Mortgage Bankers Association - "Mortgage Applications Increase In Latest MBA Weekly Survey" (9-03-08)

"The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) today released its Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending August 29, 2008. The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, was 453.1, an increase of 7.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from 421.6 one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 5.8 percent compared with the previous week and was down 27.0 percent compared with the same week one year earlier."

Inman News - "Construction spending slides" (9-03-08)

"Spending on residential construction projects in July fell 27.5 percent from a year ago, the U.S. Census Bureau reported this week. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of private residential construction was $357.8 billion in July, compared with $493.6 billion a year earlier, and was down 2.3 percent from $366.1 billion in June '08. Spending has fallen in each of the last 17 months."

Yahoo - "House Prices Still Too High Despite Collapse" (9-03-08)

"The median price of an existing single- family home as a percentage of median disposable income rose to a record high of 469.5% in 2005, far above the median value of 337.9% during the history of this series (1968-2007) which includes the inflationary period of the later 1970s and the sharp increase in home prices seen in the first seven years of the current decade. Excluding the problematic period of the 1970s and the current decade, the median was 336.5%."

Bloomberg - "GMAC Mortgage Unit to Dismiss 5,000, Shut 200 Offices" (9-03-08)

"GMAC LLC and its Residential Capital LLC home loan unit plan to dismiss 5,000 employees, or 60 percent of the unit's staff, and close all 200 GMAC Mortgage retail offices because of weak real estate markets."

Bloomberg - "Ex-Credit Suisse Brokers Charged With Subprime Fraud" (9-03-08)

"Two former Credit Suisse Group AG brokers were charged with violating securities laws by fraudulently selling corporate clients subprime mortgages linked to auction-rate securities."

Bloomberg - "Rosengren Says Credit Crunch Blunting Fed Rate Cuts" (9-03-08)

"Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President Eric Rosengren said the U.S. credit crunch has blunted the impact of the fastest interest-rate cuts in two decades, signaling he opposes raising borrowing costs."

Bloomberg - "BlackRock Seeks $3 Billion for Fund to Buy Bank Loans" (9-03-08)

"BlackRock Inc., the biggest publicly traded U.S. asset manager, is seeking as much as $3 billion for a fund to buy loans that banks are selling for losses, said two investors with knowledge of the matter."

CNN - "Pick-a-payment loans turn poisonous" (9-03-08)

"Option ARMs are loans that allow borrowers to make very low minimum payments that don't even cover the interest for the loans. The difference is then added to the mortgage balance, which grows every month. There are about one million option ARMs outstanding, according to Fitch, and somewhere between 10% and 24% of these are seriously delinquent - 90 days or more past due. But payments are slated to jump for large numbers of option ARM borrowers in the next two years, which Fitch predicts will double that delinquency rate."