By Lorie Hailey
Associate Editor
The popular FHA loan is getting more expensive, reports the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration have long been an option for home buyers who don’t have a lot of cash for a down payment or whose credit is less than optimal. The loans became more popular after the implosion of the subprime mortgage market, and now they’re getting more expensive,
Buyers who get FHA-insured mortgages have less purchasing power when they go house shopping, according to local mortgage professionals, the newspaper reports.
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Microsoft and Facebook continue their alliance. Less than two weeks after Microsoft paid AOL more than $1 billion for a trove of patents, Microsoft is selling or licensing those same patents to its online ally, Facebook, for $550 million, the software company said Monday.
The New York Times reports that the deal allows Facebook to bulk up its intellectual property portfolio ahead of the social networking company’s initial public offering, expected next month, and it is a further sign of the growing importance of stockpiling patents in the arsenal of any big technology company.
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Half of new graduates are jobless or underemployed, reports USA Today.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans, the paper reports.
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Economists predict that the U.S. economy will grow faster than expected this year, despite the headwinds of higher gas prices and Europe’s financial crisis, according to USA Today.
Their median estimates are higher than in January for everything from this year’s business investment to hiring.
Economists think job growth for the rest of the year will be about 20 percent stronger than they did after Christmas.
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