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A year ago, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 5.53 percent.

For homeowners who can afford a higher monthly payment, 15-year fixed-rate mortgages are even lower, averaging 4.27 percent, also a new low.

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Saturday, October 10, 2009
Resource Fair: Noon-4pm
Informational Workshops: 1pm-3pm
Location: Cosumnes River College, Recital Hall, 8401 Center Parkway, Sacramento (Near Lot A)
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The California State Controller and the California Community Colleges are working together to hold a series of regional community/public service workshops and resource fairs that focus on helping Californians survive, thrive and become empowered to “take control” during these tough economic times. These events will provide much needed information on financial literacy, higher education opportunities, tax credits and community college financial aid. More than two dozen different financial experts will be on hand at the resource fair to help you learn additional tips on handling your finances and obtaining financial aid year-round for community colleges. Attend our workshops and become automatically enrolled in our grand prize raffle! This event is FREE and open to the public. For more information visit: www.sco.ca.gov/takecontrol.html.

Deborah Boles cuts Emma Nelson's hair. FRONTLINE: Close to Home airs Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 9PM on KVIE 6.1.

FRONTLINE: Close to Home
Airs Tuesday, Oct. 27, 9PM on KVIE 6.1

As the U.S. unemployment rate hits a 25-year high and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hits a six-year low, award-winning FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel (The Hugo Chávez Show, The Case for Innocence) chronicles the recession’s impact on one unlikely American neighborhood—New York’s Upper East Side.

In Close to Home, airing Tuesday, Oct. 27, at 9 PM on KVIE 6.1, Bikel decides to set up her cameras in the hair salon she’s patronized for 20 years. It’s an intimate space where she has come to know well the surprisingly diverse clientele—from athletic trainers and housewives to high-end bankers, actors and opera singers. Despite expectations that this neighborhood is a secure bastion of privilege, these days, when clients get in the chair, they offer a window into the country in recession: Some are broke, others don’t have a plan, and they’re all looking to commiserate.

Deborah Boles, the owner and sole hairdresser at Deborah Hair Designs, started the business in 1985. “I wanted a place where people can go and they can feel comfortable,” she says. “They know they belong here.” But it’s all on the line with the current downturn—clients come less often; some skip coloring or skip the trim—and as Deborah watches neighboring businesses go under, she wonders how long she can survive.

Barbara, Deborah’s sister, helps out at the salon, but she has been struggling with her own economic crisis. After buying a home in Florida at the height of the market, she now has a subprime mortgage that she can no longer afford. Unable to pay the exorbitant interest, she has had to take in four tenants, each with their own stories of foreclosure and unemployment.

Visit the website: www.pbs.org/frontline/closetohome

“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency—the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) —who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. “They were totally opposed to it,” Born says. “That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?”

In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 p.m. on KVIE 6.1, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Breaking the Bank) unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all, he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summer. FRONTLINE The Warning airs Oct. 20 at 9PM on KVIE 6.1.

“I didn’t know Brooksley Born,” says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. “I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable.” Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group—former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin—convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was “clearly a mistake.”

Born’s battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation—especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.

“I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face,” says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. “She’s hanging up the telephone; she says to me: ‘That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, “You’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.”… [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.’”

Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. “Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming,” Kirk says. “Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves.”

Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one.

“It’ll happen again if we don’t take the appropriate steps,” Born warns. “There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.”

Visit teh website: www.pbs.org/frontline/warning

California REOs dropped 32 percent from the previous month, but the state continued to post the highest overall total of any state, with 92,326 properties receiving a foreclosure filing in August. California’s total was down 15 percent from the previous month and was also down 9 percent from August 2009 — the first year-over-year decrease in California foreclosure activity in RealtyTrac’s monthly reports.

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