Guaranteed Online Personal Loans

The sad effects of the housing market continue to impact many companies. In a recent study the current housing market looks as though it will drop immensely in the fourth quarter also for banking companies across the globe with housing assets. It looks as though Deutsche Bank analyst Michael Mayo believes that large banks like Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and Bank of America will lose a combined $10 Billion dollars during this upcoming quarter.

Mayo feels that the bulk of this pain will be by Merrill Lynch and Citibank. The impact on these loses are felt by the companies and many different aspects of the economy. Merrill Lynch already lost nearly $8 billion this last quarter and now it looks like it isn’t going to get any better and write downs will continue to happen. What is sad is that investors will have to continue to worry about these banks and their assets over the course of the next couple years. Mayo believes that it will continue down this path making it hard for investors like you and me to get good loans with good rates.

Shai Agassi, known for being a pioneer and a visionary in the world of software, is making an adventurous move into an old, stubborn world: the world of auto manufacturing. No, he’s not trying to create the next Saturn or (heaven forbid) Daewoo. He’s putting his visionary nature into both capitalism and environmentalism. He’s trying to start an electric car company like nobody has tried to do it before.

The critics will say he’s crazy, but he really may be onto something here. He’s taking a much different approach. All electric cars up to this point have involved the car being a self contained unit in the sense that it carries its batteries and recharges at home. Agassi’s vision is that the batteries will be entirely separate from the cars - the way gasoline is separate from the cars we’re driving today.

The company would set up service stations across the country where electric car owners could exchange their dead batteries for new ones, and a wireless communication network would let the driver know where the nearest battery outlet is. Innovative indeed.

This project will seem far-fetched, but at least it’s not going to be underfunded. Agassi has already raised $200 Million. Not a bad little pile of seed capital.

I only have one question about any project that involves electric cars - what about the environmental impact of generating the electricity to power the cars. Won’t that still involve coal-fired power plants and carbon emissions? Is their a big net reduction in the environmental impact or are we just shifting things around?

The biggest fly to be swatted so far by the struggling real estate market is the CEO of Merrill Lynch who finally stepped down on October 30th to clear way to a new path for Merrill Lynch. Stanley O’Neal had little choice after Merrill Lynch lost nearly $8 billion dollars during the third quarter of the 2007 calendar year.

It really doesn’t matter what industry you are in or how big your company is, if you are losing that much money with your business then obviously some changes are going to need to be made and heads are going to roll. There have already been changes in other leadership roles to help stop the bleeding that has been going on with the traditionally dominant company in the past. In this case it is starting from the top and will trickle down as Merrill Lynch looks to rebound after such a difficult struggle.

Apparently O’Neal pushed for a merger with Wachovia recently and that helped to accelerate he exit out of the door from the board members of Merrill Lynch. What is sad for companies like Merrill Lynch and their employees is that things do not look like there will get better for the subprime real estate market.

Between basically 2002 and 2005 lenders started using creative mortgages in ways they’d never been used before. New mortgages were invented and sent to the market that allowed people to borrow for large homes they would normally not be able to afford.

The problem with these loans was they acted like promotional credit cards - they carried a low initial interest rate that would step up to something more normal when the promotional period ended. Unfortunately, consumers borrowed money n0t based on whether they could afford the conventional payment, but whether they could afford the promotional payment.

Fast forward to 2006 and 2007. Interest rates have risen, and these aggressive borrowers are seeing their promotional interest periods end. Their rates are climbing, and worse, they’re variable. That means that in theory their monthly payment could increase every month until they hit their maximum interest rate per the terms of the loan, which could go as high as 15% to 18%. The difference in the monthly mortgage could be hundreds of dollars. That jump in payment would kill almost any family’s budget.

This equation leads to families defaulting on payments, which puts mortgage companies in jeopardy. With lenders in jeopardy, their first move is to severely tighten lending practices. This keeps money out of the economy, and as we’ve seen, kills home sales.

The moral of the story? Both lenders and borrowers will need to be more forward thinking in the future to avoid the type of crisis we’re seeing in the US economy today.

The economy is slowing, and energy prices seem to be poised to go through the roof, but stocks are improving on hopes that an interest rate cut by the Fed will spark economic activity.

Even as oil prices have gone over $93, the DOW average improved nearly fifty points. This can mostly be attributed to widely held expectations that the Fed will cut the right by at least 1/4%. Back in September the Fed cut the rate by .5%. It’s not widely believed that this cut will be as big, but hopes are high that there will be a corresponding spike in lending and spending.

“It’s kind of a psychological sort of move,” Wren said. “A 25 basis-point cut isn’t going to ease the credit crunch. But it’ll give the Fed a little more time to figure out what’s going on with the economy.*”

So said Scot Wren, an equity analyst and strategist for a major US financial firm.

Optimism about the economy isn’t due entirely to the expected drop in interest rates. Several huge companies are also reporting increases in profits in spite of a sluggish economy. That kind of result in the face of generally adverse conditions gives investors hope, and encourages them to buy.

This story illustrates the huge factor human emotion plays in the movement and success of markets. Many of us may think that markets have a mind of their own, and individual outlooks aren’t a big factor. But you have to realize that every person has a perspective and when you aggregate those perspectives what you get is the ebb and flow of markets in general. That’s why in can be so dangerous to follow the crowd in your investing strategy.

It seems that there isn’t as much cause for panic as some would have us believe.