Texas Mortgage Rate

At this year's gathering of the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., there's little to celebrate. Executives from hard-hit Eastern and Midwestern cities are calling on the federal government to assist them in dealing with the fallout from the subprime mortgage meltdown that has left thousands of homes vacant and undercut property tax revenues that fund municipal services.

Houston Mayor Bill White, who passed on the conference this year, can sympathize with his colleagues' pain but is not feeling it locally. The city's economy, bolstered by a booming energy sector, has not experienced the nosedive in the housing market that has occurred elsewhere. Likewise, Texas leads the nation in job growth and single-family home starts and sales. Foreclosures in Harris County rose a moderate 24 percent in 2007, totaling less than a third of the record 30,742 that occurred in 1987.

Servicer creates homeowner woes

Morgan Stanley said Tuesday it is cutting about 600 jobs and slimming its mortgage business, after a credit crisis upended the home loan industry this summer and forced other investment banks into similar moves. Two weeks after the Wall Street investment bank missed analysts' expectations for the fiscal third quarter and took a writedown of $940 million for corporate loans stuck on its books, Morgan Stanley said it will eliminate about 1 percent of its work force. "It is the direction everybody is going," said Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Brad Hintz. "This is Wall Street voting with their feet about how rapidly the mortgage market is coming back. They are saying it is not coming back quickly." As part of a plan to fuse its three mortgage businesses into one subsidiary based in Irving, Texas, Morgan Stanley will close certain offices and cut 500 jobs in the U.S.

FantasySports.com and Associated Intellectual Property to be Auctioned ...

POMPANO BEACH, Fla., Oct. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Moniker.com, the first and only provider of Domain Asset Management(TM) services, has been granted exclusive rights to broker the sale of FantasySports.com, which is currently owned by iTV Entertainment, LLC (iTVE). The domain and its portfolio of Intellectual Property will hit the auction block during Moniker's online, silent auction at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East. The current starting bid is $11.8 million U.S.

Along with the domain name FantasySports.com, iTVE's Intellectual Property portfolio includes the buyers' exclusive right to participate in iTVE's Right To Use Interests in eight issued and ten pending U.S.