Nordwave Florida

The number of home foreclosures in process and delinquent mortgages rose during the second quarter, while home retention actions also increased, U.S. bank regulators said on Wednesday.

Foreclosures jumped 16 percent to 2.9 percent of serviced mortgages, while home retention actions such as loan modifications rose 21.7 percent, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision said in a report.

“The mortgage data reported for the second quarter of 2009 continued to reflect negative trends influenced by weakness in economic conditions, including high unemployment and declining home prices in weak housing markets,” the report said.

The report covers mortgages serviced by most of the industry’s largest mortgage servicers, whose loans make up about 64 percent of all mortgages outstanding in the United States.

The regulators said there was a lull in newly initiated foreclosures during the second quarter as mortgage servicers worked to implement the federal “Making Home Affordable” program.

The $50 billion program, launched in March, is designed to stabilize the housing market by helping up to 9 million Americans reduce their monthly mortgage payments to more affordable levels.

The OCC and OTS said the emphasis on the program contributed to a dramatic shift in the composition of home retention actions toward lowering payments. Previously, the vast majority of loan modifications either did not change or increased monthly payments.

The weak economy continued to drive up the number of delinquent mortgages. The number of mortgages delinquent 30 to 60 days jumped 10.9 percent during the second quarter to 3.2 percent of all mortgages covered by the report.

The number of mortgages that were more than 90 days delinquent increased 11.5 percent, rising to 5.3 percent of serviced mortgages.

Separately, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Wednesday that U.S. mortgage applications fell last week despite the lowest loan rates in four months, another sign that housing will likely recover slowly from its three-year plunge.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090930/bs_nm/us_financial_regulation_mortgages

Nearly one in three borrowers who applied for a mortgage last year was denied as lenders kept their standards tight as the mortgage crisis accelerated, the government reported Wednesday.

In its annual look at mortgage practices among lending institutions, Federal Reserve said the denial rate for all home loans was about 32 percent last year — about the same as in 2007, but up from 29 percent in 2006. The denial rates for blacks and Hispanics were more than twice as high as the rate for white borrowers.

The report highlights massive changes in the lending industry after the housing market bust. Overall loan applications were down by a third from a year earlier, and were half the level in 2006.

Loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration soared to 21 percent of all loans made last year from less than 5 percent in both 2005 and 2006.

For black borrowers, more than half of all loans were FHA-insured, more than triple a year earlier. For Hispanics, that number shot up to 45 percent, more than four times as high as in 2007. That was troubling news for consumer advocates.

“I’m hard-pressed to believe that many of those borrowers couldn’t have been served by the private sector,” said John Taylor, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a consumer group in Washington. “It implies that the industry has shut down in serving this population.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090930/ap_on_bi_ge/us_lending_discrimination

The U.S. and five other world powers go to the table with Iran on Thursday to demand a freeze of its nuclear activities, and a senior U.S. official said Washington may seek rare face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats.

Even as they prepared for Thursday’s talks, the U.S. and its allies were contemplating new and tighter sanctions on Tehran, in a clear signal of expectations that the negotiations may again end in failure.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested all six — the five permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany — were of one mind on the need for Iran to meet international concerns on its refusal to stop uranium enrichment and heed other U.N. Security Council demands.

“We support what the international community has said with a unified voice,” she told reporters at the United Nations.

Iran’s choice, she said, is to agree to measures that “would guarantee that what they’re doing is solely for peaceful purposes — and the alternative track, which is greater isolation and international pressure.”

With the stakes raised by Tehran’s revelation last week of a secret uranium enrichment site, a move by the U.S. to break precedent and meet directly with Iran would reflect the Obama administration’s determination to get results at Thursday’s gathering.

Briefing reporters in Geneva, a senior U.S. official raised the possibility of a meeting between the Americans, represented by William Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, and Iran’s chief negotiator Saeed Jalili. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the private nature of the talks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_iran_nuclear_talks;_ylt=Aov9Eub8XgPuMdNpHyftXzis0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTM3bTFuaGgxBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwOTMwL2V1X2lyYW5fbnVjbGVhcl90YWxrcwRjcG9zAzYEcG9zAzMEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl9oZWFkbGluZV9saXN0BHNsawN3ZXN0Z29lc3RvaXI-

The Fed upgraded its view of the economy Wednesday, declaring: “Economic activity has picked up following its severe downturn.”

But forget all the talk about recovery, V-shaped or otherwise. The economy is actually worse today vs. during the depths of the recession, according to Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of Crash Proof 2.0.

“Ben Bernanke is keeping his record of perfection intact of never getting anything right. Once again he’s gotten it wrong,” Schiff says. “If the Fed really thought the economy was sound, why does he have it on life support? If he pulls the plug, our sick economy is going to die.”

Although the Fed never said the economy is “sound”, Schiff is referring to the FOMC’s renewed pledge that “economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.”

Nothing that’s occurred in the past six months has changed Schiff’s view that America’s economy is headed for disaster. In fact, he’s even more convinced a true “currency crisis” awaits, and that China will soon stop enabling our reckless borrowing, the basis our “phony” economy. The coming collapse of the dollar and bursting of the Treasury bubble will have devastating consequences for ordinary Americans, and any investors based in dollars, he says.

The economy today is “worse [because] we are much more deeply indebted than in March,” Schiff declares. “We’ve dug ourselves a deeper hole.”

