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“They know they’re going to take down a large number of banks and they can’t do it until they’re staffed up,” said Mark Dotzour, chief economist and director of research for the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

Dotzour expects federal regulators to establish an agency, similar to the Resolution Trust Corp. that disposed of assets belonging to insolvent S&Ls in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Once they start to sell [foreclosed real estate], we’ll find out what the market really is,” Dotzour told attendees at an economic summit hosted by a handful of real estate groups in Tampa, Fla.

…

Dotzour expects foreclosure rates to continue to climb, real estate prices to fall more and cap rates to rise to at least 9 percent before leveling off.

In 2010 and 2011, interest rates will begin to rise, as will inflation. Once investors realize the market is at bottom, deals will begin to flow again, he said.

Anjool Malde, 24, was found on the ground outside Coq d’Argent in London’s Square Mile at midday on Sunday.

He left his Deutsche Bank office early on Friday afternoon after agreeing to “help” the bank with its inquiry.

Police are continuing to investigate the death ahead of an inquest, but are not treating it as suspicious.

‘An inspiration’

Mr Malde had been expected to talk to his employer on the phone on Monday – the day after he died – then return to work to help with the inquiry later that week.

A Deutsche Bank spokesman said: “We are deeply saddened by our colleague’s death, and our thoughts are with his family and loved ones at this time.”

The Oxford University graduate, who had not been suspended, was a former BBC radio presenter and co-founder of events company AlphaParties.

A City of London police spokesman said: “Police have identified the man who fell to his death on Poultry on Sunday as Anjool Malde. Police continue to investigate the incident however it is not being treated as a suspicious death.”

Mr Malde was said to be a big Michael Jackson fan, who was very upset by the US singer’s death.

He was also an amateur musician (keyboard, guitar, drums and vocals), video producer and photographer based in central London and Marbella in Spain, according to his profile on the online people directory bigsight.

Friends and colleagues have paid tribute to Mr Malde on a special page on the social networking site Facebook.

One said: “Devastated that we have lost such a talented person. My thoughts and prayers are with your family.

“You were truly the entrepreneurial legend. You are going to be greatly missed but all those memories will be cherished forever, may you rest in peace Jools.”

Suspicious activity reports rose to 63,713 in fiscal year 2008, which ended last September, from 46,717 the year before. California and Florida, centers of the housing bust, had the highest numbers of suspicious reports as foreclosures jumped, the stock market dropped and credit dried up.

“These combined factors uncovered and fueled a rampant mortgage fraud climate fraught with opportunistic participants desperate to maintain or increase their current standard of living,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in its report.

“Industry employees sought to maintain the high standard of living they enjoyed during the boom years of the real estate market and overextended mortgage holders were often desperate to reduce or eliminate their bloated mortgage payments,” it said.

Wealth management giant UBS is facing a court hearing in Miami next week after refusing to disclose data on 52,000 Americans holders of secret Swiss bank accounts to U.S. tax authorities.

The Swiss Justice Ministry said on Wednesday that Swiss law prevents UBS from handing over client information and the government would seize UBS client data, if necessary, to stop that happening.

The case, which comes amid a global fight against tax cheats supported by the U.S. administration, has damaged the UBS brand and could result in an expensive settlement for the bank at a time when the bank needs to focus on restructuring.

“Switzerland will use its legal authority to ensure that the bank cannot be pressured to transmit the information illegally, including if necessary by issuing an order taking effective control of the data at UBS,” the Swiss government said in a response to U.S. authorities filed in Miami on Tuesday.

The tax litigation is also crucial for the future of the multi-billion dollar wealth management industry and is pushing several offshore banks to force clients to come clean.

A court hearing that will lead to a ruling on the UBS data issue is due to start on July 13. Washington has accused UBS of hiding nearly $15 billion in assets in secret accounts.

Not to scare you, but the situation is actually worse than it seems. Over the years, the government has changed the way it counts the unemployed. An example of this is the criticized Birth-Death Model which was added in 2000. The model is designed to account for the birth and death of businesses and the resultant lag in survey data. Unfortunately, the model doesn’t work that well during economic contractions (like we have now) and consistently overstates the number of jobs being created each month.

John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics specializes in removing these questionable tweaks to the government’s statistical data to better align current numbers with the methodology used to gather historical data. After reviewing the data, Williams believes that “the June jobs loss likely exceeded 700,000.” David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff notes that the fall in the number of hours worked in June (to a record low of 33 per week) is equivalent to a loss of more than 800,000 jobs.

