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Archive for January, 2009

Foreclosed Homeowners Should Stay Put Says Congresswoman

If you’re poor and the bank is coming for your home, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has a plan for you.

Just squat, she says.

Yes, this Ohio Democrat is actually encouraging her financially distressed constituents whose homes have been foreclosed upon, to simply stay put.

In a Friday report, CNN’s Drew Griffin explored the case of Ohioan Andrea Geiss, whose home was foreclosed upon in April.

“Behind in payments, out of work, a husband sick, she had nowhere to go,” said Griffin. “So, she decided to follow the advice of her Congresswoman and go nowhere.”

“So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes,” said Congresswoman Kaptur before the House of Representatives. “Don’t you leave.”

She’s called on all of her foreclosed-upon constituents to stay in their homes and refuse to leave without “an attorney and a fight,” said CNN.

By telling a bank to “produce the note,” a homeowner can delay foreclosure by forcing the lender to prove the suing institution is actually the same which owns the debt.

Union Membership Rises for Second Straight Year

WASHINGTON — Amid widening unemployment, home foreclosures and credit woes, union membership jumped to 12.4 percent of the work force last year.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the ranks of organized labor rose by 428,000 workers — the biggest annual gain since the government began compiling such data in 1983. It’s also the second year in a row that unions have added to their ranks.

Membership rose by 311,000 members in 2007, to account for 12.1 percent of workers. Overall, union membership remains well below the peak of 35 percent during labor’s heyday of the 1950s.

Membership was about 20 percent in 1983, the first year the bureau began compiling the numbers.

Unemployment Sweeps Nation

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Unemployment spiked in all states nationwide in December for the first time as companies shed hundreds of thousands of positions, federal data released Tuesday shows.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia recorded unemployment rate increases compared with the previous month and the year prior period, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported.

The report marked the first time every state recorded a rise in monthly unemployment since the bureau began keeping such records in 1976.

Michigan and Rhode Island once again led the nation with the highest jobless rates at 10.6% and 10% respectively. Rhode Island’s rate is the highest in more than three decades.

Your Bailout Money at Work

“The notion of Citigroup spending $50 million on a new corporate jet, even as it is depending on billions of taxpayer dollars to survive, does not fly,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit. “To permit Citigroup to purchase a plush plane — foreign-built no less — while domestic auto companies are being required to sell off their jets is a ridiculous double standard.”

Citigroup has received $45 billion in government funding. It ordered a $50 million French-made Dassault Falcon 7X in 2005 and is to take possession this year.

This is the latest expense of a Wall Street bank that’s received billions in government aid to draw ire. Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain spent $1.2 million to redecorate his office last year — including $1,400 on a wastebasket — and will repay Merrill’s parent company Bank of America.

Economy is Getting Worse

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Economists expect an already deep recession to get even worse in 2009, according to a survey released Monday.

Companies will lay off more workers and hoard more cash during the next 12 months, according to the National Association for Business Economics survey, a quarterly take from a panel of economists at private-sector companies in various industries. A vast majority of the 105 economists polled believe the country’s gross domestic product will continue to sink in 2009.

If business conditions indeed worsen during the year, they will be sinking from already historic lows. The survey’s measures of consumer demand, profit margins and capital expenditures all hit their lowest-ever levels in January’s edition of the 27-year old survey.

The Job Market is Worse Than You Think

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The unemployment rate rose to 7.2% in December, the highest it has been since 1993. That’s obviously not good news.

But the job market might be in even worse shape than this number suggests. There’s a growing number of market experts who think that the government’s employment statistics don’t accurately paint the true picture of the job market.

Now to be fair, the government also does report a so-called underemployment rate, which includes some part-time workers as well as people who have given up looking for work during the past year. That figure is now 13.5%.

But one prominent critic, John Williams, an economist and publisher of the research site Shadowstats.com, said that when you take into account the large number of people who have been so discouraged by job market woes that they have not been actively looking for work for more than a year, the unemployment rate is actually as high as 17.5%