The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage fell back down to 3.94 percent, the record low set earlier in the fall.
Low rates offer a historic opportunity for those who can afford to buy or refinance. Still, few people are able to take advantage of the record-low rates or have already done so.
The rate on the 30-year home loan fell from 3.99 percent the previous week, Freddie Mac said Thursday. The 3.94 percent average is the lowest on records dating to the 1950s.
The average on the 15-year fixed mortgage fell to 3.21 percent from 3.27 percent. That’s also a record.
Rates have been below 5 percent for all but two weeks this year. Even so, this year could end up as the worst for home sales in 14 years.
Low mortgage rates have failed to energize sales. Sales of previously occupied homes are just slightly ahead of last year’s dismal sales figures _ and those were the worst in 13 years. New-home sales appear headed for their worst year on records dating back half a century.
Mortgage applications have risen slightly in recent weeks but are up from extremely low levels, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
High unemployment and scant wage gains have made it harder for many people to qualify for loans. Many Americans don’t want to sink money into a home that could lose value over the next three to four years.
The average on the 30-year fixed loan has been below 5 percent for all but two weeks in the past year instant payday loans. And many homeowners who have the necessary credit and home equity to refinance already have.
To calculate average the rates, Freddie Mac surveys lenders across the country Monday through Wednesday of each week.
Some lenders have reported an increase in applications through the Obama administration’s refinancing program. That program was broadened in October to allow up to 1 million more homeowners lower their mortgage payments. But the MBA said such government-assisted loans account for just a small portion of refinancings.
The average rates don’t include extra fees, known as points, which most borrowers must pay to get the lowest rates. One point equals 1 percent of the loan amount.
The average fee for the 30-year loan rose to 0.8 from 0.7; the average on the 15-year fixed mortgage was unchanged at 0.8.
For the five-year adjustable loan, the average rate fell to 2.86 percent from 2.93 percent. The average on the one-year adjustable loan ticked up to 2.81 percent from 2.8 percent.
The average fee on the five-year loan rose from 0.5 to 0.6. And the fee on the one-year adjustable loan was unchanged at 0.6.
The majority owner of the Maple Leafs says it rejected
The American public has gotten past its animosity toward General Motors for taking a government bailout in 2009, the company’s top executive said Thursday.
Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson said a poll taken last summer for GM by Washington public opinion firm Peter Hart Research Associates shows that more than 70 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of the company. When the same poll was taken in July of 2009, more than 70 percent had a negative opinion, Akerson said.
“I think America loves a competitor. I think General Motors, Chevrolet in particular, is part of Americana,” Akerson said during an appearance at the Detroit Economic Club.
In 2009, GM, saddled with high debt and expensive labor costs, needed $49.5 billion in government loans to survive a trip through bankruptcy court.
The U.S. government got a stake in the restructured company, part of which was sold in an initial public stock offering about one year ago on Nov. 18, 2010. The government’s remaining 500 million shares would have to sell for around $53 per share for the U.S. to break even. Such a sale probably won’t come anytime soon. GM shares are trading around one-third less than the $33 IPO price.
The summer before the IPO, then-GM Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre said government ownership was hurting the company’s sales. Whitacre said GM didn’t want to be known as “Government Motors.”
But Akerson said on Thursday that the new GM is now making money and has passed that stage.
“I do think that we’ve kind of gotten over that,” he said.
GM made a net profit of just over $7.1 billion in the first nine months of the year.
Akerson said the government doesn’t get involved in running GM. But he’s concerned about government pay limits for companies that took bailout money. GM, he said, won’t be able to give bonuses to its 25 highest-paid executives _ even though it could make $8 billion or $9 billion this year.
“We’ve got some very, very good people that could do well at other companies who are doing this one for the home team,” he said.
Akerson pinned the drop in GM’s stock price on the broader economy, not automaker’s performance. Shares of General Motors Co. were down 96 cents, or 4.2 percent, to $21.69 in afternoon trading Thursday. They’re down about 41 percent for the year, slightly worse than the 40 percent drop in shares of Ford Motor Co.
Akerson also said GM will take actions to right its money-losing European operations. He referred to French competitor Peugeot Citroen SA’s plan cut 6,000 jobs because of flat demand in Europe, although he stopped short of saying there would be plant closures or layoffs at GM.
