LOS ANGELES – A surprisingly strong rebound in California's real estate market helped lift a key home price index for the eighth month in a row.That's good news for people who plan to sell their homes this spring. Prices are now up almost 4 percent from the bottom in May 2009, but still almost 30 percent below the May 2006 peak.
Prices rose 0.3 percent from December to January on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index released Tuesday. Prices increased in 12 cities in the index.
The biggest monthly gain was in Los Angeles, where prices rose 1.8 percent from December. And real estate agents say there's a distinct sense the worst of the downturn is over.
Buyers are "seeing that prices are creeping up," said Tony Middleton, a real estate agent with ZIP Realty who concentrates on the San Fernando Valley. "They're losing bids on homes and they have to bid again."
Prices in San Diego, meanwhile, rose by almost 0.9 percent. Phoenix had the third-largest gain at 0.8 percent.
Compared with the same month last year, the 20-city index was off just 0.7 percent from last year at a reading of 146.32. That was the smallest decline in almost three years and in line with analysts' expectations, according to Thomson Reuters.
Rising home prices also could boost consumer optimism. For most Americans, their home is their largest asset, so as values climb from the depths of the housing bust, homeowners feel wealthier and more comfortable spending. And, for homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, rising prices rebuild equity.
Consumer confidence rebounded in March after a February plunge, according to a survey released Tuesday. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index rose to 52.5 in March, recovering about half of the nearly 11 points it lost in February.
Still, shoppers remain cautious and there are signs that last year's housing rebound won't last. Home sales sank during the winter, and government incentives that have propped up the market are ending.
Another reason for the positive news is simply that the Case-Shiller index measures a three-month average of home prices. So January's report included November's strong home sales.
However, bargain-hunting homebuyers continue to pack open houses in California, often facing off with investors for foreclosed homes.
"We're seeing multiple offers in most of the markets here in the San Francisco Bay area," said David Kerr, an agent with ZipRealty in Oakland, Calif. "People are getting off the fence."
In February, bank-owned properties made up 44 percent of all resales in the state, according to MDA DataQuick. In Southern California, they accounted for more than half of resales.
With such high demand, supply is dwindling, driving prices higher.
Meanwhile, the state's unemployment rate has flat-lined of late, and that's made buyers more comfortable about purchasing a home than they were just six months ago, said Richard Green, director of the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southern California.
California home sales will likely get a boost in coming months thanks to a new serving of government stimulus.
Last week, state lawmakers enacted a tax credit of up to $10,000 for homebuyers that kicks in May 1. The state allotted $100 million for first-time buyers and another $100 million to anyone who buys a newly built home. California had a round of tax credits last year that proved to be popular; that program ended in July.
The latest incentive picks up where a federal first-time homebuyer tax credit of up to $8,000 is scheduled to leave off when it expires at the end of April. Should the Obama administration extend the federal tax break, that could give homebuyers in California even more reasons to buy.
Still, there remain pockets of weakness. Sales of homes priced above $500,000 are sluggish. And despite rising prices, more than one-third of all homeowners with a mortgage still owe more on their loans than their homes are worth, according to First American CoreLogic.
Among the cities showing monthly price declines in January, the biggest drop was in Portland, Ore., where prices fell 1.8 percent from December. Chicago and Seattle saw declines of 1.7 percent, while prices in Atlanta fell 1.5 percent.
Many analysts expect the Case-Shiller 20-city index will again turn downward in the coming months as more foreclosures in other states hit the market.
"It is only a matter of time before the index records a double-dip in prices," wrote Paul Dales, U.S. economist with Capital Economics, who forecasts a 5 percent drop. The market will be tested in the second half of the year, he wrote, when a tax credit that has boosted sales is gone.
The Case-Shiller index measures home price increases and decreases relative to prices in January 2000. The base reading is 100; so a reading of 150 would mean that home prices increased 50 percent since the beginning of the index.
LONDON – European stock markets rose modestly Wednesday following a late rebound on Wall Street in the previous session and ahead of a raft of U.S. economic data, though the long Easter break kept trading volumes light.
The FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was up 13.76 points, or 0.2 percent, at 5,686.08 while Germany's DAX rose 13.16 points, or 0.2 percent, to 6,155.61. The CAC-40 in France was 7.64 points, or 0.2 percent, higher at 3,995.05.
