| Lending Club Partners with Top University Alumni Associations to ...
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Since the early 1900s, homecoming has marked the return of millions of alumni looking to reconnect and give back to their alma maters across the country. Lending Club, the rapidly growing people-to-people (P2P) lending service, today announced the availability of its affinity-based lending service through the websites of top university alumni associations to offer a new way to lend and borrow money among fellow alumni. Lending Club is the first in the P2P lending industry to provide co-branded lending applications to online communities, including the alumni associations at Georgia Tech, Kansas State and University of Michigan. "Whether it's helping fellow alumni pay off student loans or launch new enterprises, we offer a rewarding new way for alumni to invest directly in each other," said Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club.
It takes more green to fill grocery bags
They'll get some tax breaks, too. Businesses will be able to immediately write off 50 percent of purchases of plants and other capital equipment. Small businesses currently are able to take tax deductions on the first $125,000 they spend on new equipment, Marita said. That will be raised to $250,000. In both cases, the deduction eligibility likely will apply to this calendar year and not be retroactive, Marita said, because the government wants to encourage spending. Q: Since mortgages and foreclosures are a big part of the problem with the economy, how will homeowners be helped? A: The stimulus package includes changes in mortgage lending, including a one-year increase in Freddie Mac's and Fannie Mae's conforming loan limits (from $417,000 to a maximum of $729,750), and a permanent increase in the FHA loan limit from $367,000 now up to a maximum of $729,750.
Mayor sues NY banks over subprime crisis
CLEVELAND, Jan. 11 Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson is suing Wall Street over the U.S. economy-threatening subprime lending crisis.
Jackson, a Democrat, filed his suit against 21 banks in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, naming venerable institutions such as Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo for creating a public nuisance.
The mayor contends the companies irresponsibly bought and sold high-interest home loans to people who had "no realistic means of keeping up with their loan payments," resulting in widespread defaults that depleted the city's tax base and left entire neighborhoods in ruins, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer reported.
City officials hope to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, including lost taxes from devalued property and money spent tearing down or boarding up thousands of abandoned houses.
Motley Fool Personal Finance: Beware The Two-Tier Mortgage
If you dislike horror stories then please look away now, especially if you borrow money. That's because a two-tier mortgage market is just around the corner. According to the Bank of England, lenders scaled back lending to households in the last three months of 2007 as strains in the money market took its toll. The Bank's quarterly credit survey shows that households found it increasingly difficult to borrow money towards the end of last year. Unsecured lending, which includes credit cards, personal loans and car financing, fell. Worryingly, secured lending, which are loans secured against properties, also fell as a result of banks reducing their appetite for risk. The upshot is that some homeowners who are coming off fixed-rate mortgage deals may find it difficult to get new loans.
Local Financial Services Industry Laying Off By The Hundreds
Financial services, a growth industry for the local economy in recent years, has been cutting staff at a faster rate this year as the upheaval in the mortgage-lending sector continues. On top of cuts inflicted at mortgage banks and brokerages, the student loan industry is cutting staff in reaction to changes in the federal subsidies granted to private lenders. Through the end of September, 1,500 jobs have been pared from the payrolls of San Diego financial services employers over the previous 12 months, according to the most recent report from the state Employment Development Department. Most are related to the national slowdown in the housing market. For example, Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co. cut about three-fourths of its staff starting this year, to 1,000 from 4,000 at the end of last year.
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