McLEAN, Va. (AP) -- Rates on 30-year mortgages remained almost flat this week as the Federal Reserve said it would keep rates near record lows to help the economy recover.

The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage was 4.98 percent this week, down slightly from 4.99 percent last week, Freddie Mac said Thursday. Last year at this time, the average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 5.10 percent.

Rates are still above the record low of 4.71 percent set in early December. They've been held around 5 percent by a Federal Reserve program to pump $1.25 trillion into mortgage-backed securities to try to keep rates low and make home buying more affordable.

On Wednesday, the Fed said it still expects to end the program as scheduled on March 31. However, the central bank did say that it remains open to changing that timetable if necessary.

Freddie Mac collects mortgage rates on Monday through Wednesday of each week from lenders around the country. Rates often fluctuate significantly, even within a given day, often in line with long-term Treasury bonds.

The average rate on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages fell slightly to 4.39 percent from 4.40 percent last week, according to Freddie Mac.

Rates on five-year, adjustable-rate mortgages averaged 4.25 percent, down from 4.27 percent a week earlier. Rates on one-year, adjustable-rate mortgages dropped to 4.29 percent from 4.32 percent.

The rates do not include add-on fees known as points. The nationwide fee for loans in Freddie Mac's survey averaged 0.6 point for 30-year, 15-year and five-year loans. It averaged 0.5 point for one-year loans.

Cities in the so-called Sand States dominated the foreclosure rankings in 2009, with the 20 worst-hit metro areas residing in Nevada, Florida, California and Arizona.

Las Vegas had the largest number of foreclosure filings of any city last year, with 12% of its households receiving at least one during the year, according to RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosed homes. That was more than five times the national average.

Cape Coral, Fla., was a close second with 11.9% of its households; Merced, Calif., was third with 10.1%.

The good news is that all top 20 cities recorded declines in foreclosure filings in the last three months of the year.

The bad news is that the foreclosure plague is spreading beyond these usual trouble spots, according to RealtyTrac's CEO, James Saccacio. And, nationwide, foreclosures grew 21.2% during the year.

"Areas like Provo, Utah, Fayetteville, Ark., Portland, Ore., and Rockford, Ill., all posted foreclosure rates above the U.S. average in 2009," he said. "And markets like Honolulu, Minneapolis and Seattle saw foreclosure activity increase at more than twice the national pace over the past 12 months."

He added that the new foreclosure wave seems more grounded in traditional foreclosure causes, such as job losses, than those recorded in the Sand States, where they were much more "bubble related."

In cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami and Bakersfield, Calif., soaring home prices of the mid 2000s drove homebuyers to desperate measures, such as taking on hybrid adjustable rate mortgages, also called toxic ARMS. These products only remained affordable as long as home prices grew; once prices stopped rising, borrowers began to default.

New hotspots

Some cites that had escaped the worst of the default demon in prior years saw foreclosure filings -- default notices, auction sales and bank repossessions -- soar. The Gulfport area of Mississippi recorded a year-over-year spike of 784%. Houma, La., recorded a 379% gain, and Roanoke, Va., filings jumped 352%.

Despite the big increases, however, the foreclosure rates for those cities ranked in the bottom third of the nation. For example, Gulfport was number 180 out of 203 metro areas listed.

Filings in Boise, Idaho, on the other hand, grew 103% but that was enough to put it 24th among cites, the highest ranking of any place outside the Sand States.

In contrast to the boom areas, cities where home prices never soared have endured far fewer foreclosures. The lowest rate of filings for any of the cities covered in the RealtyTrac report were found in Burlington, Vt., and Utica, N.Y, each of which had a miniscule 0.05% filing rate.

The housing boom, with its annual double-digit price increases, mostly bypassed areas like those, enabling buyers to escape the necessity of stretching their incomes to cover high housing costs.

In Burlington, the median home price has stayed under $230,000, and median home prices in Utica have been very cheap, not more than $120,000 at any time.

