Federal Reserve policymakers have backed away from the need for another round of monetary stimulus as the U.S. economy gradually improves.
Minutes of the central bank’s meeting published on Tuesday showed only two of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee’s 10 voting members saw the case for additional monetary stimulus.
The decision to deconstruct Christ Church Cathedral is supported by Canterbury church leaders.
An open letter of support from 70 churches and Christian organisations was presented to the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch, Victoria Matthews, at St Peter’s Church in Upper Riccarton yesterday. The letter affirmed that the Anglican Church had the right to decide the fate of its cathedral.
“God’s real Church is the people, and people matter more to God than any building,” the letter reads. “We pray for the bishop and other leaders as they face the challenges this brings.”
In better economic times, workers in this dusty inland town [of Azusa, California] east of Los Angeles built motor homes in the low-slung complex at 975 West First Street.
More recently, it was an assembly site for floats in the Tournament of Roses Parade. Today it is the home of two Hispanic Protestant churches, which rent space for Sunday services in two buildings set on 1.3 acres. So when the site’s owners decided to sell the property, they called Raphael Realty.
David and Mary Raphael are real estate agents who deal only in church buildings. It’s a rare specialty. They could think of only two other real estate agencies in the country that do what they do, one in Texas and one in Northern California.
An urbanization drive perhaps unparalleled in human history has turned China into a continent-sized construction site. Some of the new buildings have won international acclaim, such as Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium built for the 2008 Olympics. But far too many are eyesores, complain architects and online critics.
When the architecture website www.archcy.com asked readers to vote for China’s top 10 ugliest buildings, Li Hu, a Beijing-based partner at U.S. Steven Holl Architects, said, “Choosing 10 is very hard, choosing a million is perfectly possible.
“Development is too quick. Architects don’t have time to reflect,” says Li, who blames the ugly edifices in part on interference by government officials, a lack of imagination by architects and corruption.
With the highest unemployment rate in the European Union at 23 per cent and 50 per cent of young people out of work, Spain this week veered back to recession for the second time in two years.
The strike comes amid mounting international concern that Spain might become the next casualty of the eurozone debt crisis after Greece, Ireland and Portugal, which were all forced to accept financial rescue packages.
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The congregation of St. David’s Anglican Church in Peters will hand over its property, its name and its debt of nearly $1 million to the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh and start over in a former Catholic church in Canonsburg.
The move is the latest in a property dispute between the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh and the rival Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh. The diocese split in 2008, with a majority leaving the Episcopal Church for the theologically conservative Anglican Church in North America.
Attorneys for Christ Church Savannah have filed documents asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in litigation they contend deprived them of the Johnson Square church property.
The 45-page document filed Thursday afternoon asks the high court to determine the law on local church property, which it contends has been inconsistently treated in five different jurisdictions considering the issue.
The supreme court may accept or reject the request for review.
Conventional wisdom has advanced competing theories: Wall Street types took too many risks, encouraged by lax government regulation; or pro-homeownership policies eroded mortgage-lending standards and created the housing bubble.
Actually, both theories are correct ”” and neither is….
[The real foundation was laid with Paul Volcker’s]… decisive defeat of double-digit inflation in the early 1980s.
All the good news (low inflation, high employment, rising stock and real estate prices) drove economic growth. Between 1982 and 2007, there were only two mild recessions. When prosperity was jeopardized ”” by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the tech crash in 2000, the 9/11 attacks ”” the Federal Reserve seemed to defuse the threats. The economy seemed less risky. Economists announced the Great Moderation of business cycles.
Booms become busts because justifiable confidence becomes foolish optimism. So it was. Believing the world less risky, people took more risks. Investment banks and households increased their debt. Lending standards eroded, because borrowers’ repayment prospects were thought to have improved. Regulators relaxed oversight, because markets seemed more stable and self-correcting. On the fringes, ethical standards frayed; criminality increased. The rest, as they say, is history.
We don’t yet know where the stay-home generation will make their church homes. When the economy improves they may hit the road. But I wonder if something has changed for good during the Great Recession. Diminished economic opportunities might have taught a generation of young adults that they cannot depend on money to make them happy. Even in a better economy your job probably won’t last long; the company may not be able to afford you, or you may soon be looking for something else to improve your meager earnings. Organizational loyalty, up and down the corporate ladder, has collapsed.
