negative narratives" about the protests and its political backers. Warning that the movement could lead to weakened support for Wall Street among both Democratic and Republican politicians, the four-page memo targeted specific states where the outcome of 2012 elections could have a major impact on the financial sector.

OTHER STORIES:

Bank Debt Is Near Record Low: Fed - (www.cnbc.com)

Dick Bove: Why I Was Wrong on Bank Stocks - (www.cnbc.com)

The Wall Street disconnect from reality - (www.reuters.com)

Clark, Lytle: the lobbyists smearing OWS for profit - (www.sourcewatch.org)

House Buyer Strike: Do not participate in a rigged market - (www.patrick.net)

15 Tea Party Freshmen Sell Out For $3.5 Million in First Nine Months - (www.opensecrets.org)

Congress reinstates $729,000 FHA mortgages as more welfare for the rich - (www.sfgate.com)

Why House Prices Won't Bottom Out - (www.yahoo.com)

Charts showing where the bad lending come from - (www.ritholtz.com)

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