US consumers are defaulting on credit-card payments at a significantly higher rate than last year, raising the prospect of problems in the stricken US subprime mortgage market spreading to other types of consumer debt. Credit-card companies were forced to write off 4.58 per cent of payments as uncollectable in the first half of 2007, almost 30 per cent higher year-on-year. Late payments also rose, and the quarterly payment rate – a measure of cardholders’ willingness and ability to repay their debt – fell for the first time in more than four years. Analysts at Moody’s, the rating agency, said the trend could be related to the slowdown in the US property market and a fall in the number of borrowers rolling their mortgage debt into new and cheaper home loans. Story continues below ↓advertisement ‘The combination of higher interest rates and a softer real estate market diminished the attractiveness of mortgage refinancings in which many borrowers reduced their more expensive credit-card debt by drawing on the equity in their home,’ Moody’s said. But it is not clear that the borrowers defaulting on their credit cards are the same people defaulting on their subprime mortgages, it added. […]
Americans are already among the fattest people in the world, and they just keep packing on the pounds. A new report finds that obesity rates have swelled during the last year in 31 states with not one state reporting that its obesity rate shrank. art.obese.gi.jpg Two-thirds of U.S. adults are obese or overweight, according to the Trust for America’s Health. And, for the first time, more than 30 percent of residents in one state — Mississippi — are classified as obese. Nationwide, two-thirds of U.S. adults are obese or overweight, according to the fourth annual report from the Trust for America’s Health, titled ‘F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America.’ The report’s co-author says the government needs to treat this trend as an epidemic that threatens the health of Americans and put in place a national plan to combat obesity. ‘The key recommendation in the report is we need a national strategy,’ said report co-author Jeffrey Levi. He noted that the federal government has created a comprehensive plan to be implemented in the event of an outbreak of pandemic flu. ‘We need something like that in obesity that says this […]
BONN, Germany — It rains year round in Germany. Clouds cover the skies for about two-thirds of all daylight hours. Yet the country has managed to become the world’s leading solar power generator. Even though millions of Germans flee their damp, dark homeland for holidays in the Mediterranean sun, 55 percent of the world’s photovoltaic (PV) power is generated on solar panels set up between the Baltic Sea and the Black Forest. So far just 3 percent of Germany’s electricity comes from the sun, but the government wants to raise the share of renewables to 27 percent of all energy by 2020 from 13 percent. It is a thriving industry with booming exports that has created tens of thousands of jobs in recent years, posting growth rates that surpassed the optimistic forecasts made by the fathers of a pioneering 2000 renewable energy law. This law, known by the acronym EEG, has helped this cloudy, rainy country on the northern rim of central Europe become a solar giant. ‘The EEG was the single most important vehicle to boost the solar energy market,’ Frank Asbeck, chairman of SolarWorld AG, told Reuters. The law, which offers cash incentives […]
The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950. Economists say the decline, which could be foreshadowed in a widely followed government price index to be released this week, will probably be modest – from 1 percent to 2 percent – but could continue in 2008 and 2009. Rather than being limited to the once-booming Northeast and California, price declines are also occurring in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis and Houston, where the increases of the last decade were modest by comparison. The reversal is particularly striking because many government officials and housing-industry executives had said that a nationwide decline would never happen, even though prices had fallen in some coastal areas as recently as the early 1990s. While the housing slump has already rattled financial markets, it has so far had only a modest effect on consumer spending and economic growth. But forecasters now believe that its impact will lead to a slowdown over the next year or two. ‘For most people, this is not a disaster,’ said Nigel Gault, an economist with Global Insight, a research firm in Waltham, […]
WASHINGTON — A new assessment of Iraq by U.S. intelligence agencies provides little evidence that the American troop ‘surge’ has accomplished its goals and predicts that the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will become ‘more precarious’ in the months ahead. A declassified summary of the report released Thursday said that violence remains high, warns that U.S. alliances with former Sunni Muslim insurgents could undercut the central government and says that political compromises are ‘unlikely to emerge’ in the next 12 months. Perhaps most strikingly, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that factions and political players in and outside Iraq already are maneuvering in expectation of a drawdown of U.S. troops - moves that could later heighten sectarian bloodshed. ‘The national intelligence assessment confirms what we feared the most: The U.S. has become deeply embroiled in Iraq’s civil war,’ said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. A White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said the report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, showed that President Bush’s decision to send an additional 28,000 troops to Iraq is beginning to have an effect. While it said that the surge has brought ‘measurable, but uneven […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
