Fixed mortgage rates fell once again to a record low, offering a great opportunity for those who can afford to buy or refinance homes. But few are able to take advantage of the historic rates.
Freddie Mac said Thursday the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage fell to 3.89 percent. That’s below the previous record of 3.91 percent reached three weeks ago.
Records for mortgage rates date back to the 1950s.
The average on the 15-year fixed mortgage ticked down to 3.16 percent. That’s down from a record 3.21 percent three weeks ago.
Mortgage rates are lower because they track the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which fell below 2 percent. They could fall even lower this year if the Fed launches another round of bond purchases, as some economists expect.
Average fixed mortgage rates hovered around 4 percent at the end of 2011. Yet many Americans either can’t take advantage of the rates or have already done so.
High unemployment and scant wage gains have made it harder for many people to qualify for loans. Many don’t want to sink money into a home that they fear could lose value over the next few years.
Mortgage applications have fallen slightly on a seasonally adjusted basis over the past four weeks, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, said that until hiring picks up and unemployment drops significantly, the impact of lower mortgage rates will remain muted.
Previously occupied homes are selling just slightly ahead of 2010’s dismal pace. New-home sales in 2011 will likely be the worst year on records going back half a century.
Builders hope that the low rates could boost sales next year. Low mortgage rates were cited as a key reason the National Association of Home Builders survey of builder sentiment rose in December to its highest level in more than a year.
But so far, they have had little impact on the depressed housing market.
To calculate the average rates, Freddie Mac surveys lenders across the country Monday through Wednesday of each week. 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 fell to 0.7 from 0.8; the average on the 15-year fixed mortgage was unchanged at 0.8.
For the five-year adjustable loan, the average rate declined to 2.82 percent from 2.86 percent. The average on the one-year adjustable loan fell to 2.76 percent from 2.80 percent.
The average fee on the five-year adjustable loan rose was unchanged at 0.7; the average on the one-year adjustable-rate loan was unchanged at 0.6.
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Stocks indexes were little changed Wednesday following a big gain the day before. Gains by retailers offset a decline in banking and financial stocks. Most other sectors were flat.
The Dow Jones industrial average inched up 3 points to 12,400 as of 12:30 p.m. Trading was relatively subdued following a surge of nearly 180 points the day before, which brought the Dow to its highest level since July. The Dow started the day lower, losing as many as 60 points in mid-morning trading, then went back to breakeven shortly after noon.
The Standard & Poors 500 index was down less than a point at 1,276, while the Nasdaq fell 2 points to 2,646.
Phone equipment maker Acme Packet Inc. plunged almost 20 percent after saying its quarterly profit and revenue would be well below analyst expectations.
Yahoo Inc. fell 2 percent after it named Scott Thompson, president of eBay Inc.’s PayPal division, as its new CEO. Yahoo has been without a permanent CEO since firing Carol Bartz in September. The company’s board lost patience with her attempts to turn around the struggling Internet company during her 2 1/2 years on the job.
European markets fell after the euro weakened to $1.29 versus the dollar from $1.30 the day before. Another increase in Italy’s long-term borrowing rates renewed worries about Europe’s flailing efforts to restore investors’ confidence in the region’s governments.
Germany’s DAX fell 0.8 percent, while the CAC-40 in France fell 1.5 percent. The FTSE 100 index of leading British stocks was down 0 on line pay day loans.6 percent.
Retailers were among the few industries to rise after a trade group for malls said sales rose 5.3 percent in the last week of December because of strong after-Christmas shopping. Lowe’s Cos. rose 1.5 percent and Ross Stores Inc. rose 2.3 percent. However, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. fell 1.3 percent, making it the biggest decliner among the Dow’s 30 stocks. Analysts have been concerned that some retailers boosted holiday sales with deep discounts that will hurt profits.
Ford Motor Co. rose 2.4 percent after the auto maker said last year’s sales jumped 11 percent because of strong demand for trucks and SUVs. December sales rose 10 percent. Chrysler, owned by Italy’s Fiat, said sales rose 26 percent for the year and 37 percent in January. General Motors Co. said U.S. sales rose 13 percent last year. Analysts have been expecting December to be a strong sales month for the U.S. auto business as confidence in the economy unlocks pent-up demand.
