Foreclosure filings issued to U.S. homeowners have fallen for the second straight month. According to new data released by RealtyTrac Thursday, default notices, scheduled auctions, and bank repossessions were reported on 308,524 properties in February. That's a 2 percent decrease from January, when foreclosure activity dropped by 10 percent. February's numbers are still 6 percent above the level reported one year earlier, but RealtyTrac says it's the smallest annual increase the company has tracked since January 2006.
Fitch Ratings warned Tuesday that the still-weak financial fundamentals of the nation's lenders have cemented its rating outlook for the U.S. banking sector as negative. The New York-based agency did note, though, that many of the factors that have been putting downward pressure on banks' ratings, including lending and liquidity, are easing. However, commercial real estate exposure, particularly for regional banks, as well as consumer mortgages are expected to weigh heavy on lenders' earnings into 2011.
An activist group who says its purpose is to investigate and prosecute government corruption is in a federal court battle to get its hands on documents detailing the political contributions made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The organization says its been trying to get access to the GSEs' records since May of last year but has been denied by the companies' regulator, who is shielding the documents under claims that the government-controlled firms are private corporations. No. 2 on the GSEs' list of campaign contribution recipients is President Obama.
Marking the sixth straight month of declines, national house prices fell 2.3 percent in January, according to the latest IAS360 House Price Index (HPI) released Wednesday by Denver-based Integrated Asset Services, LLC (IAS). The culprit? IAS says unusually severe winter weather in large regions of the country may have added to housing market woes. The January numbers resulted in the largest single-month decline in the IAS360 in more than a year.
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