Wall Street was poised to dip slightly following a flat performance on Tuesday — Dow futures were down 10 points, or 0.1 percent, at 10,844 while the broader Standard & Poor's 500 futures fell 1.5 point, or 0.1 percent, to 1,167.90.
Tim Hughes, head of sales trading at IG Index, said a raft of U.S. economic data later, including the monthly private payrolls report from ADP, a manufacturing survey for the Chicago region and crude oil inventory figures "all have the potential to add a small amount of volatility to an otherwise bland trading landscape later in the day."
The big event this week is Friday's U.S. nonfarm payrolls data for March — traditionally this can set the market tone for a week or two but this month's figures will be released as many traders head off for the Easter break. All major stock indexes in Europe and the U.S. are closed for Good Friday.
The report is expected to show employers added 170,000 jobs in March. That would be only the second increase since the recession began in late 2007.
The euro, meanwhile, rallied 0.4 percent to $1.3464 after official figures showed inflation in the 16 countries that use the euro spiked to its highest level in 15 months during March. The dollar rose 0.6 percent to 93.36 yen.
In its preliminary estimate for the year to March, Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, said consumer prices in the eurozone rose by 1.5 percent, way above February's equivalent rate of 0.9 percent and market expectations for a more modest increase to 1.2 percent.
Eurostat did not provide any more details but a fuller analysis of why inflation jumped to its highest level since December will emerge on April 16, when a broader analysis is published.
Despite the euro's advance Wednesday, the currency continues to be dogged by worries surrounding Greece's debt crisis.
Even though the European Union finally agreed a backstop for the debt-laden country last week, investors remain concerned about the Greek government's ability to tap the financial markets for more cash — two bond issues this week met with muted success.
The most visible sign of unease in the markets is in the spread between Greek and German 10-year bond yields — the so-called spread between the two is indicative of investor unease, rising as it has to over 3.4 percentage points.
The current spread is more or less the same as before the rescue plan's announcement last Thursday and up from the 3.06 percentage points on Monday.
In Asia, trading was fairly lackluster. Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average ended down 7.20 points, or less than 0.1 percent, at 11,089.94 while Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 135.44 points, or 0.6 percent, at 21,239.35. south Korea's index fell less than 0.5 percent to 1,692.85.
Australia's benchmark dropped 0.8 percent and China's Shanghai index was off 0.6 percent.
Benchmark crude for May delivery was up 49 cents at $82.86 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose 20 cents to settle at $82.37 on Tuesday.
Story: Young Percy Jackson is a demi-god (son of a god and a human). He is falsely accused of stealing the lightning bolt and must retrieve it before earth is torn asunder by the warring gods. Aiding him in his search for the missing bolt are Annabeth, the daughter of goddess Athena and Satyr, a half-human, half-goat creature.
WASHINGTON: New claims for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week as layoffs ease and hiring slowly recovers.
GENEVA: The World Trade Organization said Friday that it expected 9.5 percent growth in merchandise trade this year, in a strong recovery from the steepest commercial contraction since the Great Depression.
WASHINGTON – Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it. The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts' newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama's plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he did as governor and should be repealed.
Republicans say Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. More than a dozen GOP attorneys general are determined to challenge the requirement in federal court as unconstitutional.
Starting in 2014, the new law will require nearly all Americans to have health insurance through an employer, a government program or by buying it directly. That year, new insurance markets will open for business, health plans will be required to accept all applicants and tax credits will start flowing to millions of people, helping them pay the premiums.
Those who continue to go without coverage will have to pay a penalty to the IRS, except in cases of financial hardship. Fines vary by income and family size. For example, a single person making $45,000 would pay an extra $1,125 in taxes when the penalty is fully phased in, in 2016.
Conservatives today say that's unacceptable. Not long ago, many of them saw a national mandate as a free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans — the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare. Most experts agree some kind of requirement is needed in a reformed system because health insurance doesn't work if people can put off joining the risk pool until they get sick.
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon favored a mandate that employers provide insurance. In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.
"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits — two ideas that are now part of Obama's law. Pauly's paper was well-received — by the George H.W. Bush administration.
"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
Obama rejected a key part of Pauly's proposal: doing away with the tax-free status of employer-sponsored health care and replacing it with a standard tax credit for all Americans. Labor strongly opposes that approach because union members usually have better-than-average coverage and suddenly would have to pay taxes on it. But many economists believe it's a rational solution to America's health care dilemma since it would raise enough money to cover the uninsured and nudge people with coverage into cost-conscious plans.
