Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Home prices in November continued their fall from the bubble-high prices of 2006, dropping by 1.3 percent compared to October, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city report.

Sales prices fell for the second consecutive month in 19 of the 20 cities the index covers.

Analysts had not expected such a steep decline because mortgage interest rates remain low and the nation’s gross domestic product grew during the fourth quarter of the year.

Prices are down 3.7 percent from a year ago, and off 32.8 percent since their bubble-high peak in the summer of 2006.

“The trend is down and there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand,” says David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Indices.

Despite the low mortgage rates and growth in the GDP, other conditions are contributing to tumbling home prices.

When house prices rose to bubble highs, 89 percent or more of all working-age Americans had a job. Now, only 64 percent of Americans of working age are employed, including about 8 million who are working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Moreover, half of all Americans earn $33,000 or less per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

That means there are fewer qualified buyers in the market. In part, that is because the average price of homes in many areas still exceeds three times the annual income of most Americans. Those conditions further reduce the number of buyers, which continues to exert downward pressure on home prices.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – New home sales jumped in November from October. But, 2011 is still on track to end the year as the worst year for home sales in history.

On Friday, the Commerce Department said new home sales rose 1.6 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 315,000. The scant rise is less than half the 700,000 new homes that economists say should be sold to sustain a healthy housing market.

The number is also below the 323,000 homes sold in 2010, the worst year for sales on records dating back to 1963.

While new home sales account for just a fraction of the housing market, they do have a big impact on the economy. According to the National Association of Home Builders, each new home built creates about three jobs for a year, and generates roughly $90,000 in taxes.

Despite historic low mortgage rates, the housing markets remains depressed and is a long way from fully recovering.

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Jerusalem, Israel David Rosenberg (The Medi – Home prices – an anxious subject for both Israeli consumers and policy makers as they first raced higher and then suddenly started to sink – remain a threat to the economy, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned on Monday.

Although the price rises have eased as the government has clamped down on mortgage lending, Israel is by no means out of the hole yet, the Paris-based organization said in a report. Israel faces a twin risk of prices spiraling upward to bubble levels, if current measures don’t bring about long-term stability, or conversely dropping sharply.

“There is still a risk that a soft landing may not be achieved and house prices (and loan repayments) in relation to rents and incomes may reach ‘bubble’ proportions, heightening the risk of a sharp and damaging correction,” the OECD said. “On the other hand, the early stages of weakness may presage an imminent sharper-than-desired decline in prices.”

The warning has special meaning for Israel, which unlike the U.S. and much of Europe, succeeded in avoiding the catastrophic collapse of its housing market and the financial crisis that followed. But ironically the country’s record of almost uninterrupted economic growth, combined with low borrowing rates, caused home prices to start climbing in Israel just as much of the developed world was seeing prices fall at double-digit rates.

The increase caused the Bank of Israel to undertake a series of measures to reduce demand for mortgages at the same time it was raising interest rates through much of 2010 and 2011.

“There’s a lot of concern that there will be crash. Prices are heading down – the only question is how fast and how far,” Pinchas Landau, an independent financial consultant, told The Media Line.

“For first time in 15 years, there’s more supply than demand. There isn’t massive building. You have a multi-year backlog, but it’s not American situation,” he said. “There could be widespread pain, but if prices come down 20 percent I don’t think that’s a crash. You have to look at how much they went up before.”

Home prices in the 12 months through September climbed 10.5 percent and the central bank has reversed course and lowered its base lending rate in the past two months, a move that could encourage more home loans. Nevertheless, there are signs that they may have reached a plateau.

The rise over the past 12 months is far less steep than the 20 percent recorded in 2010 and August-September prices dropped for the first time since 2008, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).

Meanwhile, residential construction is increasing while sales of new homes are falling. The number of building starts in the 12 months through August reached 43,672 units, compared with annual rates of less than 35,000 up through 2009. But only 1,057 new homes were sold in October 2011, down by more than 50 percent from a year ago, the CBS reported at the end of November.

A survey of senior real estate executives in Israel conducted by the accounting firm Deloitte Brightman Almagor Zohar in November found that 46 percent expected home prices to decline as much as 10 percent in the coming 12 months and another 9 percent saw drops of 10-20 percent. Fifteen percent, however, foresee rises of up to 10 percent.

The OECD said that warning indicators, such as the ratio of home prices to rents had not reached “critical levels” and lauded the measures taken by Israel to restrain the rises. But it did recommend that the government, which controls the lion’s share of land in the country through its Israel Lands Authority, speed up the sale of leaseholds, reduce delays in planning approvals and work to develop a market in mortgage-backed securities “with a good deal of caution.”

It said tax exemptions for homeowners and property investors should be pared back and housing policy geared more toward encouraging more rental housing and helping low-income families.

In spite of growing signs of recession in Europe, which is Israel’s biggest trade partner, Israeli gross domestic product will likely post another year of growth in 2012, the OECD said. Real GDP growth will shift down to 2.9 percent in 2012 from 4.7 percent this year, but accelerate to 3.9 percent in 2013.

