Monday, January 28, 2013

Tuesday January 29 Housing and Economic stories


TOP STORIES:

Pentagon moving to freeze hiring, delay contracts - (finance.yahoo.com) The Pentagon will begin taking steps to freeze civilian hiring, delay some contract awards and curtail some maintenance to prepare for drastic budget cuts if Congress can't reach an agreement on a final spending plan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday. Speaking to reporters, Panetta said that department officials must also develop detailed plans to implement unpaid furloughs for civilian personnel. The furloughs would kick in if the automatic cuts are triggered. But Panetta said he has asked defense leaders to ensure that any initial moves they make now should be reversible if at all possible, and they must minimize harmful effects on military readiness. "The simple fact is that this fiscal uncertainty has become a serious threat to our national security," Panetta said during a Pentagon press conference. "We really have no choice but to prepare for the worst."

Jack Lew had major role at Citigroup when it nearly imploded - (www.washingtonpost.com) Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew has spent most of his career in government, but during the financial crisis, he was embedded inside one of the country’s biggest banks as it nearly imploded. From 2006 to 2008, he worked at Citigroup in two major roles, a notable line in his résumégiven that as Treasury secretary, he would be charged with implementing new rules regulating Wall Street. But Lew did not have just any position at the bank. In early 2008, he became a top executive in the Citigroup unit that housed many of the bank’s riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity investments. Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in taxpayer money that year. The group had been under pressure to compete with similar units at other big Wall Street firms and, some analysts say, took on too many risks as it played catch-up. “The mismanagement of risk was comprehensive at that organization,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Who is going to buy all those houses in Calif when the Gen X/Yers retire? - (www.telegraph.co.uk) California is in the midst of an unprecedented decline in its child population. Falling birth rates, a decrease in migration and the retirement of the 'baby boom' generation are threatening the future prosperity of America's most populous state, a new report has revealed. The report, by the University of Southern California (USC), shows that in 1970 children made up one third of the state's population. By 2030 that number is expected to have declined to one fifth. "After decades of burgeoning population and economic growth the state now faces a very different prospect," the report, titled California's Diminishing Resource: Children, said. Its author Dowell Myers, a USC demographer, said: "We have a massive replacement problem statewide." He added: "These trends are not yet widely recognised, but they should be a wake-up call for policymakers.

Banks Get Away With Huge Robosigning Fraud By Paying Portion of Illegal Profits - (www.zerohedge.com) The chapter on robosigning, i.e., Fraudclosure, is now closed with a $10 billion wristslap on US banks, of which a whopping $3.3 billion in the form of direct cash and $5.2 billion in "other assistance." The banks who are now absolved from any and all Linda Green transgressions in the past include: Aurora, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, MetLife Bank, PNC, Sovereign, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. And so, banks can resume to resell properties with mortgages on which the original lien may or may not have been lost in the sands of time. From the Fed: Independent Foreclosure Review to Provide $3.3 Billion in Payments, $5.2 Billion in Mortgage Assistance: Ten mortgage servicing companies subject to enforcement actions for deficient practices in mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure processing have reached an agreement in principle with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board to pay more than $8.5 billion in cash payments and other assistance to help borrowers.

Bank of America Pays Far Less in Settlements Than Profits From Causing Bubble - (finance.yahoo.com) The mortgage settlements just keep coming. On Monday morning, Bank of America said it reached an agreement to resolve virtually all existing and future claims that it (and mortgage lender Countrywide, which BofA bought in 2008) misrepresented the quality of home loans it sold to Fannie Mae from 2000 through 2008. In the deal, Bank of America is paying $3.6 billion in cash and is also repurchasing about 30,000 mortgages for $6.75 billion. That money all goes to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise that taxpayers bailed out in the financial crisis. Bank of America is paying for the deal by tapping into reserves it had already set aside for mortgage-related losses, plus is kicking in an additional $2.5 billion. That Bank of America needed to draw on extra money has some bank watchers nervous that it hasn’t set aside enough money for other outstanding mortgage cases.






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