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STORIES:
Irish Bank Evicts Pensioner After $155 Billion Losses:
Mortgages - (www.bloomberg.com) Brendan Kelly’s televised eviction from his Dublin house hit close to
home for many of those watching in Ireland, where one in seven mortgages is in
trouble. Bailiffs dragged the shouting, 71-year-old pensioner away from his
five-bedroom residence in the affluent Killiney neighborhood last week after he
failed to keep up payments on a 2 million-euro mortgage ($2.6 million). It was
a rare moment in a country where lenders dealing with
about 20 billion euros of distressed loans have seized less than one percent of
the properties backing them. “I’m here on behalf of the people of Ireland,”
Kelly said April 18 before being led from the property. The country’s 10
largest banks, including four overseas- owned lenders, lost more than $155
billion on soured loans, mainly in commercial real-estate, in the past four
years, according to Bloomberg calculations. Now lenders and the government are
grappling with how to handle failing mortgages while avoiding widespread
evictions amid concern that banks may need more money than they raised
following a third round of stress tests last year.
Housing Declared Bottoming in U.S. - (www.bloomberg.com) For the 100th time in the past 5 years… ;-)
The U.S. housing market is showing more signs
of stabilization as price declines ease and home demand improves, spurring
several economists to call a bottom to the worst real estate collapse since the
1930s. “The crash is over,” Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s
Analytics Inc. in West Chester,Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview
yesterday. “Home sales -- both new and existing -- and housing starts are now
off the bottom.” Data released yesterday showing better-than-estimated new-
home sales and a slowdown
in price declines are bolstering optimism that the market is poised for a
sustainable recovery. Economists including Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ’s Chris Rupkey, Bank of America Corp.’s Michelle
Meyer and Mark Fleming of
CoreLogic Inc. are also predicting prices are close to a trough after a 35
percent slump from
a July 2006 peak, even as the threat of more foreclosures loom to boost supply.
Las
Vegas house prices hit new post-recession low - (www.vegasinc.com) Las Vegas-area
home prices fell from January to February, according to the closely-followed
Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. S&P on Tuesday said
Las Vegas was among nine big U.S. markets to see prices hit new post-recession
lows in February, as the larger U.S. market continued to struggle. Las Vegas
prices fell 0.4 percent on a monthly basis and were down 8.5 percent from
February 2011, S&P said. The declines compare to 0.8 percent on a monthly
basis for the 20 big U.S. markets tracked by S&P/Case-Shiller; and a 3.5
percent year-over-year decline for the 20 markets. With Las Vegas ranking No. 8 in the nation for
foreclosuresand unemployment elevated at 12.1 percent, the local
residential real estate market has remained stuborningly weak through the
recession.
More
People Seeking Help Cite Burden of Student Loans - (www.nytimes.com) More people seeking debt counseling are citing student loan debt as
their main reason for seeking help, an analysis by a large credit-counseling
agency shows. Last year, nearly 15 percent of clients seeking help through CredAbility, a nonprofit based in Atlanta,
cited student loans as their main debt burden —compared with no more than 2
percent during each of the prior two years, the agency said. The agency says
its network of counselors assisted roughly 200,000 people last year. “It was
really a startling change for us,” said Mark Cole, the agency’s chief operating
officer. Most of the clients citing student-loan debt were between ages 30 and
50, suggesting they might be starting to find the loans unmanageable as they
also handle other debts and obligations, like mortgages and family costs, as
well as a difficult job market. “It’s starting to catch up with them,” Mr. Cole
said.
Debt
Collector Is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals - (www.nytimes.com) Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery
are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside. This
and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of
medical debts, Accretive Health, were
revealed on Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general, raising concerns that
such practices have become common at hospitals across the country. The tactics,
like embedding debt collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding
that patients pay before receiving treatment, were outlined in hundreds of
company documents released by the attorney general. And they cast a spotlight
on the increasingly desperate strategies among hospitals to recoup payments as
their unpaid debts mount.
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