After announcing a $305 million restructuring of its UK operations and job cuts numbering 1,400, Australian banking major NAB has seen its share price fall.
The lender recently announced a loss on its UK business for the half year ending March 31st resulted in a 15.6 drop in its own half yearly profit, which came in at $2.05 billion.
NAB says it will spend $305 million streamlining its UK operations, and will focus on both business lending and retail banking.
U.S. home prices posted a small gain in March, their first overall increase in eight months, according to figures released today by the real estate data firm CoreLogic.
Including foreclosures and other distressed sales, home prices in March were up 0.6 percent over their February level, their first overall gain since July 2011. Excluding distressed sales, prices showed a 0.9 percent increase. It was the third monthly increase in a row for prices of nondistressed homes. On an annual basis, prices on nondistressed homes were up 0.9 percent from March 2011. When foreclosures and other distressed homes are figured in, prices showed an annual decline of 0.6 percent over the previous 12 months. Read the full post
Mortgage rates retreated this week, with 30-year loans falling back below the 4 percent mark after briefly surging above it for the first time in months.
The broad-based decline, which occurred in all major loan types, at least temporarily eased fears that mortgage rates were beginning a long-anticipated climb back toward more historic norms. The recent release of several downbeat reports on the housing market accompanied the decline. Average interest rates on standard 30-year fixed-rate mortgages fell back to 3.99 percent, down from 4.08 percent last week, according to the weekly Freddie Mac rate survey. Prior to last week’s sharp gain, 30-year rates had not exceeded 4 percent since late October. Read the full post
Savings Accounts and Money Market Rates provided by 1 December 2011 U.S. stocks climbed higher following Standard & Poor’s largest gain in a month as consumer confidence surpassed analysts’ expectations, increasing by the most since 2003, Bloomberg reports.
Exxon Mobil Corp. climbed 1.4 percent on an oil rally while Yahoo! spiked 2.3 percent after Thomas H. Lee Partners showed interest in a bid. Hewlett-Packard Co. also grew 1.4 percent after RBC Capital Markets increased its rating for the company’s shares.
On Tuesday, November 29, the S&P 500 rose 0.2 percent to 1,195.19, a 3.2 percent rally in two days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also saw growth, adding 32.62 points, or 0.3 percent, according to the news source. Read the full post
Fitch, the global credit ratings agency has downgraded Macquarie Group’s banking arm from A to A-, citing the lenders reliance on wholesale funding markets, and the market orientated nature of its businesses.
Investors however seemed largely unconcerned by the news, with Macquarie shares rising for the fourth consecutive day. T
Only 5 percent of underwater homeowners are likely to qualify for mortgage principal reductions under the recent $25 billion foreclosure abuses settlement, an economist with the Brookings Institution has calculated.
Those 500,000 homeowners would see principal reductions averaging $20,000 each, based on the $10 billion of the settlement set aside for that purpose, according to recently published estimates by Ted Gayer, co-director of economics studies for the Brookings Institution. Even so, Gayer estimates that would eliminate only 30 percent of the equity deficit of the average underwater homeowner.
There are currently 11.1 million U.S. Read the full post