Do you remember all the buzz about mortgage relief when the new national programs got announced? The national financial journalists and some government officials are watching the statistics, and the reviews have not been good.
CNNMoney is adding to the discussion with its report Few getting long-term mortgage relief.
A snippet:
Under the president’s plan, delinquent borrowers are [...]

There’s been a lot of buzz in the metro Detroit area about the special coverage that Time magazine and its media partners including CNN are giving to Detroit and Michigan.
Here is the Assignment Detroit home page.
The intro:
It’s a city in crisis – but with potential for a big comeback. Despite an ailing auto industry and [...]

AnnArbor.com is working on a special project, “Ann Arbor’s Hidden Poor.” If you are interested in what is happening to southeast Michigan families who are teetering on the edge of financial crisis, you will want to read the pieces that are being produced by that newspaper / news web site team.
One of the reports is [...]

Marney Rich Keenan, a columnist for the Detroit News, writes this week about the day the word “jobless” hit home.
A snippet:
Of course, there was lots of swearing. Lots of venom directed towards corporate. You can’t fly in a head honcho from Manhattan to dismiss a tremendously overworked, loyal group of employees, professing, “There’s nobody I’d [...]

Even if Michigan is able to have a speedy recovery from the recession, a study by the Pew Center on the States has indicated that it will take years for the state to recover the lost jobs.
Here is some of the reporting on that story:

Detroit Free Press.
Michigan Public Radio.

You either work for, or do business with, a company that has holiday gifts or gift baskets, holiday parties, or employee bonuses as part of its traditions, … or you don’t.
But one should never take such business gifts for granted, or assume you’ll get an equivalent holiday package as you got in previous years.
USA Today [...]

H. Douglas Chaffin, president and chief executive officer of Monroe Bank & Trust in Monroe, Mich., wrote a guest column for Saturday’s edition of The Monroe Evening News that was headlined “What happened to personal responsibility?”
Doug said in his piece that bankers are seeing an alarming trend “with a small number of borrowers” who can [...]

The Detroit News has this report, Michigan child support pleas flood courts.
A snippet:
Parents pinched by the recession are flooding courts across the state with requests for reductions in child support payments.
In Wayne County, requests for payment adjustments have doubled. Courts there and across southeast Michigan are prioritizing such cases to expedite relief to strapped payers, [...]

The social safety net in Michigan is fraying at the edges in attempts to keep up with the realities of this recession.
I’ve posted headlines from southeast Michigan about food pantries struggling to keep up with the demand, the numbers of students on the free or reduced price school lunches, and attendance at the soup kitchen [...]

USA Today has this report today: More walk away from homes, mortgages.
A snippet:
“The most disturbing aspect of this is that it’s becoming acceptable to do,” says Joel Naroff, an economist with Naroff Economic Advisors. “What does that mean down the road for housing and the economy if people are happy to walk away and destroy [...]