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Lenders are rethinking their reliance on credit scores. In the past year, an increasing number of banks have begun turning to court documents, phone bills and other nontraditional ways of measuring creditworthiness to bolster their lending decisions. The shift comes at a time when the financial industry is suffering from a record number of loan defaults, particularly in the mortgage business. Industry experts say the widely used credit scores, the most famous of which is called the FICO, have not proved as effective in ferreting out bad borrowers as many lenders had anticipated. (Read TIME's "Bailout Report Card...
...which uses historical phone payments and other records to assess an individual's creditworthiness, says his company's business accelerated in May and June of last year as it became obvious that more and more lenders were having loan problems. He says his company has signed on a number of new clients in the past year and that his clients are not using his company's data just to make new loans but also to better assess the risks of the loans they already have made. "Traditional credit scores do a reasonable job of separating the very bad from...
...Credit scores, first developed in the late 1950s, try to boil down to a single number whether a person is likely to pay back a loan. The most widely used ranking of individual creditworthiness is the FICO score. Fair Isaac Corp., which computes the number, won't say exactly what goes into the formula, but it is essentially a summation of an individual's credit history - which loans were paid off and which weren't - rolled up into a three-digit number between 300 and 850. The higher the number, the more likely you are to pay back a loan...
...border traffic in weapons and medium-range rockets that are capable of striking deep into Israel. "We won't end the Gaza operation without some kind of suspension of the arms smuggling," one senior Israeli official told TIME. "The next phase is inevitable." Since the Israeli offensive began, the number of rockets fired by Hamas has tapered off from nearly 100 a day to around 24 on Thursday, but large Israeli population centers remain within firing range...
...traditionally volatile border with Israel reprised its role as a bellwether of Israeli-Arab tensions Thursday morning as unknown militants fired at least three Katyusha rockets into Israel. It was the third such attack since the end of Israel's 2006 Lebanon war. The first two attacks involved a number of 107-mm Katyusha rockets, which have a range of seven miles, but were poorly executed - some did not explode, one did not make it across the border, and one did not even leave the launcher...