WASHINGTON (AP) – Oct. 23, 2008 – Lawmakers have called key players from the past and present to congressional hearings in an effort to find out what caused the biggest U.S. financial crisis since the 1930s and determine how the government plans to get the country out of the mess.
Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the [...]
U.S. fixed-rate mortgages declined in the latest week, according to Freddie Mac’s survey released Thursday. The national average interest rate on the benchmark 30-year, fixed-rate loan averaged 6.04% in the week ending Thursday, down from last week’s 6.46% and the year-ago 6.33%. The 15-year fixed-rate loan averaged 5.72%, down from the week-ago 6.14% and the [...]
Pulte Homes Inc., the No. 4 U.S. home builder, posted a larger-than-expected quarterly loss on Wednesday, saying the home building environment significantly worsened and it would not provide a financial forecast.
Pulte reported that its third-quarter net loss narrowed to $280.4 million, or $1.11 per share, but that was wider than the 58 cent per share [...]
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on Tuesday that the government has already done a lot to address the foreclosure problem that continues to plague the U.S. housing industry and the economy, but more must be done.
“There’s been very signifcant progress,” Paulson said in answer to a question about Treasury’s approach to the housing foreclosure [...]
WASHINGTON – Oct. 17, 2008 – Rates on 30-year mortgages jumped to the highest level in eight weeks, squeezing some potential homebuyers out of the market, and reflecting how nervous lenders remain despite the massive global intervention in the credit markets.
Mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday that 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages averaged 6.46 percent this week, [...]
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
New York’s Sub-Treasury Building (now Federal Hall
National Memorial), in the early 1930s.
July 9, 1932 was a day Wall Street would never wish to relive. The Dow Jones
Industrial Average closed at 41.63, down 91% from its level exactly three years
earlier. Total trading volume that day was a meager 235,000 shares. “Brother,
Can You Spare a [...]
Wells Fargo reported $1.64 billion in profit for the three months ending Sept. 30, 25 percent less than it earned a year ago.
The bank took a hit from investments in failing financial institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman Brothers, but it managed to increase its capital reserves for potential loan losses as [...]
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Wednesday kept the door open to further interest rate cuts, saying policymakers will keeping using “all the tools at our disposal” to restore stability in financial markets.
Bernanke: Quick Rebound Not in the Cards
3:39
Chairman Ben Bernanke talks about the credit markets and how it will take quite some time [...]
U.S. reverse mortgage loan creation rose 4.2 percent to a record level in fiscal 2008 and growth is expected to accelerate next year due to an impending increase in the federally insured loan limit, a trade group said on Tuesday.
Growth slowed this year as home prices sank, eroding home equity.
In a reverse mortgage, home owners [...]
Rates on 30-year mortgages fell below 6 percent this week, the first decline in three weeks.
Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, reported that 30-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 5.94 percent this week, down from 6.10 percent last week.
Mortgage rates have been on a roller coaster, hitting a high for the year of 6.63 percent in late July [...]