Shiller on New York: We're Ancient Rome, Right Before the Fal

News during the Asian trading session that the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority would invest $7.5B in Citibank led the Nikkei to rebound, and pushed FX carry trades like USDJPY and GBPJPY to rocket higher as well. While the positive sentiment waned over the following few hours, the greenback remains stronger than yesterday, with pairs like EURUSD and GBPUSD down slightly from Monday’s highs near 1.49 and 2.07, respectively. Nevertheless, as London traders started to come into play, better-than-expected German sentiment data along with disappointing forecasts for today’s US economic data reignited the Euro. Indeed, the German IFO business climate survey surprisingly rose in November to 104.2 from 103.9, putting an end to six consecutive months of declines. Current assessments remained buoyant as well, suggesting that investors are still relatively optimistic despite instability in the financial markets and the tightening of credit conditions. read more

Trillion Dollar Bus

Phyllis Gilpatrick was in a nursing home, recuperating from her third hip surgery, on the day she and her husband refinanced their Brighton house.

She was in no condition for an office closing. So a van whisked her home, where she initialed a pile of loan documents while reclining on her back in a wheelchair.

Signing the documents put Phyllis, a disabled truck dispatcher, and her husband, Donald, a retired trucker, into a subprime loan for $301,500 that would soon double their previous payments and leave them on the brink of foreclosure.

"I was too much worried about the wife and everything," said Donald. "I didn't read the paperwork."

Their story provides a look into the swelling subprime-lending crisis. read more

Top Australian CEOs snub Government wage freeze plan

Stockton, Calif., Detroit, Michigan and Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., had the three highest foreclosure rates among the 100 biggest U.S. metro areas in the quarter.

Stockton's rate of one foreclosure filing for every 31 households, the highest of the metro areas, was a surge of more than 30 percent from the prior quarter. A total of 7,116 filings on 4,409 properties were reported in the metro area during the quarter.

In Detroit, the foreclosure rate of one filing for every 33 households ranked second and was more than double the number of filings reported in the previous quarter, RealtyTrac said. A total of 25,708 filings on 16,079 properties were reported.

Other cities in the top 10 were Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Las Vegas, Nevada; Sacramento, Calif.; Cleveland, Ohio; Miami, Florida; Bakersfield, Calif. read more