Fallen photography pioneer Eastman Kodak Co. lost 2 cents to 64 cents after the company said its stock could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange if it doesn’t rise above $1 in the next six months.
U.S. stocks opened the year with a bang on Tuesday. The Dow and S&P 500 each rose 1.5 percent after a measure of U.S. manufacturing expanded at the fastest rate in six months.
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Bakers Footwear Group sold its Wild Pair trademark to Steven Madden Ltd. for $4 million and will continue to offer the brand of footwear in its stores through a licensing agreement.
St. Louis-based Bakers signed the non-exclusive, royalty free license deal Wednesday. Bakers said it will use the proceeds from the deal to reduce its debt.
“The structure of this transaction allows for Bakers to benefit from the future expansion of Wild Pair,” Bakers’ CEO and Chairman Peter Edison said in a statement. Bakers has 233 stores in the U.S.
New York-based Madden, which operates 84 retail stores worldwide, owns 19.9 percent of Bakers’ common stock.
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.”
Shares in Spain’s Repsol energy company are soaring after the company announced it has made a major new shale oil find in Argentina that boosts by a third its total amount of recoverable oil.
Repsol YPF SA’s shares were up 5.4 percent in midday trading Tuesday in Madrid.
The company said the discovery includes 927 million barrels of recoverable resources, 741 million of which is oil.
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez in May announced a huge shale oil deposit in Neuquen province, but less than 10 percent of it had been explored at the time.
Repsol owns the rights to 12,000 square kilometers (4,633 sq. miles) of the 30,000 square kilometer (11,583 sq. mile) basin. Like other oil companies, it has only recently begun to search them.
With financial help from St. Clair County, a Michigan company will build a perishable-goods warehouse at MidAmerica St. Louis Airport in Mascoutah. The facility will handle fresh fruit and vegetables bound for international markets.
The deal announced Thursday includes $2.15 million from the county in upfront money and for refrigeration equipment for the warehouse, which will cost up to $5.7 million.
North Bay Produce Inc. of Traverse City, Mich., will build the 36,448-square-foot warehouse, which will be completed by the middle of next year, officials said.
In exchange for the county’s help, the airport will own the warehouse after 15 years, officials said.
North Bay specializes in year-round production and marketing of fresh fruit and vegetables for customers in North America, Latin America and Europe Business Card Holders. County officials said the warehouse will help North Bay open a shipping route to Asia.
“A large portion of the product they will handle at Mid-America flies, and we look forward to hosting their worldwide air activity,” said County Board Chairman Mark Kern. “This is the anchor tenant for our international trade route linking Latin America with Asia.”
North Bay’s president, Mark Girardin, said the company searched for three years to find a distribution center in the Midwest.
The refrigeration equipment the county is contributing to the project came from a MidAmerica warehouse the Boeing Co. began using last year for assembly operations.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized Sun Security Bank in Ellington, Mo., after the troubled bank was shut down by Missouri bank regulators.
Sun Security has 27 branches, including two in St. Charles County. The bank held $355.9 million in assets and $290.4 million in deposits.
In a deal with the FDIC, Great Southern Bank of Springfield, Mo., has agreed to assume all the deposits of Sun Security.
The federal regulator said all Sun Security branches will open on Saturday, and after Columbus Day, the offices will become Great Southern branches. Columbus Day is a bank holiday.
Customers with questions about the seizure can call the FDIC at 1-866-806-6128 Payday Loan for Bad Credit.
The failure of Sun Security Bank is expected to cost the FDIC $118.3 million.
Sun Security, which has two branches in St. Charles County, was formerly led by Shaun Hayes as chief executive.
The FDIC’s seizure Friday of Sun Security and Wyoming, Minn.-based Riverbank increases to 76 the number of U.S. bank failures this year.
Damage from Irene appears to be less than feared, a bit of reassuring news for a fragile economy.
Insured damage from Irene will range between $2 billion and $3 billion, and the total losses will likely be about $7 billion, according to preliminary estimates by Kinetic Analysis Corp. a consulting firm. Both figures are less than had been feared and will likely have little impact on the nation’s $14 trillion economy.
“Irene left several places with black eyes, but it doesn’t seem to have delivered an economic knockout,” said Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics.
The estimates from Kinetic Analysis, based in Silver Spring, Md., suggest that Irene will have caused far less insured damage than the $6 billion the industry paid out after Hurricane Isabel struck the East Coast in 2003.
