A judge has dismissed two shareholder lawsuits against Wachovia Corp. Also named as a defendant was parent Wells Fargo & Co. Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo more than a year ago when it was on the brink of collapse.

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Fannie Mae implemented the Clarifire application as the technology solution for its servicers to use in complying with the foreclosure pre-filing mediation process mandated by the Florida Supreme Court’s administrative order, eMason announced. The Department of Housing and Urban Development deployed the REO performance evaluation model developed by Walzak Consulting Inc. in its Management and Marketing III program for HUD field service manager and asset manager contractors, an announcement said. DepotPoint Inc. issued a news release about it new platform for lenders, servicers and asset managers to aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources.

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A new report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies indicates that if there is to be any stabilization in the housing market, it will be at “…extremely low levels that will make the climb up all that more difficult.” Muting any of the recent news in the steadiness of new construction and sales are housing price declines, a record level of foreclosures, rising interest rates, and a shrinking job market. Summing up the study, Nicolas P. Retsinas, Director of the Joint Center said, “Although there are some signs of improvement or at least steadiness in new construction and sales, housing starts stand near 60+ year lows and any life in home sales is coming from distressed foreclosure sales, temporary first-time buyer tax credits, and low interest rates that moved higher in recent weeks.”

Sounding like they were trying to find anything at all possible to spin to the positive, the center was optimistic about the coming of age of the “echo baby boom”, counting on the largest generation in American history to “refuel demand for housing of all types”. Considering that the EBB’s are witnessing the meltdown firsthand, it’s hard to make a convincing argument that the collective will be urgently buying real estate any time soon.

Separately Roger Orf, CEO of Citigroup Property Investors, was calling for governments to force banks to sell their foreclosed properties in a process he dubbed “creative destruction”. Orf favors an immediate clearing of the deck in terms of toxic properties as opposed to the malaise of a gradual unwinding of assets. Orf doesn’t expect fully functioning property lending markets to return before 2011, by when he hoped banks will have completed repair of their capital bases through a wave of real estate sales. The amount of damage to real estate prices as a result of Mr. Orf’s proposal is unknown but when the government forced savings and loans to sell their junk bond portfolios in the early 90′s prices dropped by up to 85% on bonds that were paying interest and backed with solid financials. In that instance, buyers simply stepped aside and let bond prices plummet to levels that carried no risk for the buyers.

What both reports signify is that the need for home loan modifications will continue for the next few years as prices either stabilize or drop and interest rates on mortgages continue to reset and recast. With a relatively small number of reluctant and extremely careful new homebuyers the lenders, servicers, and investors behind today’s mortgages could become much more interested in getting loan modifications completed, especially if a modification is the only way to generate cash flow from a property in a portfolio. While it’s unlikely that Mr. Orf’s proposition ever comes to pass, the foreclosure of properties will become less desirable if more buyers don’t materialize or if the value of REO’s at the banks continues to decrease.

Chicago, IL, United States (AHN) – Voting in Chicago’s mayoral race has begun, with the Daley name absent in ballots for the first time in decades. Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is expected to win, and the question is if his victory will be enough to avoid a runoff.

About half of the city’s 1.4 million voters are expected to head to polls. Early voting began in late January and ended last week.

Emanuel has led polls since Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart took himself out of contention last fall. In recent weeks, the former presidential aide has topped 50 percent, the threshold required to avoid a runoff on April 5.

His closest rival, former City Colleges Board chair Gery Chico, is seeking the opposite, launching a “kickoff to the runoff” a day before election.

Chico, who trails the front runner by 34 points in the last We Ask America poll, took to the trains in the final hours of his candidacy to “speak to our working men and women.”

A former chief of staff of retiring Mayor Richard Daley who has the endorsement of the police union, Chico has help from four other candidates in the race in his bid for the no. 2 spot.

Appealing for the black vote, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, the so-called consensus candidate of the African-American community, had the Rev. Jesse Jackson by her side to make her case during a get-out-the-vote rally. She is also counting on the support of female voters. She received the endorsement of the National Women’s Political Caucus on Monday.

An ambassador to New Zealand during the Clinton administration, Braun was in the second spot in polls after other black candidates withdrew to consolidate support for her. But her poll numbers have dipped significantly while negative perceptions among voters have risen.

She came under fire last month for bringing back the issue of Monica Lewinsky to criticize former President Bill Clinton for endorsing Emanuel. Later, she argued heatedly on television with the only other black candidate in the race, community activist Patricia Van Pelt Watkins, by calling Watkins a “crack addict.”

