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The corporate parent of Orange-based Ameriquest Mortgage today said it would lay off 10% of its workforce — about 1,500 employees — as the long-running housing boom and demand for home loans cools off.

ACC Capital Holdings, which also owns AMC Mortgage Services and Argent Mortgage, would not identify where it would cut jobs or provide other details about the layoffs.


"The mortgage industry is entering a more challenging phase of rising interest rates," the company said in a statement. "In cyclical industries such as mortgage lending, periodic workforce reductions are not uncommon."

After benefiting for years from a booming housing market, mortgage lenders now face an industrywide slowdown as a rise in interest rates has dampened demand for refinancings and new loans.

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The Texan's salute to the owners and Abramoff's government clients was recorded by ABC-TV News: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system.'"

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Later, according to a recording made by a human rights investigator posing as a potential customer, one of the prominent factory owners said that DeLay had promised to stop the reform laws.

"Do you know what Tom told me?" Willie Tan said. "He said, 'Willie, if they elect me majority whip, I make the schedule of the Congress, and I'm not going to put it on the schedule.' So Tom told me, 'Forget it, Willie. No chance.'

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Much of the nation has had a lovely real estate boom for the past five years, but the house party is almost over and the cleanup won't be pretty.

That's the word from economists and investors who have watched housing prices march ever higher.

"The collapse of the housing bubble will throw the economy into a recession, and quite likely a severe recession," warned a July report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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"The demographic story behind the housing market boom, as we always thought, was a giant hoax," wrote Merrill Lynch & Co.'s North American economist, David Rosenberg, in a recent report.

If housing prices decline sharply, the effects could be broad. Lehman estimates one-third of the past year's U.S. economic growth was a consequence of the housing boom. Housing construction is equal to 5 percent of the national economy.

A downturn in housing could mean more than 1.3 million lost jobs, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts, bumping up the national unemployment rate by 1 percent and the unemployment rate in house-mad California by 2 percent. Those numbers don't include likely job cuts in housing-dependent businesses, such as banking, furniture and building materials.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research predicts worse, saying a bubble burst would mean the loss of 5 million to 6.3 million jobs.

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The number of new people signing up for jobless benefits last week rose sharply, suggesting that the labor market is still trying to gain traction after being knocked by a trio of Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that new applications for unemployment insurance jumped by a seasonally adjusted 30,000 to 335,000 for the week ending Nov. 19. In the prior week, new filings for jobless benefits registered a large decline.

Last week's increase left claims at their highest point since the middle of October. Economists were expecting claims to total around 312,000.

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Many of America's inner cities continue to hemorrhage jobs despite years of federal programs designed to improve their economies.


Nearly half of the country's 82 largest municipalities lost jobs from 1995 to 2003, according to a new study by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. By comparison, only one of the surrounding metropolitan areas lost jobs during the same period.

A separate analysis by The Associated Press found that most inner cities targeted by the federal government's primary urban economic programs lost jobs as well.

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A sustained decline will hit the U.S. housing market next year, costing the nation as many as 800,000 jobs, according to a new economic report released Wednesday.


The slowdown is likely to last several years, with as many as 500,000 construction jobs and 300,000 financial sector positions lost, the quarterly Anderson Forecast predicted.

"We expect housing to start slowing the economy this quarter or the next," said Edward Leamer, director of the study done at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Some jobs in manufacturing might well disappear as a result of weakness in housing, but this may be offset by jobs brought home or not lost to foreign competition," he wrote.

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The report cited several signs that the decline could be under way:

• New construction of housing in October was down 5.6 percent from the previous month, with new construction of single-family housing accounting for a 3.7 percent dip.

• New home sales have declined.

• Applications for home mortgages have trended downward since late September as rates increased.

• In some regions, homes are remaining unsold longer and the pace of housing construction is outpacing population growth, which could spell a decline in demand.

"On all these grounds, we believe housing is due for a sustained decline," economist Michael Bazdarich wrote in the forecast. "The remaining questions are how hard the fall will be and when it will begin."

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Sales of new homes plunged in November by the largest amount in nearly 12 years, providing the most dramatic evidence yet that the red hot housing market over the last five years is starting to cool down. The Commerce Department reported Friday that new single-family homes were sold at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.245 million units last month, a drop of 11.3 percent from October, when sales had surged to an all-time high.

Last month's decline was even bigger than the 8.7 percent drop-off that Wall Street analysts had been expecting. While sales of both new and existing homes are still on track to set records for a fifth straight year in 2005, analysts are forecasting sales will decline in 2006 as the housing boom quiets down.

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