Plan devised to stem growing credit crisis

It hasn't been easy, but Edward L. Moye has been making the $1,700 monthly payments on his $280,000 mortgage since he took it out in June 2005. Come June, though, his 6.9 percent interest rate is scheduled to start rising. That could boost his payment to $2,000 or more, and the West Norriton resident knows he cannot afford it.

Moye is among the estimated two million homeowners facing interest-rate resets on their adjustable-rate mortgages over the next 18 months. Anticipation that the rate of defaults on those loans will soar led government and industry officials to devise a plan - announced Thursday - to stem a growing credit crisis. See:

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Comcast Corp.'s shares tumbled after the company acknowledged that the housing slump and new competitors - mainly AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. - were slowing its growth even as its costs climbed.

The company, based in Philadelphia, had predicted this year that it would add 6.5 million of what Comcast calls revenue-generating units in 2007, but Comcast chief financial officer Michael Angelakis said that growth would amount to 6 million.

The looming competition with Verizon and AT&T was described as a "meaningful signal" by analyst Robin Diedrich of Edward Jones in St. Louis. "These companies in the cable industry have not had to pull back prices. Our long-term concern is, they are going to have to . . . bring down their prices." See:

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Toll Bros. Inc. reported its first quarterly loss since it began selling shares on the stock market in 1986.

Robert I. Toll, chairman and chief executive officer of the Horsham-based builder, said 2007 was by many measures "the most challenging of the 40 years that Toll Bros. has been in business." The year "1974 was perhaps rougher, but the difficult times only lasted one year," he said.

The company's net loss of $81.8 million, or 52 cents a share, for the fourth quarter compared with net income of $173.8 million, or $1.07 a share, a year earlier.

His management team predicted that company revenue, which plummeted 24 percent in fiscal 2007, would continue falling in 2008. Managers also pegged the average closing price of a company home at $630,000 to $650,000, down 3 percent to 6 percent, and declined to give earnings guidance for next year. See:

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The Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians - the nation's second-largest physician group - endorsed a single-payer health-care system Monday.

But the organization stopped short of saying that a single-payer system like Medicare, in which the government would get and pay most bills, is the best way to achieve universal health coverage.

The group said the country also could do that through expansion of the current mix of private insurance and government coverage. Under the proposal, people would be required to get health insurance.

While some physicians have formed organizations that push for single-payer, David Dale, president of the American College of Physicians, said his was the largest general-interest doctor group to support the controversial idea. The group said change was necessary because access to health care had deteriorated.

The largest physician group in the United States, the American Medical Association, does not support single-payer. See:

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A yearlong delay of two Philadelphia casinos amid legal and political maneuverings has come at a significant cost to the city, state and casino operators.

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