Word: arme
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...past year, adjustable-rate mortgages have become the most popular way for Americans to buy homes. Though they represented only 13% of the $516 billion in total mortgages outstanding at the end of last year, ARMS now make up more than 60% of new home mortgages. Their attraction for home buyers is that they offer initial rates at about 2% lower than conventional fixed-rate mortgages, currently pushing 15%. But ARMS also present a gamble that consumers, in their anxiety to make an affordable deal, do not always appreciate. Reason: ARMS are tied to the general interest-rate level. Although...
...ARMS began to attract attention when interest rates started rising in the late 1970s. A year ago, an increasing number of home buyers viewed the ARM as the niftiest invention since aluminum siding. In November 1982, Houstonites Sheila and Bert Christensen would have been unable to afford their four-bedroom house at the daunting 15% going rate for a conventional mortgage. But with an ARM, the computer repairman and his wife paid an initial rate of just 11⅞% on their $85,000 home. Now they wish they had never heard of ARMS. Last January their lender boosted the rate...
...potential problems with ARMS have led many lenders to impose voluntary limits, or caps. San Francisco's First Nationwide Savings offers an ARM with an adjustment limit of ⅜% every six months and a maximum increase of 3½% over the life of the loan. If such moves fail to make ARMS safer, Congress may have the last word. Next month the Housing Subcommittee of the House Banking Committee will hold hearings on the problems of adjustable rates. Curbs on the loans are possible, but there is unlikely to be a farewell to ARMS. -By Stephen Koepp. Reported...
...bombarding the coast. "The destroyers had run in almost to the beach and were blowing every pillbox out of the ground with their five-inch guns," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who watched from one of the landing craft. "I saw a piece of German about three feet long with an arm on it sail high up into the air in the fountaining of one shellburst. It reminded me of a scene in Petrouchka...
...More immediately, the Forest Service is testing a method for quickly showing if a person is sensitive to the poison ivy family. In the test, also developed at U.C.S.F., a small drop of the plant's poisonous chemical, urushiol, is placed on the arm, and the reaction is monitored...