He said the government debt crisis in Europe could have a larger impact on the U.S. than the 2008 financial meltdown and recession, because Europe is “a hugely and important cultural and economic center of gravity for the world.”
Last week GM said its third-quarter net income fell 15 percent from a year earlier to $1.7 billion, partly because of a pretax loss of $292 million in Europe. The loss forced GM to back off an earlier forecast of breaking even in Europe this year.
“Clearly you can’t have a unit as important as Opel is to General Motors chronically unprofitable,” he said. “It’s not sustainable and it’s not good for the company.”
Kellwood’s chief has indeed been lured away by J.C. Penney.
Michael Kramer, 47, who has been the head of the Town and Country-based apparel company since 2008, will start as chief operating officer of J.C. Penney on December 5. His potential departure had been reported last week.
Kramer said today that the major draw of the new job was Ron Johnson, J.C. Penney’s new chief executive and his former boss at Apple’s retail division, and his vision to revamp the company.
“If this opportunity with Ron wouldn’t have come up, I would still be here moving Kellwood forward,” he said.”If this team can turn J.C. Penney around and restore it back to being America’s favorite store, that will be a story.”
His successor at Kellwood has not yet been determined. But there are a couple of internal candidates being considered for the job, he said.
“I accomplished what I came here to do at Kellwood,” he said, adding that the company is now the most profitable on a percentage basis than it has been in 15 years. Kellwood is a private company and so does not publicly report its results.
Since he arrived at Kellwood, Kramer has helped restructure the company and steered it on a path to acquire a number of designer brands such as Rebecca Taylor, Scotch & Soda, and Adam. Kellwood had previously been known mostly for its moderately-priced brands like Sag Harbor and private-label clothes for outlets like Walmart.
“Mike will help ensure that J.C. Penney is a strong partner to our suppliers, which will be essential to our success as we set out to re-imagine the department store experience,” Johnson said in a statement.
Johnson has also recruited other former Apple colleagues to be part of his team at J.C. Penney. Daniel Walker, a former Apple executive, will be chief talent officer at J.C. Penney. And he has lured Michael Francis, who had been chief marketing officer at Target, to be J.C. Penney’s president.
But even though Kramer is taking the new job, he may stick around St. Louis. His wife and children like it in St. Louis, he said, so he may commute to Texas (where J.C. Penney is based) during the week and come back to St. Louis on the weekends.
Greece’s finance minister is breaking ranks with Prime Minister George Papandreou over his call to hold a referendum on a hard-fought European debt deal to rescue the country’s economy.
Evangelos Venizelos issued a written statement Thursday on returning from an emergency meeting in Cannes, France, where he accompanied Prime Minister George Papandreou for meetings with top European officials.
After the meeting, the French and Germany leaders said a Greek vote would decide whether the country stays in the eurozone, and vowed Athens would not get critical bailout funds until after the vote free credit score online.
Venizelos said Greece’s position within the euro was a “historic conquest” of the country that “cannot be put in doubt” and “cannot depend on a referendum.”
Bank of America is nixing its plans to charge a $5 debit card fee.
The bank says in a statement that the decision to scrap the plan came after listening to customer feedback in recent weeks.
The news comes after other major banks, including Chase and Wells Fargo, said last week that they were canceling tests of similar fees.
“Our customers’ voices are most important to us. As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so,” David Darnell, co-chief operating officer, said in a release.
The about-face by the banking industry comes amid growing public anger over fees. A movement to get customers to switch to credit unions had marked this Saturday as “Bank Transfer Day.”
BlackBerry services buzzed back to life across the world Thursday, after a three-day outage that interrupted email messages and Internet services for millions of customers.
Research In Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that makes the phones, posted a statement that says services are improving.
Many BlackBerry users have been unable to send and receive emails and messages in an outage that started Monday in Europe. Web browsers haven’t been working either. On Thursday morning, BlackBerry users on Twitter and online forums were reporting that their phones were buzzing with incoming messages again.
RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologized for the outage in a video posted to the company’s site Thursday morning.
“It’s too soon to say that this issue is fully resolved,” Lazaridis said. “I’d like to give you an estimated time of full recovery around the world, but I cannot do this with certainty at this time.”