Romney's success in Massachusetts with a bipartisan health plan that featured a mandate put the idea on the table for the 2008 presidential candidates.
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who failed in the 1990s to require employers to offer coverage, embraced the individual requirement, an idea advocated by her Republican opponents in the earlier health care debate.
"Hillary Clinton believed strongly in universal coverage," said Neera Tanden, her top health care adviser in the 2008 Democratic campaign. "I said to her, 'You are not going to be able to say it's universal coverage unless you have a mandate.' She said, 'I don't want to run unless it's universal coverage.'"
Obama was not prepared to go that far. His health care proposal in the campaign required coverage for children, not adults. Clinton hammered him because his plan didn't guarantee coverage for all. He shot back that health insurance is too expensive to force people to buy it.
Obama remained cool to an individual requirement even once in office. But Tanden, who went on to serve in the Obama administration, said the first sign of a shift came in a letter to congressional leaders last summer in which Obama said he'd be open to the idea if it included a hardship waiver. Obama openly endorsed a mandate in his speech to a joint session of Congress in September.
It remains one of the most unpopular parts of his plan. Even the insurance industry is unhappy. Although the federal government will be requiring Americans to buy their products — and providing subsidies worth billions — insurers don't think the penalties are high enough.
Tanden, now at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, says she's confident the mandate will work. In Massachusetts, coverage has gone up and only a tiny fraction of residents have been hit with fines.
Brown, whose election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy almost led to the collapse of Obama's plan, said his opposition to the new law is over tax increases, Medicare cuts and federal overreach on a matter that should be left up to states. Not so much the requirement, which he voted for as a state lawmaker.
BAENGNYEONG ISLAND, South Korea – Hopes faded Saturday for the rescue of 46 marines missing after an explosion sank a South Korean military ship near the disputed sea border with rival North Korea in one of the South's worst naval disasters.Navy and coast guard vessels, as well as air force planes, were searching the waters near South Korea's Baengnyeong Island where the 1,200-ton Cheonan sank early Saturday in bad weather and rough waves during a routine patrol mission.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff said an explosion tore a hole in the rear of the Cheonan late Friday night, shutting off the engine, wiping out power and taking the ship down a little over three hours later. Officials said they did not have specific information about where on the ship the explosion occurred.
Despite early fears of an attack, there was no immediate indication that North Korea — which lies about 10 miles (17 kilometers) from Baengnyeong and was visible Saturday from the island — was to blame, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, but troops kept a vigilant watch.
Joint Chiefs spokesman Park Seong-woo said the military will issue a judgment on the cause of the accident after rescue teams search and salvage the vessel for analysis.
Most of the vessel was underwater Saturday, though part of its hull was visible. Officials have yet to confirm any deaths. Some of the 58 rescued crew members were treated for minor burns, broken bones and abrasions.
At a naval base in Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, wails filled the air as relatives checked a list of missing marines. One man, his brow furrowed with worry, stared blankly out the window; another wept silently, his forehead pressed up against a television screen listing the missing crew members' names.
"Where are you? Where can you be?" one mother screamed.
President Lee Myung-bak ordered officials to quickly determine what caused the ship to sink and make all efforts to rescue the crew, spokeswoman Kim Eun-hye said.
The ship went down near a disputed maritime border that has been a flash point between the two Koreas. Their militaries have fought three bloody skirmishes in the area in recent years. South Korea uses Baengnyeong Island as a military outpost.
The explosion prompted a number of crew members to jump into the water, the military said.
"Yells and screams filled the air," witness Kim Jin-ho, a seaman who was on a local passenger ship bound for Baengnyeong, told cable news channel YTN. "Marines on deck were desperately shouting: 'Save me!'"
First Lt. Baek Jae-woo, a lecturer on vessel structure and design at the Republic of Korea Naval Academy, said it won't be clear what caused the explosion until the ship is towed. "But at this point, all three scenarios — missile attack, internal explosion, torpedoes — are possible causes."
He said the Cheonan was designed to carry weaponry for coastal defense and a full frontal attack.
