Latest Interest rates Stories

Troubled U.S. homeowners could save up to $823 million from a predatory lending settlement reached this week with Bank of America, state officials say. Under the terms of the deal, Bank of America neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing but agreed to modify the terms of 390,000 subprime and option ARM mortgages originated by Countrywide Financial Corp., which was acquired by BofA last year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The bank has so far modified 50,000 of the mortgages, a report...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. agreed to a $60 million settlement with the state of Massachusetts over its role in the subprime mortgage meltdown. About $50 million of the settlement will go to homeowners struggling to recover from loans that went bad, The Boston Globe reported Monday. The rest of the settlement will go to the state, the newspaper said. A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office, Amie Breton, said the bulk of Goldman Sachs's subprime mortgages were found in Boston, Brockton,...

Sweden's Riksbank cut its repo rate 0.5 percentage points to 0.5 percent Tuesday, citing a decline in economic conditions. The deterioration in global economic activity has hit Sweden hard, the bank said in a statement. The bank noted a substantial drop in exports, a rapidly declining labor market and weak consumer spending. A lower rate was needed to counteract production and employment being too weak and to attain the inflation target of 2 percent, the bank said, noting rates would remain...

Canada's central bank lowered its key lending rate as low as possible Tuesday, cutting it a quarter percentage point to 0.25 percent. In a statement from Ottawa, the Bank of Canada cited continued high uncertainty and weaker-than-expected activity in all major economies as the rationale. Bank policy is that the one-quarter percent lower bound prevents short-term money market disruptions. The statement said despite aggressive monetary and fiscal policy actions among the Group of 20 countries,...

The Council of Mortgage Lenders in Britain said new loans for home buyers jumped 4 percent in February, indicating a possible turnabout in the housing market. The CML said 24,300 new loans were approved in February, compared with 23,400 in January, The Times of London reported Tuesday. After months of falling home values, building society Nationwide reported home prices gained 0.9 percent in March. In addition, Hometrack said the number of registered potential buyers increased last month. In...

Wells Fargo Bank and HSBC Bank intentionally steered African-Americans who qualified for conventional mortgages into costlier subprime loans, a lawsuit claims. The suit, filed Friday by the civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, stems from governmental and advocacy group studies indicating that blacks are more likely to wind up with higher-cost subprime loans than whites, even though their income, assets and...

A U.S. Chamber of Commerce official said U.S. President Barack Obama's foreclosure prevention plan could haunt the overall economic recovery process. While the administration's plan to stabilize the housing market is laudable, Chamber Executive Vice President Bruce Josten said, if risky mortgages got us in to this crisis, extending those risky mortgages will only postpone the pain and hamper recovery. Additionally, the 'cram down' plan will create hundreds of separate mortgage modification...

A New York Law firm said it filed a class-action lawsuit against J.P. Morgan & Chase for monthly service fees attached to some low-interest credit cards. Affected customers calling Chase said they were offered a $10 monthly fee and a higher minimum payment schedule -- jumping minimum payments from 2 percent to 5 percent of their balances -- or a higher interest rate, USA Today reported Monday. Chase spokeswoman Stephanie Jacobson said the new policy affected credit card holders with...

U.S. consumers have pulled back on payments to credit card companies as they struggle to keep up with bills, a research firm said. CardTrak.com, which tracks credit card data, said consumers in November paid 16.1 percent of their outstanding debt, a drop of 2.5 percent, which is the largest decline on record. It's kind of shocking, CardTrak.com founder Robert McKinley told USA Today. It indicates that there are fundamental changes in the way that consumers view and use credit, he said....

The global credit crisis did not originate with China's build up of savings, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said. Albert Keidel, in effect, discounted U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.'s analysis of the credit crisis, the China Daily reported Friday. In the years leading up to the crisis, super-abundant savings from fast-growing emerging nations such as China and oil exporters ... put downward pressure on yields and risk spread everywhere, Paulson...