Whirlpool CEO Jeff Fettig told CNBC on Friday he's optimistic that a rebound in the U.S. housing market and pent up consumer demand will boost appliance sales during the next three to five years.

[click to expand] Membership is very close to falling below the 1M threshold (1,005,838) for the first time since 2003. The rise and fall of NAR membership with the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Index is a logical trend in a... Read More

ResCap Requests Mediator for Creditor Talks on Ally Settlement Bloomberg Residential Capital LLC asked the judge overseeing its bankruptcy to appoint a mediator for talks with creditors who oppose the mortgage company's plan to drop potential lawsuits against parent Ally Financial Inc. To contact the reporter on this story: Steven ...

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece aims to shield its banks from possible lawsuits linked to a crucial buyback of sovereign bonds and has no plans to extend the acceptance deadline for the scheme beyond Friday, a senior finance ministry official said.

Although the stream of gloomy economic data for the euro zone continues unabated, new downbeat forecasts by the European Central Bank's staff as well as Germany's central bank are too negative, Giles Keating, Head of Research at Credit Suisse said on Friday.

Sandy is thought to have slowed US hiring in Nov. Businessweek WASHINGTON (AP) - Superstorm Sandy is widely thought to have slowed U.S. job growth last month. The only question is how much - an answer that's expected to emerge Friday in the government's jobs report for November. Yet once the storm's impact is ... and more »

As tax hikes and spending cuts loom, we at the Metro Program will continue to harp on the need also to renew the economy. Put simply, U.S. economic strength and fiscal health requires that Congress cut and invest to catalyze economic renewal even as it moves the nation toward fiscal stability. Along those lines, two briefs the program is releasing today as part of our Remaking Federalism / Renewing the Economy series call for budget negotiators to curtail the massive mortgage interest deduction (MID) and use some of the savings to expand and make permanent the critical research and experimentation (R&E) tax credit . These proposals epitomize what needs to happen this winter as Congress moves to fix the debt. To begin with, the time has come to reform the mortgage interest tax break, which continues to grow exponentially, subsidizes excessive housing consumption, and diverts substantial resources from more productive pursuits. Writes our colleague Bruce Katz: “Reforming the MID offers an opportunity for the federal government to realize hundreds of billions of dollars in savings over a 10-year period to contribute towards deficit reduction as well as to invest in tax incentives that are likely to spur more productive and innovative economic growth.” So let’s do it. Let’s limit the deduction now to generate from $350 billion to $500 billion or more for deficit reduction and investments over the next 10 years. At the same time, there are few more overdue, catalytic, and meritorious uses of a sliver of MID-reform revenues than a decisive move to renew the force and clout of the federal R&E tax credit, the stimulative effective of which has waned over time. The R&E tax credit is, after all, an American invention that in 1981 announced to the world that the United States placed a high priority on cultivating an innovation-driven economy and knew how to do it. Since its inception, the...