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No new job. No new house. No recovery. - (money.cnn.com) Alean Elston just cannot find a job. The 26-year-old from New Jersey has tried nearly everything. She has mailed resumes, asked friends and family for leads and dropped in on retail outlets in hopes of finding work. Applying for job after job with no luck is nothing new for the 2009 business administration graduate. And as a consequence, she lives at home with her parents. Fact is, she cannot afford a place of her own. Elston is far from alone. Younger workers were disproportionately affected by the recession. As a group, they had a very tough time finding work, and many highly educated graduates were forced to take menial jobs or retreat to the safety of academia.
More realty agents report that their home sales are being canceled or postponed - (www.washingtonpost.com) What’s behind the unusually high rate of contract cancellations and settlement delays in the real estate market? With signs of recovery emerging in many parts of the country, shouldn’t deals be zipping along with minimal complications? Apparently not. Nearly one-third of realty agents in a new national survey reported experiencing contract cancellations — purchases crumbling before going to closing — in February. That’s up dramatically from a similar poll 12 months earlier, when just 9 percent of agents reported cancellations. Another 18 percent reported delays in scheduled closings in the latest study, which involved approximately 3,0 00 agents surveyed by the National Association of Realtors. The high reported cancellation rate (31 percent) doesn’t mean that nearly one of every three of all signed contracts is falling apart, according to the association, but rather that more than triple the number of agents and their clients are running into deal-endangering problems compared with 2011. If you are a potential buyer or seller in an otherwise improving marketplace, you need to be aware of the issues that are hampering sales, and be prepared in advance to deal with some of the most prominent.
Europe Needs the Mother of all Firewalls - (www.washingtonpost.com) The 17 countries that use the euro need to build a €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) firewall to help the struggling currency union return to growth, the head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Tuesday. Angel Gurria, the secretary-general of the Paris-based international development body, said existing plans for a €500 billion ($664 billion) European rescue fund were not enough to restore market confidence in the eurozone. “The mother of all firewalls should be in place,” Gurria told a news conference in Brussels, where he was flanked by Olli Rehn, the EU’s economic affairs commissioner, who has also been pushing for a larger bailout fund. A permanent rescue fund of at least €1 trillion would give governments the breathing space to focus on kickstarting growth and restoring the competitiveness of their economies, Gurria said, pointing to a raft of economic reforms that individual countries should enact.
From ground to roof, house raised in 3 days - (www.ocregister.com) Wheels churning, a Gradall crane hoists a prefabricated wall into the air and positions it in place at the corner of a concrete slab. Framers Sergio Torres and Chris Wagstaff level the wall, secure it with nail guns, then move on to the next panel. Numbers scrawled across the slab show the position for each corresponding wall panel, stacked to the side of what will soon be a 2,016-square-foot house on the corner of a residential Costa Mesa street. Each comes with windows, plumbing and wiring in place, waiting to be unfurled and connected. The workers follow a choreographed plan, erecting a new wall every seven minutes. Each panel fits over pipes protruding from the concrete, snapping into place like jigsaw puzzle pieces. In just over 1½ hours, they have set up nearly half the walls and positioned the first roof section into place. "It's like Lego kits," said a beaming Eric VanDerHeyden, executive vice president for the builder, RSI Development of Newport Beach. "What's cool about this is, at the end of the day, the whole first floor will be framed out, including the interior walls. "What we do in a day would normally take seven to 10 days."
SEC Weighs Sanctions for Lawyers Who Advise on Fraudulent Deals - (www.bloomberg.com) U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators are considering extending the reach of enforcement actions in cases involving complex financial transactions to lawyers who provided the legal advice on fraudulent deals, an agency official said. “I’ve seen some factual situations where advice that was given didn’t look like it was done in good faith,” Kenneth Lench, head of the structured products unit in the SEC’s enforcement division, said today at a law event in New York. “Something we need to seriously consider in appropriate cases are charges against lawyers.” The SEC typically sanctions individuals who play an active role in making false statements or material omissions to investors, not the lawyers who advise them. Often, in matters involving a company and its employees, the individuals claim the lawyers signed off on the conduct in question, Lench said.