Hopes for the missing were diminishing with each hour, a coast guard official said. He said humans can survive in winter waters if rescued within two hours, noting that the temperature of the Yellow Sea at the time was between 37 and 41 degrees Fahrenheit (3 and 5 degrees Celsius). He asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The incident is one of South Korea's worst naval disasters. Local media reported that the country's worst maritime accident occurred in 1974, when a ship sank off the southeast coast in stormy weather, killing 159 sailors and coast guard personnel. In 1967, 39 sailors were killed by North Korean artillery.
The explosion sparked fears of another attack. On Friday, North Korea's military threatened "unpredictable strikes" against the U.S. and South Korea in anger over a report the two countries plan to prepare for possible instability in the totalitarian country.
The two Koreas remain locked in a state of war because the three-year Korean War ended in 1953 with a truce, not a peace treaty.
However, there were no signs of North Korean military movements, presidential spokeswoman Kim said.
"It's looking more and more like it was just an accident that happens on a ship," Carl Baker, an expert on Korean military relations at the Pacific Forum CSIS think tank in Honolulu, said by telephone. He said North Korea was unlikely to attack the far more powerful South Korean military.
At the naval base in Pyeongtaek, many relatives waited for news, their faces buried in tissues and handkerchiefs. However, about 150 — fed up with the lack of information — pushed their way past security to confront military officials.
Younis Khan and Shahid Afridi have lodged appeals against the penalties imposed on them by the PCB in the aftermath of a disastrous tour of Australia. Afridi, who was named Pakistan's captain for the World Twenty20, was fined Rs 3 million (US$35,000) for his ball-biting incident in Perth, for which he was also banned for two Twenty20 matches by the ICC. Younis and Yousuf, meanwhile, were accused by the PCB of being a bad influence on the Pakistan team due to "their infighting" and "attitude".
"Yes I have sent a notice to the Chief Operating Officer of the board Wasim Bari, asking him on what grounds have I been fined by the board," Afridi was quoted as saying by PTI. "I have taken the plea that when the board chairman Ijaz Butt himself has said on record that the PCB would not punish me twice for the same offence how can they fine me now for ball tampering."
Ahmed Qayyum, the lawyer for Younis, said he had sent a letter to the board asking them to explain on what grounds the indefinite ban was imposed on his client. "The chargesheet they have sent to Younis contains no proper evidence or explanation to back up the indefinite ban, there is no reasoning given for the ban," he said. "We have basically asked the board to provide us with solid evidence that Younis was involved in infighting with Yousuf and that they disrupted the team's dressing room atmosphere.
"We want this issue to be settled amicably and the ban to be ended but if that does not happen then we will go to the court."
The duo were among seven players penalised for various reasons. Mohammad Yousuf and Younis were banned indefinitely by the PCB, Shoaib Malik and Rana Naved-ul-Hasan were banned for a year while Afridi and the Akmal brothers were fined and placed on probation for six months. Malik and Naved, too, reports have suggested, are preparing to lodge an appeal. The penalties were imposed on March 10, and the players have 30 days to appeal against them.
The PCB last week appointed two retired Supreme Court judges - Muneer Sheikh and Jamshed Ali Shah - and a former High Court judge, Irfan Qadir, to deal with the appeals.
WASHINGTON – The tumultuous health care debate that brought you death panels and socialism has spun off a catalog of popular myths that will keep growing as President Barack Obama and all sides battle toward the midterm elections this fall.
At a White House signing ceremony Tuesday, Obama ventured the hope that Americans on all sides will judge the legislation for what it actually says and does. "When I sign this bill," he declared, "all of the overheated rhetoric over reform will finally confront the reality of reform."
Wishful thinking, Mr. President.
Facts are stubborn, the saying goes. But myths about the legislation are likely to persist as well. And a lot of people don't agree on which is which.
"People have taken away from the debate a number of beliefs about the bill that are very difficult to shake based on objective reports," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard public health professor who follows opinion trends. "There is enough skepticism out there that questions about how it's going to help the country are likely to continue."
Here's a look at some of the myths and realities, from both sides of the issue:
• Obama has put the nation on a slippery slope toward socialism.
Hello? Government's role in health care has been steadily growing since Medicare and Medicaid were established 45 years ago. Even if Republicans were to take control of Washington and repeal this bill, government would still be on track to pick up more than half the nation's health care tab by 2012, according to a report last month from Medicare.