It would be easy to follow the lead of Todd and Victoria Buchholz and blame Facebook and laziness for younger Americans’ unwillingness to drop everything and move to North Dakota. But I would hope other factors, chiefly love of neighbor and family, are at work. The grass is not always greener in the Peace Garden State. Your sins will follow you even to the Canadian border. It’s challenging but rewarding to stay home and learn to love the family, church, and neighbors who have known you since youth.
Americans may take the restless pursuit of prosperity at any cost for granted, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable in God’s eyes. the national narrative that celebrates the free-ranging individual fosters sinful discontent….
Pinched by the global recession and tough-love budget demands of the European Union, the Italian government is looking for extra revenue, and has its eyes set on commercial properties owned by the Roman Catholic Church.
On Feb. 15, the government of Prime Minister Mario Monti announced it wants to revise rules on the tax-exempt status of church-owned commercial property. Although the exemption also applies to other not-for-profit entities, such as trade unions, political parties and religious groups, the Catholic church is its largest beneficiary.
“Such a move would have been unimaginable six months ago,” said Francesco Perfetti, a history professor at LUISS University in Rome. “After all, no matter whether you are a believer or not, the church is an integral part of Italy’s culture.”
…[Italian Prime Minister Mario] Monti’s joint letter with twelve EU states last week calling for an end to self-defeating contraction marks a key moment in this crisis. If Francois Hollande is elected French president in May, the shift in Europe’s balance of power will be complete. Germany will lose its stifling grip on EU policy machinery. The EMU bloc will start to tilt towards reflation at long last.
Whether it can come soon enough to avert a social explosion across Europe’s arc of depression remains to be seen. Nor can such stimulus overcome the fundamental flaws of EMU since Germany is at an entirely place in the deform structure, with unemployment at 20-year lows of 5.5pc.
What is needed to save the South must endanger the North. Germany would overheat, pushing its inflation to 4pc or 5pc until Bild Zeitung erupts in Teutonic fury. It is impossible to reconcile the conflicting imperatives.
One of the key questions of 2012 is which party can make the stronger case to voters who, in Obama’s words, “feel the American dream slipping away.” Democrats are heartened by more favorable reports on employment, rising approval ratings, and their apparent victory in Congress on extending the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits. But, as the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg notes, the Party’s base now consists mainly of young people, African-Americans, Latinos, single women, and affluent suburbanites. In 2008, Obama struggled to connect with voters he referred to as “lunch-pail folks”””the ones clinging to their guns and their religion. He lost them by eighteen points. As the conservative political analyst Michael Barone points out, even though Obama won a higher percentage of the total vote than any Democratic President except Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, he did it with “a top-and-bottom coalition”””holders of graduate degrees and high-school dropouts.
With the Republicans preoccupied by their race to the right, Obama has the luxury of honing a message aimed at the middle. The slogan he tried out in the State of the Union, “an America built to last,” sounded like an ad for a mattress company, or a car company””a little like Clint Eastwood’s “halftime in America” Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler. The Republican onetime mayor of Carmel, California, huskily declared that “all that matters now is what’s ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together?”
Since 2009, the window maker has shifted from a 40-hour work week to 32 at many of its plants, cut executive pay and 401(k) contributions, but has not laid off any of its 4,300 workers, Ms. Marvin says. Even so, Ms. Marvin isn’t holding out too much hope for 2012.
“We’re not talking about a housing recovery,” she says. “We’re talking about a small pickup.”
St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, an architecturally important and beloved part of downtown Germanton for generations, may be torn apart, moved and rebuilt to house a congregation in Carrboro that needs a place to worship.
Germanton Baptist Church, which sits next to the Episcopal church, is buying the land from the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, said the Rev. Jeff Stephens of the Baptist church.
“Our church is experiencing significant growth,” said Stephens, who came to the church in January 2011. “And for the Episcopal diocese to approach us about purchasing the property is an exciting opportunity because we are in desperate need of some room to grow.”