For cities like that, few foreclosures are caused by mortgage related issues and, as long as the local economies don't crash, defaults should remain well under national averages.

via MediaWonk

From the be careful what you wish for file: Twentieth Century-Fox’s Avatar, which is rapidly approaching the top spot among all-time global box-office grosses, and would likely be the biggest selling Blu-ray title to date when released at Christmas time, will actually be released on June 1st, at least in most of the world. Amazon France is already taking pre-orders, for 28.99 euros.

Why not wait until the most propitious time of year to release such a monster title in order to maximize sales? Because it would be against the law in France to wait beyond June 1. And if you release it in France, under EU rules, you’ve effectively released it throughout the EU. And if you release it in the EU, you’ve effectively released it throughout Blu-ray’s Region B, which includes Africa and the Middle East as well as Australia and New Zealand, where they speak a version of English. And if you’re going to release a movie with an English soundtrack in Region B, you might as well release it in Region A, which includes the United States, because it’s going to end up on the Internet sooner or later, probably sooner.

Welcome to life under France’s new three-strikes regime.  

Often overlooked in the hoopla surrounding the three-strikes provision in France’s Creation and the Internet law passed last year that established a procedure for cutting off Internet access for repeat copyright infringers, were other measures strictly regulating release windows for movies in France. Under the law, any movie released theatrically in France must be released on DVD and Blu-ray, as well as made available for authorized downloads, exactly four months after its theatrical debut.

Since Avatar was released in mid-December, Fox was technically obliged to release it on Blu-ray/DVD/ in mid-March April, although a separate provision in the law allows a distributor to petition for a one-time extension of the window in the case of very high-grossing films (or for quicker DVD release of  theatrical turkeys). That bought Fox another six weeks, to June 1, but that’s it. The fact that the distributors’ business interests might best be served by waiting longer doesn’t count in the law.

That’s the sort of thing that can happen when you invite the government to regulate an industry sector, especially the French government. It’s rarely subtle and it frequently end up cutting both ways.

For all the benefit the studios may get from France’s three-strikes rules–and at the moment that doesn’t actually look very promising–they could end up losing due to the loss of flexibility over how they manage their businesses.

Because of how the Blu-ray and DVD regions are drawn, because of the global nature of the Internet, the laws of France could end up, as a practical matter, dictating studio business strategy worldwide, particularly as digital distribution platforms become more critical to the bottom line. That, in fact, is precisely what French president Nicolas Sarkozy–so widely praised by U.S. content owners for his “leadership” in protecting copyrights online–set out to accomplish when he proposed the Creation and the Internet law back in 2008: to make France the world leader, not just in copyright protection but in promoting the digital distribution of culture.

Sarkozy may have gotten what he wanted. But as Fox is discovering with Avatar everyone else may have gotten more than they bargained for.

Bankruptcy filings in Dallas and Fort Worth have climbed more than 80% from last year, and Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganizations are up 158%, 11 months through the year.

Through the end of November, some 16,191 individuals and businesses had filed for bankruptcy in the Dallas and Fort Worth divisions of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Northern District of Texas. Through the same time frame in 2008, 9,018 people and companies had filed for some form of bankruptcy protection in the region.

Nationwide, business bankruptcies through the end of September had already surpassed the total for all of 2008, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The 45,510 business bankruptcies filed in the first nine months of the year is the highest total since 1997, when 53,931 businesses filed for bankruptcy protection.

“What we’re seeing is a continuing stream of corporate Chapter 11s, and it’s way beyond what we’ve seen last year,” said Joe Wielebinski, a Dallas bankruptcy attorney with Munsch Hardt Kopf and Harr PC. “It’s all across the board in industries, locations and types of problems.”

In the federal fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, bankruptcy filings nationwide were up 34.5%, according to the Administrative Office of the Courts.

Local figures breaking out business bankruptcies aren’t yet available, but just like the recession, business bankruptcy activity in Texas seems to have been milder than in other regions of the country, said Phil Lamberson, head of the business restructuring and bankruptcy practice at Winstead PC.

The North Texas energy and real estate industries have had significant increases in bankruptcy filings this year, but it could have been much worse.