The long-term costs of Irene will grow as storm-ravaged areas deal with lost business, insurance claims, dislocated workers and transportation disruptions _ costs that will take months to fully calculate.
Still, rebuilding and repairing the damage from the storm will likely be enough to boost economic output in the final three months of this year, economists say.
For now, power outages and flooding will close some businesses, costing workers lost pay and likely boosting temporary layoffs. Transportation and shipping may also be disrupted.
Chuck Watson, Kinetic’s director of research and development, noted that the impact on businesses was limited, in part, because the impact was felt on a weekend payday loan. Even so, Watson and Sweet said small businesses on the North Carolina coast will likely lose two weekends of tourist activity, including the travel-heavy Labor Day weekend.
Millions of people have lost power from the storm, and analysts said the length of the outages and the extent of disruption to public transportation in cities like New York will help determine the economic damage.
Crews are already restoring power in Southern states hit by the storm and are starting work in the northeast.
Irene slammed into a region that is key to the nation’s economic health. The mid-Atlantic and New England are home to several major cities and account for about 16 percent of the nation’s economic output, Sweet said. The region also has about 14 percent of the country’s workforce.
That led many analysts to worry about the potential impact of a major hurricane. The economy is struggling. Any major shock could tip it back into recession. The economy expanded at a meager 0.7 percent annual rate in the first six months of the year.
Watson said his firm initially feared Irene would be much more powerful when it made landfall in North Carolina and would remain strong by the time it pummeled New York City. That could have caused damage of as much as $30 billion, he said.
But by Friday it was apparent the storm had weakened and would cause much less damage.
Federal finance minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney will do their best Friday to calm investors
No pain, no gain. That’s the mantra of the high-yield bond investor who is willing to assume the default risk of a bond if its yield and price seem worth the wager.
Relentlessly bad news and constant warnings about debt risk here and abroad, coupled with the recent extreme volatility of the junk bond market, mean even more courage is required in 2011.
Junk bonds remain a viable market for yield-seekers, but only for a small portion of an individual’s portfolio. Anyone who believes the economy will worsen shouldn’t consider them at all because debt of companies with subpar credit is not for the faint of heart.
The average high-yield bond mutual fund has a one-year total return of 13 percent and a three-year annualized total return of 10 percent, according to Lipper Inc. Funds provide a diversified portfolio of the bonds of hundreds of companies, so you aren’t saddled with one company’s uncertainties.
Some experts see potential for a junk-bond rally based on recent investor overreaction, but that is not a sure thing. Although merger-and-acquisition financing has driven this year’s market, some planned high-yield issues were pulled back, and investors continue to exit the market.
There are, however, good things to say about companies issuing high-yield bonds.
“In spite of all the bad macroeconomic news, when high-yield companies are viewed at the fundamental corporate level, things still look good,” noted Michael Kessler, credit strategist with Barclays Capital in New York. “The ratings momentum this year has been overwhelmingly positive, and more companies are getting upgraded than downgraded.”
Far more companies have gone from being junk issuers to investment grade than the other way around, Kessler said. The recession was very severe and default rates went up a lot, so companies that survived were those that “got religion” quickly, he believes.
They made progress on the strength and liquidity of balance sheets.
The rating of bonds by credit-rating agencies, in descending order, is AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B, CCC, CC, C and D, with anything BB or worse generally considered a junk bond. Kessler believes investors interested in individual junk bonds should seek out only those in which the company could potentially be upgraded to investment grade or is significantly reducing its debt.
“While I personally don’t love the high-yield bond sector right now, if the economy rebounds from its recent soft patch and shows improvement, it should do just fine,” said Mark Salzinger, editor and publisher of The Investor’s ETF Report (www.noloadfundinvestor.com), based in Brentwood, Tenn. “A mild slowdown wouldn’t be a big deal for exchange-traded funds, and the yield advantage will win out over fears that credit will go down.”
If a “really bad” recession unfolds, high-yield bonds “will get killed,” Salzinger warned, because their yield won’t be high enough to offer any kind of protection in a truly difficult period.
With that caveat in mind, Salzinger believes high-yield still has some worthwhile exchange-traded funds (ETFs, which trade on an exchange):
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