“This is substantially better than in many OECD countries, but Israel benefits from relatively rapid population growth,” OECD economist Peter Jarrett said Sunday while visiting Israel for the Globes Business Conference in Tel Aviv. “Europe is leading the world into another period of very slow growth, if not outright recession.”

The report addressed two other issues that have dominated economic policy in the past year amid a gathering storm of social protests over the high cost of living and growing income inequality. The protests began quietly against hikes in gasoline prices, morphed into a nationwide boycott of cottage cheese and erupted over the summer into tent cities and mass rallies that drew hundreds of thousands demanding a wide range of economic reforms.

The government responded by appointing a committee to examine socio-economic policy and has since adopted some of the recommendations of the so-called Trajtenberg panel.

The OECD said that Israel’s “deep socio-economic cleavages,” expressed in high rates of poverty and income inequality, is weighing down on the economy by lowering growth rates for productivity and per capita income. Although the problem is concentrated in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and Arab populations – which account for 60 percent of poor households, double their proportion of the population – they are not the only Israelis trapped in poverty.

The report noted some progress in overhauling education, where Israeli students have performed poorly in international comparisons of achievement in science, math and reading. But the OECD faulted efforts to encourage people to join the workforce, pointing to the abandonment of the Wisconsin program, which had put the responsibility job placement in the hands of private sector firms.

The OECD was also supportive of efforts to increase business competition and restrict the size and power of holding companies. It backed plans to separate financial institutions, such as banks and insurers, from other businesses, while faulting the government for the slow progress toward creating competition in electricity generation.

The OECD said the scope for increasing competition in other industries is limited due to the small size of the Israeli economy.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The United States-European Union summit here ended without any fiscal help emerging from the U.S. as ambassadors from both sides provided a read-out of the meeting while the host president brushed aside chances of any news-making headlines emerging.

President Barack Obama, along with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, did not address a news conference but made post-summit statements in the White House Roosevelt Room.

Obama noted that “much has changed” since the last EU summit in Portugal last year. “What hasn’t changed is the fundamental bonds” between the U.S. and EU, he said.

Playing down the idea of there being news from the meetings, Obama said, “These aren’t always the most dramatic meetings because we agree on so much; that sometimes it’s hard to make news,” stressing fundamental bonds of freedom, democracy, law and free-market economies.

Without announcing any concrete measures to help out the European debt crisis from across the Atlantic, the President highlighted its “huge importance” to the U.S. economy, saying the U.S. “stands ready” to help Europe to resolve the debt crisis.

“You know, if Europe is contracting or if Europe is having difficulties, then it’s much more difficult for us to create good jobs here at home because we send so many of our products and services to Europe,” Obama said.

During the regular daily press briefing in the Brady room, White House spokesman Jay Carney also stressed that Europe needed to shoulder the responsibility.

Carney said, “Europe has the resources and capacity to deal with it and they need to act decisively and conclusively to resolve this problem.”

At a post-summit press conference at the Foreign Press Center, William Kennard, U.S. ambassador to the EU, reiterated American reluctance to move International Monetary Fund (IMF) or other international mechanisms to help Europe.

“I want to be very clear there was no discussion about the U.S. increasing its commitment to the IMF or making any other financial obligation to the EU. That was not a part of this discussion,” said Kennard.

On the other hand, both Barroso and Rompuy said that Europe wasn’t alone in dealing with debt problems.

“We, the European Union and the United States, have the strongest trade and economic relationship in the world. And we therefore both need to take strong action to address near-term growth concerns as well as fiscal and financial vulnerabilities,” Rompuy said.

“The world economy has not yet been able to absorb and overcome all the effects of the 2008 financial crisis,” Barroso said, adding, “We face the common challenge of bringing debt under control, while re-launching growth and creating new jobs. We all know this is not an easy task.”

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Market researcher RealtyTrac reported Thursday that the number of U.S. homeowners receiving first-time default notices rose 14 percent from July to September. First-time default notices are the first step in a process that leads to repossession.

The increase is a sign that banks are once again moving forward at a rapid rate against homeowners who have fallen behind in their mortgage payments.

On a positive note, the rate was 34 percent lower than the same period a year ago.

Faster foreclosures could also mean a faster turnaround for the housing market, experts say. But they also caution that the market will not see a revival while a large number of foreclosures still exists.

It also took longer for a home to reach foreclosure. In the third quarter, it took an average of 336 days, or 11.2 months, for a U.S. home to go from receiving an initial notice to being foreclosed by a lender. That was up from 318 days, or 10.6 months, from the second quarter. RealtyTrac notes that is the longest time span for the foreclosure process since the first quarter of 2007.

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Yonkers, NY, United States (AHN) – The saying “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” is seemingly true based on a two-year study of the groups. For American households earning less than $50,000 per year, it has been far more difficult on the economic road to recovery than their more affluent counterparts.

