Mortgage delinquencies up
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The national unemployment rate, already 10 percent, will peak at about 10.5 percent in the first quarter of 2010, says Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight. Additional job losses mean more borrowers won’t be able to pay their mortgages. “The [delinquency] rate is going to stay up there for quite a while because the job market is going to be really weak for a while,” Newport says.