After months of painstaking talks, government authorities and five of the nation’s biggest banks have agreed to a $26 billion settlement that could provide relief to nearly two million current and former American homeowners harmed by the bursting of the housing bubble, state and federal officials said in Washington on Thursday.
It is part of a broad national settlement aimed at halting the housing market’s downward slide and holding the banks accountable for foreclosure abuses.
Under the plan, federal officials said, about $5 billion would be cash payments to states and federal authorities, $17 billion would be earmarked for homeowner relief, roughly $3 billion would go for refinancing and a final $1 billion would be paid to the Federal Housing Administration.
“You could sell your home, owe nothing more on your mortgage and get $30,000,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) said in the Aug. 17 letter obtained by Bloomberg News.
Transfiguration was built in the early 1900s and sits just north of a Cleveland Clinic parking garage. The Gothic Revival church was home to one of several congregations that broke off from the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio.
The breakaway congregation recently moved to another location after a judge later decided the property must stay with the diocese. The building badly needs repairs, and a diocesan official, the Rev. Brad Purdom, said the diocese cannot restore every building.
“It breaks our hearts,” Purdom said. “But at the end of the day, you have to make some choices about how you’re going to spend the limited resources that you do have.”
Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, has placed multibillion-dollar bets that pay off if homeowners stay trapped in expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates.
Freddie began increasing these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages….
[A]..mix of political control and market reform has yielded huge benefits. China’s rise over the past two decades has been more impressive than any burst of economic development ever. Annual economic growth has averaged 10% a year and 440m Chinese have lifted themselves out of poverty””the biggest reduction of poverty in history.
Yet for China’s rise to continue, the model cannot remain the same. That’s because China, and the world, are changing.
China is weathering the global crisis well. But to sustain a high growth rate, the economy needs to shift away from investment and exports towards domestic consumption. That transition depends on a fairer division of the spoils of growth. At present, China’s banks shovel workers’ savings into state-owned enterprises, depriving workers of spending power and private companies of capital. As a result, just when some of the other ingredients of China’s boom, such as cheap land and labour, are becoming scarcer, the government is wasting capital on a vast scale. Freeing up the financial system would give consumers more spending power and improve the allocation of capital.
The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it was likely to raise interest rates at the end of 2014, but not until then, adding another 18 months to the expected duration of its most basic and longest-running response to the financial crisis.
The announcement means that the Fed does not expect the economy to complete its recovery from the 2008 crisis over the next three years. By holding short-term rates near zero beyond mid-2013, its previous estimate, the Fed hopes to hasten that process somewhat by reducing the cost of borrowing.
The Fed said in a statement that the economy had expanded “moderately” in recent weeks, but that unemployment remained at a high level, the housing sector remained in a deep depression, and the possibility of a new financial crisis in Europe continued to threaten the domestic economy.
Every summer, Volkmar and Vera Kruger spend three weeks vacationing in the south of France or at a cool getaway in Denmark. For the other three weeks of their annual vacation, they garden or travel a few hours away to root for their favorite team in Germany’s biggest soccer stadium.
The couple, in their early 50s, aren’t retired or well off. They live in a small Tudor-style house in this middle-class town about 30 miles northwest of Frankfurt. He’s a foreman at a glass factory; she works part time for a company that tracks inventories for retailers. Their combined income is a modest $40,000.
Yet the Krugers have a higher standard of living than many Americans who have twice that income.
In his second meeting as chairman of the Federal Reserve in May 2006, Ben Bernanke heard a Fed governor warn about the nation’s mortgage market. But Mr. Bernanke described the cooling of the housing boom as a “healthy thing.”
“So far we are seeing, at worst, an orderly decline in the housing market,” he said.
Mr. Bernanke’s words were contained in 1,197 pages of transcripts released Thursday of closed-door Fed meetings from that year. The transcripts paint the most detailed picture yet of how top officials at the central bank didn’t anticipate the storm about to hit the U.S. economy and the global financial system.