For more affluent households, those earning $100,000 or more, economic recovery began as far back as February 2010—when the Consumer Reports Sentiment Index score for this group moved into positive territory (above 50). In that time, sentiment among this affluent group, which represents 18 percent of Americans, has continued to rise and has reached a two-year high of 54.8.

However in the same period, sentiment levels of households earning less than $50,000 bottomed out in October of 2009. Since then, sentiment has barely risen among this group that represents 50 percent of the U.S. population.

“We are seeing a tale of two very different recoveries,” said Ed Farrell, a director of Survey Research at the Consumer Reports National Research Center. “While things have been improving for the wealthiest Americans for some time, lower-income families still have very little to be positive about.”

Analysts believe the disparity in sentiment levels could be attributed to the fact that lower-income households have suffered more pronounced and frequent financial troubles throughout the last two years.

Estimates place the financial suffering among lower-income Americans as being three to five times the level of those earning $100,000 or more over the course of the recession.

One of the biggest areas of disparity between the two groups is in their ability to afford medical coverage and prescription medication. The percentages of home ownership is a clear predictor of the two groups. Ninety percent of affluent households claim to own a home while only half of the lower income group can say the same.

Even now, missed mortgage payments among households earning less than $50,000 have soared, and are approaching 9 percent in June. Among the more affluent Americans, missed mortgage payment claims are below 2 percent and falling.

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They may also give you advice on the amount of loan for you to apply for as most credit counselors would advise you against borrowing more than you could actually afford to pay unless you can see an increase of income in your near future. In many cases, a bad credit report will have a major effect on your finances when you are applying for a home loan. Generally if your credit score is lower than 600, it is probably wise if you attempt to increase your credit score by paying off your credit card debts or any other unsecured debt before you apply for a home loan. Although there are lenders that specialize in bad credit financing, it is always better for you to make sure your credit score is above 600 in order to allow you to obtain an affordable home loan. Most lenders will probably charge you a higher interest rate due to your low credit scores so by increasing your credit scores you can reduce the chances of paying higher interest rates. It may also be a good idea for you to put down a larger down payment for the loan you are applying for.

This will make up for the fact that your credit score is low. By putting down a higher initial payment, your creditors will most likely not charge you a higher interest rate based solely on your credit scores. They are likely to take your large down payment into account and consider a lower monthly payment for you. So it is advisable that you start collecting money for a big down payment to show your creditors that you are financially responsible despite your low credit scores. Some financial advisors would also advise against getting a bad credit home loan with adjustable rate. This is due to the fact that many adjustable rate mortgages start off with a very low interest but as interest rates increase, you might find that you are not able to afford the higher interest rate down the road. It may be wiser to take a loan with lower risks such as a loan with fixed interest rate and fair fees.

By doing so, you might be able to save yourself the headache and stress of trying to figure out ways to keep up with the increasing interest rates of an adjustable rate mortgage. There will also be no surprises in the future as you know you can consistently afford to pay your mortgage at the fixed rate. All in all, it may always be better for you to try to increase your credit scores to above 600 before applying for a home loan if you find yourself in a bad credit situation. It might take you longer than usual or even more hard work on your part, but in the long run you might be saving yourself more money in the future and avoid digging yourself another bad credit hole.

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Once you get the approval from the lenders, you can expect the money very quickly in your personal bank account. Usually, amount is transferred to bank account electronically. This financial service does not contain any special condition or formality, like collateral, paperwork, documentation, faxing or credit check. As a result, the entire loan procedure is very simple, easy, convenient and quick. By filing up one application form through internet, you can expect the approval and money within few hours. Many lenders and banks have joined financial industry of UK and they all are offering unsecured bad credit loans to needy people. As far as rate of interest and APR is concerned, you may find the deal a bit expensive but by performing research over the internet, you can grab the affordable and cheap loan quotes.

Unsecured bad credit loans can be divided into many categorized, like bad credit car loans, bad credit personal loans, bad credit home loans, bad credit tenant loans etc. However, purpose of finance is same for every category to provide fast and required amount to borrowers. Under this loan category, you can easily manage to grab desired amount in the range of 500-25000 for the period of 6 months-10 years. So, fulfill your all dreams without placing any property and in spite of bad credit score.

You can avail bad credit unsecured loans through the Internet. All you need to have is one computer system with an Internet connection. If you have two of these with you, you can get cash sitting at home. You are not needed going to any brick and mortar places now. Those days are now gone when the borrowers had to run after the lenders for money. Now, you can get it just by filling an online application form and providing it to the lender. The lender will analyze your form and will approve you for the loan, in case the information provided satisfies him. Within a short span of 24 hours, the requested amount will be transferred to your bank account.

These loans are unsecured in nature. There is no provision of collateral security in these loans. The lenders provide you cash on risk as they do not ask you to pledge anything as collateral security. That is the reason we call these loans unsecured in nature. The provision of collateral security has relieved many people who cannot afford to pledge anything expensive like a car or home.

The ones having low credit scores are also approved for these loans. There are absolutely no credit checks. You are not needed worrying even if you are poor at credits. We approve almost everyone. All the best!