The first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate, Braun has dismissed surveys by citing pollster Rod McCulloch’s words to “hold off on the Rahm Coronation.” McCulloch conducted a poll for Braun that found Emanuel below the 50 threshold mark and the former senator trailing in second place at 22 percent.

Emanuel’s status as the front runner comes despite more than two dozen objections to his candidacy over the issue of his residency, an issue settled by the Illinois Supreme Court only days before early voting began.

A former congressman who represented the city, Emanuel has likewise faced questions about his time as a board member at Freddie Mac, which was plagued with corruption and eventually put into conservatorship during the subprime mortgage crisis.

Watkins is one of three candidates in the race who have consistently polled in single digits. The two others are city clerk Miguel del Valle, a former state senator, and community activist William “Dock” Walls III.

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On Jan. 19, Scott D. Farah was sentenced to 15 years in prison because he allegedly deceived investors in his company, Financial Resources Mortgage Inc. Robert R. Jones pleaded guilty to defrauding his employer, Community Bank & Trust, on several loans and collecting kickbacks, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorneys Office. A former Webster Bank employee pled guilty to collecting $5 million by setting up vendor companies that were fraudulently paid for services.

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With a military rifle in one hand and a bottle of prescription medications in the other, the new “Mr. America” is over-fed, under-nourished, over-medicated, over-spent and “over there” (waging war in the Middle East). And soon, with Obama’s new disease care reform proposals, America will find itself destitute and diseased, unable to climb out of the medication dependence pit it has dug for itself.

See the political cartoon on this topic here: http://www.naturalnews.com/026686_debt_america_disease.html

To understand why this is true from a financial point of view, take a look at these numbers:

If you read the actual federal budget for 2009, it’s an astonishing $3.1 trillion. The size of the number itself is mind-boggling, but it’s even more disturbing when you realize just how much of the federal budget is spent on these three things:

WAR
DISEASE
DEBT

In fact, let me ask you this question right now: What percentage of the federal budget do you think is spent on these three things? War, Disease and Debt.

Is it 10 percent? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

Keep going…

Of course, if you actually work in Washington, you won’t even describe these as “War, Disease and Debt.” Instead, you call them:

DEFENSE
HEALTH
THE ECONOMY

It all sounds much nicer when phrased that way. But these terms are intentionally deceptive. We’re not really “defending” our way into Iraq, Afghanistan and seventy-five other countries where we have a military presence. Spending on “health care” doesn’t have anything to do with health (it’s all about disease). And people who say spending more debt money to “help the economy” are mathematical retards. You can’t get yourself out of debt by spending more money (even though V.P. Joe Biden insists you can…).

So are you ready for the actual number?

It’s an eye-opener. The actual percentage of the U.S. federal budget spent on WAR, DISEASE and DEBT is 87 percent.

Here’s how it breaks down according to publicly-available numbers: (Source = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2009 )

Total U.S. Federal Budget for 2009: $3.1 trillion

1) WAR: Department of Defense ($515.4 billion) + War on Terror ($145.2 billion) + Dept. of Veterans Affairs ($44.8 billion) + Dept. of Homeland Security ($37.6 billion) = $743 billion

2) DISEASE: Medicare ($408 billion) + Medicaid ($224 billion) + Dept. of Health and Human Services ($70 billion) =$702 billion

3) DEBT: Debt to the people: Social Security ($644 billion), Social Security Administration ($8.4 billion), Welfare ($360 billion) and Interest on National Debt ($260 billion) = $1,272 billion

(Note: This does not even include the financial cost of the War on Iraq or the War in Afghanistan, as those are budgeted separately as appropriations and are not included in the Dept. of Defense budget. So the actual numbers are far worse than what’s shown here…)

Combined spending on War, Disease and Debt: $2,717 billion ($2.7 trillion), which is 87% of the total expenditures by the federal government ($3.1 trillion).
How do you dig yourself out of this hole?
For every tax dollar you send to Washington (and it’s about to become a whole lot more of ‘em), 87 cents gets spent on war, disease and debt. That leaves just 13 cents on the dollar for roads, schools, parks, technology, science, the environment, adult education and other programs.

If you spent 87% of your own household income on war, disease and debt, leaving only 13 cents on the dollar for food, clothing, transportation and entertainment, how long would your own finances stay solvent? Not very long…

It doesn’t take a financial genius to realize that the United States of America has dug itself into a financial trench so deep and so infected with really bad planning that there is virtually no way it can get out. As a result, the American people are increasingly bankrupt, diseased and homeless. (I predict a new wave of tent cities springing up across the American landscape as increasing numbers of Americans lose their jobs and their homes.)

