The Obama administration wants to spend up to $100 billion on efforts to help homeowners, especially those facing foreclosure. But one of the leading ideas on how to do that — rewriting home loans to make mortgages affordable to struggling borrowers — is based on a startling lack of data about what works, and early evidence suggests that many lenders aren’t going to make substantial changes without serious strong-arming.

There are various ideas being bandied about, but the goal is common: to entice mortgages servicers, whether lenders themselves or third parties acting on behalf of investors, to rewrite the terms of loans so that people behind on payments might be able to keep their homes. (Read the four steps to ending the foreclosure crisis.)

One way being discussed to do that is for the government to share in the losses if a servicer modifies a mortgage and the homeowner again defaults. Another approach is to directly help pay for the cost of the modification. The servicer might cut monthly payments to 38% of a borrower’s income with the government chipping in to reduce the payment down to 31%, a presumably more sustainable level. Either tactic could be combined with a direct payment — $1,000 is a figure often mentioned — to incentivize servicers to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how much a homeowner can truly afford and recrafting his mortgage to match.

To a homeowner who has always made mortgage payments on time, perhaps by sacrificing spending elsewhere, the whole concept may seem grossly unfair. But society’s problems are unfortunately often our own. As the foreclosure rate has skyrocketed, and loan defaults have rippled from subprime mortgages into ones made to prime and near-prime borrowers, property values in many parts of the country have been pounded. There is an unavoidable correction going on in house prices, that much is true, but the swoon has caused additional

Reviving the Housing Market: Will Loan Modifications Work? – TIME.

SAN FRANCISCO – With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.

The new software to be released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.

The feature, dubbed “Latitude,” expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.

“This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun,” said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.

It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service.

Google also is promising not to retain any information about its users’ movements. Only the last location picked up by the tracking service will be stored on Google’s computers, Lee said.

The software plots a user’s location — marked by a personal picture on Google’s map — by relying on cell phone towers, global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location. The system can follow people’s travels in the United States and 26 other countries.

Read Full Article…

Know where your kids are? Check Google maps – Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com.

Last year the champagne still flowed, but in 2009 angst will dominate the Berlin Film Festival. Cutbacks by studios, concerns about financing and a big-budget thriller about an evil bank — even the silver screen can’t ignore the world economic downturn.

Every movie gets the villains it deserves. Bandits attacking Indians? It’s a western. Hit men shooting police? A crime story. And when psychopaths try to achieve world domination, it’s either a terrorist drama or a film about Adolf Hitler. Those are the usual suspects.

Since the financial crisis, though, a range of unexpected villains has started parading across the screen. Werner Schulz, a politician from Germany’s Green Party, summed up the current mood a few days ago: “Now people are more afraid of their financial advisors than of al-Qaida.”

One German director seems to have anticipated this development. Tom Tykwer, known for his bank robbery fable “Run Lola Run,” will premiere his new thriller “The International” on Thursday, when it opens the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale. This time the bank itself is the villain.

The bank in the movie, in fact, is a criminal organization that commissions murder and homicide — a “bad bank” worse than anything from the current nightmares of the world’s finance ministers. The hero in “The International” is not a crusading protector of the public interest but British star Clive Owen (“Inside Man”).

The financial crisis will set the tone at this year’s Berlinale, the most important international film festival after Cannes. It will be the main topic of conversation at the parties and receptions, the festival’s speeches, press conferences and in the haggling over film rights and new productions.

Complete Article…

Worry Lines Through the Botox: Berlinale Reflects Leaner Times for Movie Business – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.