New-Home Sales, Prices Decline

New-Home Sales, Prices Decline

Wall Street Journal

New-home sales fell in March but only mildly after a surge the month before, while the median price kept sliding, a sign the housing crisis hasn't ended. Sales of single-family homes decreased by 0.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 356,000 compared to the prior month, the Commerce Department said Friday.

Holding Up the Housing Recovery

New York Times

We welcomed President Obama’s plan, unveiled in March, to head off foreclosures and keep more Americans in their homes, but we feared that it wouldn’t be enough. We were particularly concerned that without a reform of the bankruptcy code, lenders wouldn’t do enough to voluntarily modify troubled loans.

Miami-Dade Plan Puts Lenders, Homeowners in Same Room

Miami Herald

The Miami-Dade Circuit Court will soon require lenders and homeowners to try and settle their cases out of court through mediation, in hopes of saving borrowers' homes and easing the backlog of cases.

Stress Tests Flash a Lot More Red

Wall Street Journal

Wall Street wasn't rattled by newly disclosed details of the government's stress tests of 19 large financial institutions, even though the banks could face hundreds of billions of dollars in additional losses. Federal bank regulators are expected on Friday to start sharing preliminary results of stress tests with the banks that have been scrutinized since February. The findings are expected to be made public next week. One scenario that assumed a 10.3% unemployment rate at the end of 2010 required banks to calculate two-year cumulative losses of 8.5% on mortgage portfolios, 11% on home-equity lines of credit, 8% on commercial and industrial loans, 12% on commercial real-estate loans and 20% on credit-card portfolios.