"The Republican myth is that the government is for the first time going to take over the health care sector," said economist Joe Antos of the business-oriented American Enterprise Institute. "The takeover was probably largely accomplished in 1965 with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. Since the early days, Medicare has called the shots on a lot of policy issues that private insurance fell in line with."
Still, the new law will undoubtedly expand the government's influence. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., warned Tuesday it will lead to the "quasi-nationalization of the health industry."
Underline "quasi." Democrats dropped their idea of a government insurance plan to compete with private carriers. So any "socialization" will be channeled through Wellpoint, UnitedHealthcare and other private insurance giants.
• Health care overhaul is going to lower your health insurance premiums.
Obama says that once new competitive insurance markets open for business, in 2014, individuals buying coverage comparable to what they have today will pay 14-20 percent less. Family coverage costs about $13,400 a year, so that could be real money.
But the president's assurance is based on a selective reading of a Congressional Budget Office report that found most individuals would probably buy better, more expensive coverage than what's available today.
And Obama skips over an important caveat: The budget office didn't say premiums would be lower than currently. It said premiums for some people would be lower than they would have been without the bill. Premiums for others would be higher.
With the U.S. population getting older, and medical science pushing the technological envelope, there's very little reason to think premiums will go down. The best Obama can hope for is to slow the pace of increases.
• You will be forced to pay for other people's abortions.
Only if you join a health insurance plan that covers abortion. In that case, the costs of paying for abortions would be spread over all the enrollees in the plan — no differently from how other medical procedures are handled, except a policyholder would have to write a separate check for it.
Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, said people who don't want to pay for abortion could simply pick a plan that doesn't offer it.
There would definitely be a demand for such plans, and not just from people with moral objections. Single men and older women would have no reason to pay an extra premium for abortion coverage.
• The Democratic bill will lead to government health care rationing.
The legislation sets up a research center to compare the effectiveness of medical treatments, and critics fear that bureaucrats will start issuing justifications for denying patients access to the latest medical technology.
Republicans as well as Democrats had previously called for a major investment in such research to help make sense of which kinds of treatments, medications and technologies are worth the cost.
The legislation specifies that the research findings cannot be used to impose mandates, guidelines or recommendations for payment, coverage, or treatment — or used to deny coverage.
Acceptance of the research is likely to be slow in coming, and the medical community — not government and insurance companies — will probably take the lead in vetting it.
• The American people have already rejected Obamacare.
Although some polls show a majority oppose the bill, most surveys find the public about evenly divided. Blendon, the public opinion expert, believes it's premature to say that the public has rejected it. Curiously, many individual components — doing away with insurance denials for pre-existing conditions, tax credits to help pay premiums, insurance purchasing pools — are widely popular.
Obama reads those findings to mean that Democrats have a chance to turn around public opinion, and he's embarking on a campaign to sell the bill.
• The legislation will save Medicare from bankruptcy.
Democrats say the bill — even as it cuts Medicare to pay for expanded coverage for working families — will add at least nine years of solvency to the program's giant hospital insurance trust fund, now projected to be exhausted in 2017.
Technically that's true — but only on paper.
Savings from the Medicare cuts will be invested in government IOUs, like any other trust fund surplus. The special Treasury securities count as an asset on Medicare's books — making the program's precarious financial situation seem more reassuring. But the government will spend the actual money. And when time comes for Medicare to redeem the IOUs, lawmakers will have to scramble to come up with the cash.
The key point is that the Medicare savings will be received by the government only once, the Congressional Budget Office said, "so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending ... on other programs."
(Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) is closing in on a deal with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) that could result in a tax refund of about $1.4 billion for the bank, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the talks.JPMorgan was not available to comment on the report.
As part of a larger settlement with Washington Mutual's bondholders, JPMorgan can claim $1.4 billion of funds in the FDIC receivership to protect itself against exposure to mortgages that WaMu serviced, the Journal said.
Washington Mutual Inc (WAMUQ.PK), which is tied to the biggest bank failure in U.S. history, is eligible to receive about $5.6 billion in tax refunds as part of a court settlement. WaMu was seized by the FDIC in 2008 and was later sold to JPMorgan fo
r $1.9 billion.
On March 12, Washington Mutual agreed to split the two potential tax refunds with JPMorgan and the FDIC.
WaMu agreed to receive $900 million of a $2.6 billion expected return, with the rest going to JPMorgan. A second $2.6 billion return will be bring in $1.04 billion for Washington Mutual with the rest going to the FDIC.