There are similar issues with the way the unemployment rate is measured. The headline rate only jumped from 9.4% to 9.5% because of a drop in the number of people in the workforce. The more inclusive “U-6” measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged workers, jumped from 16.4% to 16.5%. But even this doesn’t adequately capture the situation on the ground: Back in the Clinton Administration, the definition of discouraged worker was changed to only include those that had given up looking for work because there were no jobs to be had within the last year.

Questions were raised about the security of proprietary trading systems at a court hearing on July 4 for a former Goldman computer programmer arrested on a charge of stealing the information, which was copied to a server in Germany.

If the stolen information, or trading code, is allowed to go to a competitor who can start trading with it, “the bank itself stands lose its entire investment in creating this software to begin with, which is millions upon millions of dollars,” warned U.S. prosecutor Joseph Facciponte, according to a transcript of Saturday’s proceeding.

He added that because of the way this software interfaces with the various markets and exchanges, the bank has warned it could be used to “manipulate markets in unfair ways.” The FBI in New York said on Tuesday that measures had been taken to prevent code being sent from the server in Germany.

“Working through our assistant legal attache in Frankfurt and with the authorities in Germany, the FBI has taken steps to ensure that the appropriated code was not distributed,” FBI spokesman Jim Margolin said.

Sergey Aleynikov, 39, who left Goldman on June 5 for a Chicago firm and was arrested last Friday night, gave consent to the FBI to visit his home in Little Falls, New Jersey, over the weekend and remove all of his personal computers, according to court documents.

They show that Aleynikov, a father of three and a dual national of the United States and Russia, told the FBI he was cooperating because “I did not think I was doing anything wrong” when he downloaded copies to his personal computer, laptop and to a flash drive.

He told investigators that Goldman Sachs knew he worked on the program from home and said nothing about it previously, according to the court record.

Aleynikov said he had no intention of selling the information or breaking his employment agreement. Aleynikov was arrested at Newark Liberty airport in New Jersey on a flight from Chicago on July 3. On Monday, he was released on $750,000 bail, restricted to New York and New Jersey and ordered to surrender travel documents.

More than 500 staff at Keihin Electric Express Railway are expected to be subjected to daily face scans by “smile police” bosses.

The “smile scan” software, developed by the Japanese company Omron, produces a sweeping analysis of a smile based on facial characteristics, from lip curves and eye movements to wrinkles.

After scanning a face, the device produces a rating between zero to 100 depending on the estimated value of the fulfilled potential of a person’s biggest smile.

For those with a below-par grin, one of an array of smile-boosting messages will op up on the computer screen ranging from “you still look too serious” to “lift up your mouth corners”, according to the Mainichi Daily News.

A growing number of service industries are reportedly using the new Omron Smile Scan system for “smile training” among its staff.

The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening.

Federal government officials refused to publicly discuss any details of the cyber attack, and would only generally acknowledge that it occurred. It was not clear whether other government sites also were attacked.

Others familiar with the outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The Homeland Security Department confirmed that officials had received reports of “malicious Web activity” and they were investigating the matter, but had no further comment. Two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem.

Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, called it a “massive outage” and said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.

According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was “100 percent down” for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.

“This is very strange. You don’t see this,” he said. “Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event.”

He was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the ­British and American invasion.

He had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the law on secrets.

Following his death, his computers were seized and it is still not known if any rough draft was discovered by investigators and, if so, what happened to the material.

Dr Kelly was also intending to lift the lid on a potentially bigger scandal, his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

US television investigators have spent four years preparing a 90-minute documentary, Anthrax War, suggesting there is a global black market in anthrax and exposing the mystery “suicides” of five government germ warfare scientists from around the world.

Director Bob Coen said: ‘‘The deeper you look into the murky world of governments and germ warfare, the more worrying it becomes.

“We have proved there is a black ­market in anthrax. David Kelly was of particular interest to us because he was a world expert on anthrax and he was involved in some degree with assisting the secret germ warfare programme in apartheid South Africa.”

Dr Kelly was found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home on July 17 2003. His apparent suicide came two days after he was interrogated in the ­Commons over his behind-the-scenes role in exposing the flaws in the “sexed-up” Number 10 dossier which justified Britain going to war with Iraq.

Conspiracy theorists have claimed he was murdered.

British author Gordon Thomas said last night: ‘‘I knew David Kelly very well and he called me because he was working on a book.

“I gained the impression that he was prepared to take the flak as he wanted his story to come out.”