“Mr. America” is burned out, stressed out, tapped out and about to be rubbed out.

It is only a matter of time before economic reality sets in and the American people find their currency is phased out, too.

An economic prison to keep you trapped and penniless
It’s easy to see this from afar (from South America, in my case, where I live full time): America is living in a fantasy world, where the laws of economics have been (temporarily) suspended. There’s no such thing as too much spending. No such thing as too many prescription drugs or vaccines. No such thing as too much war. It’s all justifiable by the relentless fools in Washington who claim, “We saved the economy!”

Because, you see, we are past the point of dealing with reality in America. There will be no saving the nation from financial demise. There will be no meaningful health care reform. There will be no real changes that preserve your freedom or your bank account. Instead, one hundred percent of the efforts are now focused on preserving the illusions that keep America artificially propped up like a morbid human puppet.

The new Congressional bills, the financial bailouts, the empty talk of health care reform — these are all designed to distract you from the sobering, unavoidable and simple truth: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. [Recognize it?]

That prison keeps you working 60-hour weeks. It keeps you paying your taxes. It keeps you medicated and indoctrinated like a slobbering idiot who buys brand-name products because the logos seem somehow emotionally familiar (TV programming). It keeps you slaving away your precious hours, shoveling the fruits of your labor into a mindless, heartless machine of Big Government that has already mortgaged your assets, sacrificed your health and stolen your future.

And there’s always a seductive motivation beckoning you to sacrifice more. If you only work another job, you’ll be able to afford that giant TV screen you’ve always wanted. Here’s a credit card to make it easy, or you can just sign over your home. Here, take this vaccine shot for your own protection. Vote for me, and I’ll give you free health care. I’ll stabilize the economy by spending future generations into yet more debt. Don’t worry about paying anything back… we’ll let the next President deal with that.

The fraud continues, year after year, with new faces and names at the helm, but the same old failed thinking at the core. You cannot spend your way to prosperity, you must SAVE your way there. You cannot make a population healthy by drugging more people. You cannot make peace by waging war. And you cannot make a nation great by abandoning the real needs of the people and selling out to corporations and their lobbyists.

Sadly, while Mr. America was once a healthy, thriving, hard-working individual, he’s now a jobless, indebted medicated heart patient with a caffeine habit and an upside-down mortgage on the home he’s about to lose. And the worst part is that the lawmakers in Washington are doing everything in their power to make sure Mr. America stays that way.

About Author
Mike Adams is a natural health author and technology pioneer with a strong interest in personal health. He is also known by his call sign, the ‘Health Ranger,’ Adams posts his missions statements, health statistics and health photos at www.HealthRanger.org

Excluding foreclosures, delinquency of at least 30 days increased 7 basis points between the end of last year and the end of last month, LPS reported. But the rate was down more than 200 BPS from a year earlier. The number of loans in this category finished January at 4,719,000.

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London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – Bank of England governor Mervyn King hinted Tuesday that key interest rates may go up in spring because of the rise of inflation rate to 4 percent in January.

He said benchmark lending rates could reach 1.25 percent by the end of 2011, from the current two-year record-low of 0.5 percent. The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee last week decided to keep the lending rates unchanged, although the committee was deeply divided on the issue.

While the planned rate hike would hit mortgage holders, it would benefit savers.

Britain registered a 4 percent Consumer Price Index increase in the first month of 2011 from 3.7 percent in December because of rising prices of oil, petrol and the increase in value added tax.

King said that consumers should brace themselves for more price hikes in the coming months because of trends in the global markets of escalating prices for oil, wheat, copper and other commodities. He forecast inflation rate would hover between 4 to 5 percent in the coming months.

According to estimates, if the bank increases interest rates to 1.25 percent, mortgage holders would pay an extra $81 (GBP 54) monthly on their payments. To worsen the situation for the average Briton, average earnings this year are forecast by the Office of Budget Responsibility to go up by just 2.2 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2012.

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Sun West Mortgage Company Inc. launched in 1980. Since starting business, it has issued more than $6 billion in HECM mortgage-backed securities, according to a news release. Sun West is based in Cerritos, Calif.

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Late payments on securitized commercial mortgages were 22 basis points higher in January, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Driving the increase from December were loans on industrial properties, which were up 259 BPS. Overall CMBS delinquency has climbed 359 BPS over the past 12 months.

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