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STORIES:
'Zombie
titles' haunt victims of house foreclosure - (www.nbcnews.com) Joseph Keller doesn't expect he'll live to see the end of 2013. He
blames the house at 190 Avondale Avenue. Five years ago, Keller, 10 months
behind on his mortgage payments, received notice of a foreclosure judgment from
JP Morgan Chase. In a few weeks, the bank said, his three-story house with gray
vinyl siding in Columbus, Ohio, would be put up for auction at a sheriff's
sale. The 58-year-old former social worker and his wife, Jennifer, packed up
their home of 13 years and moved in with their daughter. Joseph thought he
would never have anything to do with the house again. And for about a year, he
didn't. Then it started to stalk him. First, in 2010, the county sued Keller
because the house, already picked clean by scavengers, was in a shambles, its
hanging gutters and collapsed garage in violation of local housing code. Then
the tax collector started sending Keller notices about mounting back taxes,
sewer fees and bills for weed and waste removal. And last year, Chase's debt
collector began pressing Keller to pay his mortgage, which had swollen, with
penalties and fees, from $62,100.27 to $84,194.69.
AIG
sues NY Fed over right to sue Bank of America, others - (www.reuters.com) American International Group Inc has filed a lawsuit against a vehicle
created by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to help bail out the insurer,
in a bid to preserve its right to sue Bank of America Corp and other issuers of
mortgage debt that went sour. The complaint, filed in the New York State
Supreme Court in Manhattan, seeks a declaration that AIG has not transferred
billions of dollars of "litigation claims" to Maiden Lane II, including
many related to the insurer's $10 billion lawsuit against Bank of America. Maiden
Lane II was created in December 2008 to buy residential mortgage-backed
securities (RMBS) from AIG and ease liquidity strains.
Obama refuses to negotiate debt ceiling raise - (www.reuters.com) The showdown over the nation's debt ceiling could force the government
to consider drastic steps to manage its limited cash, including delaying
trillions of dollars of payments to employees, Social Security recipients, contractors
and others. The Obama administration has said it
has no backup plan to pay the government's bills if Congress refuses to raise
the $16.4 trillion federal borrowing limit. The White House said Saturday in a
statement that "there are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress
can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default." The Treasury could be forced to revisit proposals it
considered during the 2011 borrowing-limit crisis, most of which it said were
unworkable. Those included selling assets such as gold or mortgage-backed
securities to raise funds, cutting all spending by 40% or prioritizing some
payments over others—for example, paying Social Security recipients before
military contractors.
Ugly Choices Loom Over Debt Clash - (online.wsj.com) President Barack Obama on Monday rejected any negotiation with
Republicans over the most pressing U.S. fiscal issue, refusing to trade cuts in
government spending in exchange for raising the borrowing limit. "If the
goal is to make sure that we are being responsible about our debt and our deficit - if
that's the conversation we're having, I'm happy to have that
conversation," Obama said. "What I will not do is to have that
negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people," he told a news
conference. Republican leaders quickly reiterated their demand that increasing
the debt limit must be accompanied by spending cuts. With an agreement to
prevent the so-called fiscal cliff of sharp spending cuts and tax increases
barely two weeks old, Obama faces another fiscal showdown with congressional
Republicans.
Breaking
News: OMFIF Report Advocates the Official Re-monetization of Gold - (www.financialsense.com) In a report published today, the Official Monetary and Financial
Institutions Forum (OMFIF), a global organization of central banks and
sovereign wealth funds, recommends that gold be re-monetized
for use as international money, alongside major currencies. OMFIF gives a number of reasons for this but they
boil down it to gold's historical role in establishing and
maintaining confidence and stability in international monetary relations. Such
confidence and stability have dramatically declined as a result of the global
financial crisis that began in 2008, to the detriment of the global economy.
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