In a time of austerity it is salutary once more to ask: what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? This is not to argue for a “Bible-says-it-all politics”, which has been out of fashion since our disastrous flirtation with it in the English Civil War of the 17th century. It is simply to recognise that all politics rest on assumptions; myths properly understood, not as fairytales but as archetypal stories about the human condition.
Both our economic activity and our political life must have ground beneath them. Human beings are not just blind globs of idling protoplasm but creatures with a name who live in a world of symbols and of dreams, not merely of matter.
If we are not only to survive this period of austerity, but even to learn to flourish in it, then we shall have to relearn a more adequate story of what is precious about human life. The story of the birth of the infant king in a poor family is a good starting place.
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Church foreclosures are at an all-time high. Since 2008 more than 200 churches and other religious organizations have faced foreclosure, according to real estate services firm CoStar Group. In the decade before 2008, church foreclosures were rare, averaging less than 10 per year.
Tim Trainor, a spokesman for CoStar, said 2011 is so far the worst yet, including the “highest dollar volume” ever in the second quarter of 2011, when 20 properties totaling more than $27 million went into foreclosure.
These foreclosures are likely just the tip of the iceberg. No one really knows how many churches not officially in foreclosure are on the brink. Take, for example, The Church at South Las Vegas. The church started in 2001 by Pastor Benny Perez now has more than 4,000 in regular Sunday morning attendance. But the church also has a $53,000 per month mortgage payment, and it can’t sell any of its real estate because that real estate is now worth at least $5 million less than what the church paid for it.
I was interested to see the AP describe the Presiding Bishop’s remarks as “a rare comment on a local issue.”
One in 45 children in the USA — 1.6 million children — were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.
The numbers represent a 33% increase from 2007, when there were 1.2 million homeless children, according to a report the center is releasing today.
“This is an absurdly high number,” says Ellen Bassuk, president of the center. “What we have new in 2010 is the effects of a man-made disaster caused by the economic recession. ”¦ We are seeing extreme budget cuts, foreclosures and a lack of affordable housing.”
What counts as a church? Chuck and Stephanie Fromm recently found out.
After hosting several periodic Bible studies for up to 50 people in their home in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., the Fromms were fined $300 for violating a city ordinance that prohibits groups of three or more people from gathering without a permit. The couple appealed and city officials agreed last month to reimburse them and re-examine the ordinance, but the case created a stir in religious circles.
“It struck a deep nerve. Bible studies in people’s homes have been a long part of American culture and heritage,” says Brad Dacus of the Pacific Research Institute, which took on the Fromms’ case. “We’re concerned that other cities will try to get away with the same thing.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a Bronx church’s case on whether it can hold worship services in New York City public schools.
The decision ends a 16-year legal battle over the rights of churches in city schools and means 160 area churches have roughly two months to find new places to hold worship services.
Lawyers for the Bronx Household of Faith, an evangelical congregation that meets at P.S. 15 in the Bronx, filed a petition in late September asking the court to review a June appeals-court ruling barring churches from holding worship services on school property.
Now that congregation, along with dozens of others, has until Feb. 12 to find a substitute house of worship.
In March 2008, about nine months after he bought a steel-processing business, Precision Steel Services in Warren, Mich., for some $750,000, Shailesh Kumar went to two banks in search of a $350,000 loan.
He wanted to expand the business and pay off a $290,000 debt he had with the seller, replacing an 8 percent, seven-year debt with a 6.5 percent, 20-year loan. “It would have made a huge difference in terms of cash flow and growth capital,” Mr. Kumar said.
But both lenders he was negotiating with demanded that Mr. Kumar put up equity in his own home as collateral. Mr. Kumar hesitated, and then as 2008 wore on, he watched the value of his home fall to $330,000 from $425,000, wiping out all of his equity. Eventually, the banks broke off negotiations. With no cash on hand and revenue down by some 60 percent during the first half of 2009, Mr. Kumar closed Precision Steel in July 2009….
Nearly one in five clients of Christian rescue missions said they were victims of physical violence within the past year, a 6 percent jump from the previous year, according to a new survey.
“It’s quite possible that the uptick in physical violence … is due to a friend or family member’s feeling of desperation and helplessness accompanying their unemployment and underemployment,” said John Ashmen, president of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (AGRM).