economoney: integrity 10th bank failure & incomes plunge

integrity bank becomes 10th US failure this year
from bloomberg: Integrity Bank of Alpharetta, Georgia, was closed by U.S. regulators today, the 10th bank to collapse this year amid a surge in soured real-estate loans stemming from the worst housing slump since the Great Depression. Integrity Bank, with $1.1 billion in assets and $974 million in deposits, was shuttered by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp... “Depositors will continue to be insured with Regions Bank so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance,” the FDIC said. Banks are being closed at the fastest pace in 14 years as financial companies report more than $505 billion in writedowns and credit losses since 2007.

incomes of americans plunge
from ap: Personal incomes plunged in July while consumer spending slowed significantly as the impact of billions of dollars in government rebate checks began to wane. The Commerce Department reported Friday that personal incomes fell by 0.7 percent in July, the biggest drop in nearly three years and a far larger decline than the 0.1 percent decrease that analysts had expected.

report card: workers in bad shape
from ap: This Labor Day finds workers in worse shape than they've been in years, according to a scorecard released Monday by Rutgers University. In its first national labor scorecard (108kb PDF), the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations said more than 10 percent of Americans are unemployed, discouraged from seeking work or underemployed. That is a nearly 25-percent increase from one year earlier. Professor Douglas Kruse, a labor economist who created the scorecard, said a sharp decline in the number of Americans able to find full-time jobs, along with growing consumer debt and health care costs, were causes for concern.