- UBS AG was sued by the U.S. over $4.5 billion in residential mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as regulators went to court for the first time to recoup losses caused by the investments.The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates the two mortgage companies operating under government control, sued the Swiss bank and several executives of UBS’s Mortgage Asset Securities Transactions unit in federal court in Manhattan today, claiming they misstated the securities’ risks.

Its not like the housing market needs any more headwinds, so heres the government potentially giving us another: The mortgage interest deduction is back in big play in the budget deal.It never exactly came off the table, but the bigger the budget deal, the more likely the mortgage deduction will take a bigger hit.

It has been revealed in a recent report that people in Scotland have taken on more additional personal debt than people in any other part of the UK. The data comes from the insolvency trade group R3 in its quarterly personal debt report. The data showed that around 13 percent of people in Scotland had taken on more debts including debts from credit cards, loans and overdraft. This compared to 12 percent of people for the whole of the rest of the UK.

According to the report many people in Scotland are also struggling to make their money stretch from one payday to the next. Around 43 percent of Scots are said to be struggling to make their money last until payday. However, whilst this figure is high it was actually around 3 percent less than the rest of the UK.

In the past twelve months around 200,000 Scots have taken out a payday loan whereas for the rest of the UK this figure came to two million.

Read more…

- Under Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America is spending billions of dollars to deal with the aftermath of the housing bust, reaching settlements with mortgage bond investors and insurers and setting aside funds for future claims. The cleanup effort hasn’t yet convinced analysts and investors that the bank is ready to put the mortgage mess behind it.Charlotte -based Bank of America, the nation’s largest bank by assets, announced a quarterly loss of $8.83 billion on July 19, the biggest in its history. The mortgage unit’s loss widened to $14.5 billion, from $1.5 billion a year earlier. Moynihan has called his company a “tale of two cities,” because its non-mortgage operations are making money. Global commercial banking reported the highest net income since the second quarter of 2009, according to the bank.