A crucial link in BlackBerry’s European network failed Monday, and a backup also failed. Although the underlying issues were quickly repaired, the system had built up a backlog of emails and messages that needed to be wound down. Meanwhile, messages destined for Europe were piling up at BlackBerry data centers in the rest of world. By Wednesday, the outage had spread to the U.S. and Canada, slowing service to a crawl there.
RIM shares were down 35 cents, or 1.5 percent, at $23.53 in premarket trading in New York. Investors have taken the outage in stride, figuring that it’s only one of many problems RIM is facing. The shares are up slightly since the outage began.
Wednesday was a good day for Fawad Khan.
He got up shortly before 3 a.m. and headed to a bank of computers in his Mississauga basement. While his family slept, he started trading.
One screen charted the euro in real time. It looked like the seismic readout for an earthquake. Trading in this kind of market, with one
Amazon.com Inc., the world
Hundreds of Longshore workers overpowered security guards in an aggressive raid on a Washington state grain terminal, officials said Thursday, and the action drew quick rebuke from a federal judge that has tried to curb the union’s escalating tactics in an ongoing labor dispute.
Workers have been battling for the right to work at the new terminal in Longview. But U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton issued a preliminary injunction to restrict union activity, saying there was no defense for the aggressive tactics used in recent days.
Protesters twice blocked the pathway of a train carrying grain to the terminal at the Port of Longview on Wednesday, and early Thursday morning hundreds of them stormed the facility, overwhelmed guards, dumped grain and broke windows, police said.
The dispute halted work at four other Washington ports, including Seattle, on Thursday as hundreds of longshoremen refused to show up or walked off the job.
Leighton said he felt like a paper tiger because the International Longshore and Warehouse Union clearly ignored a temporary restraining order he issued last week with similar limits. He scheduled a hearing for next Thursday to determine whether the union should be held in civil contempt.
“The regard for the law is absent here,” the judge said. “Somebody is going to be hurt seriously.”
Six guards were trapped for a couple of hours after at least 500 Longshoremen broke down gates about 4:30 a.m. and smashed windows in the guard shack, Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha said. He initially referred to the guards as “hostages,” but later retracted that after the guards clarified no one had threatened them.
“The guards absolutely could not get out,” Duscha said. “They feared for their lives because of the size of the crowd and the hostility of the crowd.”
No one was hurt, and nobody has been arrested _ although Duscha said that could change if police are able to use surveillance video or other means to identify the protesters.
Most of the protesters returned to their union hall after cutting train brake lines and spilling grain from a car at the EGT terminal, Duscha said. They also pushed a private security vehicle into a ditch.
The union believes it has the right to work at the facility, but the company has hired a contractor that’s staffing a workforce of laborers from another union, the Portland-based Operating Engineers Local 701 cheap pay day loans. Representatives of the engineers union did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
In Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and Anacortes, hundreds of Longshore workers failed to show up or walked off the job Thursday in apparent solidarity with the Longview activists, halting work at those ports. Union leaders said they had not called for any such actions.
“It appears the members have taken action on their own,” said ILWU spokesman Craig Merrilees from union headquarters in San Francisco.
He said some workers might have been motivated by a photograph of ILWU President Bob McElrath in police custody in Longview on Wednesday.
McElrath was not arrested, but an Associated Press photo showed him being grabbed by several police officers before union activists intervened and grabbed him back.
Police arrested 19 protesters as they blocked railroad tracks on Wednesday night, allowing the train to finally arrive at the terminal.
The protesters in Longview have portrayed themselves as being on the front line in the struggle for jobs and benefits among American workers in an economic downturn. But while union strife has flared up around the country _ most notably in Wisconsin _ the aggressive tactics seen in Longview have been a rarity in recent labor disputes.
Labor activists insist that after receiving tax breaks and promising to create well-paying jobs at the new $200 million terminal, EGT initially tried to staff the terminal with nonunion workers. Following a series of protests by the Longshore workers this year, the company announced it would hire a contractor staffed by workers from a different union.
“Today, the ILWU took its criminal activity against EGT to an appalling level, including engaging in assault and significant property destruction,” the company’s chief executive, Larry Clarke, said in a written statement. “This type of violent attack at the export terminal has been condemned by a federal court, and we fully support prosecution of this criminal behavior to the fullest extent under the law.”
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