City of Business and Property

Mortgage applications plunged to a seven month low last week as demand for home refinancing loans tumbled 30%, data from an industry group showed Wednesday. The drop does not bode well for the hard-hit housing market, which is showing some signs of stabilization, with sales rising and home price declines moderating in many regions of the country. The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance loans, for the week ended June 26 decreased 18.9% to 444.8, the lowest reading since November. Read the rest of this entry »

The Obama administration on Monday announced that it would put solar energy development in the West on a fast track, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signing an order that sets aside more than 1,000 square miles of public land for two years of study and environmental reviews. Although the clean-energy initiative identifies some 676,000 acres of federal land for study, more than half — 351,000 acres in the Mojave Desert — are in California. According to maps released by the Interior Department, the solar project areas about the border of Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave Preserve and two national wildlife refuges in the southeastern part of the state. The proposed California solar-generating areas are projected to have the annual capacity to produce 39,000 to 70,000 megawatts of electricity at full development — enough to serve millions of homes. Read the rest of this entry »

Buy shares of good companies and hang on. That’s the way millions of investors have been trained to almost religiously invest for the long haul. Even Warren Buffett likes to say his favorite holding period is forever. But this seemingly common-sense approach, which has worked remarkably well over the decades for patient investors, proved extremely treacherous during the bear market. Investors holding onto some well-known stocks saying “they will come back” often found themselves holding onto stocks with next to no value. Since the start of the decade, shares of 25 U.S. companies that had market values of $4 billion or more are now trading for $2 or less, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ. Half of those were even booted from a major stock exchange and now trade on lightly regulated markets. General Motors was the most recent example. Shares of the hallmark of American enterprise traded for nearly $73 a share on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000. Now, GM trades for less than $2 on the Pink Sheets market. That’s what makes this twist so shocking. Household-name companies, several with massive market values, seemed to be exactly the kinds of stocks to safely hold long-term. But many of these well-known stocks ended up crashing like fly-by-night penny stocks. The list of other stocks investors rode down to practically nothing includes financial firms American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual and E-Trade, technology stocks including Level 3 Communications and Conexant Systems, and retailerCircuit City.