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/342659/Bernanke-Is-Wrong!-The-Economy-Is-Getting-Worse-Not-Better-Schiff-Says?tickers=^DJI,^GSPC,SPY,DIA,TBT,UDN,GLD

General Motors Co. will shut down Saturn now that a deal with former race car driver and auto dealer magnate Roger Penske has collapsed, marking the end of a brand that was supposed to revolutionize the way small cars were built and sold in America.

The deal with Penske was supposed to be finalized Wednesday. But the unexpected end came when his company, Penske Automotive Group Inc., was unable to find a manufacturer to supply vehicles for the brand’s dealerships. GM had agreed to keep building Saturn models like the Aura, Outlook and Vue through at least 2011, but after that, Saturn would have to come up with its own products.

Penske’s tentative deal buy Saturn was announced in early June.

“This is very disappointing news and comes after months of hard work by hundreds of dedicated employees and Saturn retailers who tried to make the new Saturn a reality,” GM CEO Fritz Henderson said. He said Saturn and its dealership network will be phased out.

Although the sales price was never disclosed, Penske was to get Saturn’s roughly 350 dealerships and promised to retain 13,000 employees.

Penske spokesman Anthony Pordon said the company had reached a tentative deal with another automaker to make cars for Saturn, but that company’s board of directors rejected the agreement. He would not identify the other automaker.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/GM-to-shut-down-Saturn-after-apf-433359878.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=

OKLAHOMA CITY – The FBI says it did not edit videotapes of the aftermath of the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building before turning them over to an attorney who is conducting an unofficial inquiry into the bombing.

The FBI turned over more than two dozen tapes taken from security cameras on buildings and other locations around the federal building to Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, who obtained them through the federal Freedom of Information Act. Trentadue said the tapes are blank at various times in the minutes before the blast.

“They have been edited,” Trentadue said Wednesday.

The soundless recordings show people rushing from nearby buildings immediately after a 4,000 pound fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring hundreds more.

Some show people fleeing through corridors cluttered with debris. None shows the actual explosion that ripped through the federal building.

Trentadue said the absence of footage before the blast indicates something was on the tapes that the FBI did not want to make public.

“They don’t do anything by accident,” he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090930/ap_on_re_us/us_bombing_video

Liberal allies of President Barack Obama aren’t just getting mad at conservative attacks on his agenda. They are getting even in a way calculated to hit conservatives where it counts: their pockets.

Former GOP House leader Dick Armey, former New York lt. gov. and conservative activist Betsy McCaughey and even Fox News’s Glenn Beck have all seen their financial livelihoods threatened by political activists — who in several cases managed to make good on the threats.

The latest prominent figure in liberal cross hairs is U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue. Environmental activists, citing alleged conflicts of interest, have begun a campaign to pressure him to resign from the board of Union Pacific Railroad or from his longtime post as head of the nation’s top business lobby.

“We’re losing our self-government with these Chicago-style arm-twisting tactics,” complained McCaughey, who resigned from the board of Cantel Medical Group after the firm was connected — unfairly, according to it and McCaughey — to her claims that Obama’s health care reform would lead to death panels and other calamities. “Clearly, it’s an effort to silence critics,” she added.

McCaughey and other Obama critics are falling victim to tactics honed as much by the right as by the left: Bloggers research the opposition and post material that is picked up by allies on cable talk shows, who push it into the broader media.

But the new twist is that private firms, some with little connection to the policy debate and little warning, are being hauled into the public courtyard because of their association with an advocate-employee.

Several progressive groups are employing versions of the tactic, not as part of a coordinated effort but often enough to seem more than coincidence.

IRVING TOWNSHIP, Mich. – Each day before the school bus comes to pick up the neighborhood’s children, Lisa Snyder did a favor for three of her fellow moms, welcoming their children into her home for about an hour before they left for school.

Regulators who oversee child care, however, don’t see it as charity. Days after the start of the new school year, Snyder received a letter from the Michigan Department of Human Services warning her that if she continued, she’d be violating a law aimed at the operators of unlicensed day care centers.

“I was freaked out. I was blown away,” she said. “I got on the phone immediately, called my husband, then I called all the girls” — that is, the mothers whose kids she watches — “every one of them.”

Snyder’s predicament has led to a debate in Michigan about whether a law that says no one may care for unrelated children in their home for more than four weeks each calendar year unless they are licensed day-care providers needs to be changed. It also has irked parents who say they depend on such friendly offers to help them balance work and family.

On Tuesday, agency Director Ismael Ahmed said good neighbors should be allowed to help each other ensure their children are safe. Gov. Jennifer Granholm instructed Ahmed to work with the state Legislature to change the law, he said.

“Being a good neighbor means helping your neighbors who are in need,” Ahmed said in a written statement. “This could be as simple as providing a cup of sugar, monitoring their house while they’re on vacation or making sure their children are safe while they wait for the school bus.”

Snyder learned that the agency was responding to a neighbor’s complaint.

Granholm spokeswoman Liz Boyd said the agency was following standard procedure in its response. “But we feel this (law) really gets in the way of common sense,” Boyd said.

“We want to protect kids, but the law needs to be reasonable,” she said. “When the governor learned of this, she acted quickly and called the director personally to ask him to intervene.”

State Rep. Brian Calley, R-Portland, said he was working to draft legislation that would exempt situations like Snyder’s from coverage under Michigan’s current day care regulations.

The bill will make it clear that people who aren’t in business as day care providers don’t need to be licensed, Calley said.

“These are just kids that wait for the bus every morning,” he said. “This is not a day care.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090929/ap_on_re_us/us_baby_sitter_backlash_mich