Political Economy category archive

The Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas released on Tuesday showed prices of previously owned homes fell 2.2 percent in March, deepening their year-on-year decline.

Separately, the Conference Board said its consumer confidence index slumped to 57.2 this month from 62.8 in April as rising gasoline costs and falling home prices made Americans increasingly nervous both about current conditions and the future.

Holloway quickly went back to work. ANB Financial N.A., a bank in Bentonville, Ark. with $2.1 billion in assets and $1.8 billion in customer deposits, was failing and an expert like Holloway was needed to value the assets and find a stronger institution to take them on.

“I was very excited about coming back,” Holloway said in an interview. “I’m now 57. There’s still a lot of life left and the juices are flowing again.”

On May 9, life for ANB ended when the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, another bank regulator, announced that the lender was closing. . . .

For some, there is even a growing recognition that American consumers have been living too large, spending too fast, borrowing too much. Whether today’s circumstantial thriftiness gives rise to a more frugal culture remains to be seen, but some experts hope the current crisis will at least encourage more rational spending habits.

“In past years, we’ve seen people talking the talk, but now they’re walking the walk,” said Jack R. Nerad, executive market analyst for Kelley Blue Book Marketing Research.

It’s certainly achieving it for the time being. A study of middle-class Americans last month by the Pew Foundation found that more than half have had to reduce their spending in the past year. A quarter expect to have trouble paying bills. Within the course of the past year, heating oil has leapt more than 50 percent nationally, and gasoline is up 25 percent.

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The Pentagon did not have the proper documentation, including receipts, vouchers, signatures, invoices or other paperwork, for $7.8 billion that American and Iraqi contractors were paid for phones, folders, paint, blankets, Nissan trucks, laundry services and other items, according to a 69-page audit released to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The number of transactions during the month was 1% lower than in March to an annual rate of 4.89 million, said the National Association

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The national median existing-home price for all housing types was $202,300 in April, which is 8% below a year ago when the median was $219,900.

Analysts predicted further price falls to come as a result of the increasing backlog of unsold homes.

What’s more, some local stations now are charging more for customers who pay by credit card than they do for motorists paying cash.

With the cost of copper and other metals skyrocketing, thieves around the world are targeting outdoor sculpture to sell as scrap.

Thus far, Philadelphia appears to have dodged the copper bullet. But not entirely.

In late January, the plaque from Henry Moore’s 1964 bronze sculpture Three-Way Piece Number 1: Points was discovered missing from Triangle Park at 16th Street and the Parkway.

The plaque, which had been embedded in the grass next to the sidewalk, has not been found. The 7-foot, 3-inch sculpture, owned and maintained by the Fairmount Park Art Association, is untouched.

Other cities have not been as lucky.

“For squatters, foreclosed homes like this are like a camp-ground with free camping,” says real-estate broker Marc Charney, a foreclosure specialist, as he enters the home in Brockton, Massachusetts, and shines a flash-light at a mattress where homeless people have been sleeping each night.

The Philadelphia area was in the same boat, seeing grocery prices rise 1.2 percent from February to April. Unlike the national data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics studies regional inflation figures every two months.

The bad news is being felt in food categories most consumers know and love: bread, milk, butter – even coffee. They are staples people buy every week. The kinds consumers cannot help but notice are costing more.

Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida were among the hardest hit states, with metropolitan areas in California and Florida accounting for nine of the top 10 areas with the highest rate of foreclosure, the company said.

Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac monitors default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

The price was averaging $3.78 today in the five-county Philadelphia region and $3.62 in South Jersey.

At the national level, the average was $3.78.

These are, social-service advocates say, dire days for families already beset by climbing gas prices and declining wages.

At the kitchen table, the gas pump and the workplace, people are being squeezed and compelled to live their lives with less and less.

But food is the greatest worry.

“We have a crisis,” said Sydelle Zove, interim food-stamp campaign manager for the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger.

“Meals are scarce,” said Susan Smith, a 44-year-old Chester woman with diminishing means. “I’m 5-foot-10 and weigh 130. I should weigh 150.

“I need some food.”

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The Horsham-based builder of luxury homes did not disclose how many votes came out in favor of the plan. But a shareholder activist group said executives disclosed at the shareholders meeting that it was at least 50 percent. Media were barred from attending the event.

CEO Robert Toll didn’t get a bonus for 2007 as the housing market slumped. But under the new CEO bonus plan, the company said, he would have received $6.56 million.

In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and coauthor Linda J. Bilmes write in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and “realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project that the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion – or more – by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

There was the “whew, I need a break period.”

There was the “sitting looking at the television period,” in which he was too depressed and too worried to move.

Now Grillet, 30, is in the “omigod, my unemployment insurance runs out in two months phase.”

Here’s how it works. As we know, millions of families are facing foreclosure on their homes because they have mortgages that they can’t afford and live in homes that are worth less than the amount on their mortgages. This is a situation where the banks would ordinarily take a huge hit since they have no hope of recouping anywhere near the amount owed on the mortgages when the homes go through the foreclosure process.

The cost of compost, heating oil and other essentials needed to grow mushrooms has risen so quickly since Hurricane Katrina caused a spike in crude-oil prices two years ago that some growers in the area – where more than half the nation’s mushrooms are produced – say they are operating in the red.