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Grant Thornton UK LLP has appointed Kersten Muller as a Property Tax Partner for London.

Kersten joins from Deloitte where he was a director in the real estate team. Kersten has been advising a range of investors on the tax-efficient structuring of their UK and European properties ranging from asset acquisitions to complex acquisitions both in the UK and internationally. He has extensive experience of structuring property finance in a tax-efficient manner and reorganising portfolios to facilitate disposals. Kersten has also advised a number of corporate occupiers on ways to optimise lease transactions and is a property investor in his own right.

As property tax partner in London, Kersten will oversee a strong team of property tax specialists and is tasked with building Grant Thornton’s international property client base and further increasing the volume of transactional work in this sector.

Global Head of Property and Construction Clare Hartnell said; “I am delighted Kersten has joined the firm and I am excited to see how he will take the team to the next level.

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The figures on housing starts may soon start looking disappointing for reasons that have little to do with the economy and a lot to do with the weather.

The report on February housing starts, issued Tuesday, appears to be mixed. New permits are rising, but the seasonally adjusted level of starts dipped a bit from January to February.

This has been a very unusual winter. From December through February, the government estimates there were 137,300 units started, up 26 percent from the comparable period last year. We havent seen a year-over-year increase that big for a three-month period in nearly 20 years. Those figures include single-family and apartment units. Starts of single-family homes are up 19 percent, also highly unusual.

The big question is how much of that is the economy and how much the weather. This was a very mild winter in most of the country, and it seems reasonable to think that units that would have been started in the spring were started earlier.

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Bank stocks climbed as the results of the Federal Reserve’s stress test were released on Tuesday, two days earlier than planned.

Fifteen of the 19 banks included in the stress test, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, met the Feds criteria. The test was intended to measure the strength of bank capital buffers in the event of another serious economic downturn. Banks submitted capital plans in early January that were then run through a hypothetical situation that tested their ability to withstand “very high unemployment rates and significant further declines in housing prices, the regulator said Tuesday.

The four bank holding companies that failed the test were Ally Financial, SunTrust, Citigroup and MetLife.

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The Durbin Amendment was created to “protect” retailers and gave the Federal Reserve the power to set interchange fees for debit card transaction processing.  The idea is lower debit card fees would improve economic growth, since retailers could lower prices on items when they pay lower fees to banks for accepting debit cards, and lower prices would result in more consumers buying. The debit card transaction fee was 44 cents per transaction before the amendment, and has been capped at 21 cents as a result of the Durbin Amendment.

Plaintiffs Arguing Against the Durbin Amendment

The following are among the plantiffs in the legal action against the Federal Reserve over the failings of the Durbin Amendment:

Their argument is that the interchange fees for debit cards do not comply with the Durbin Amendment, and that the amendment is heavily influenced by the banking industry which results in higher expenses for small retailers instead of the promised lower expenses the amendment was supposed to bring.

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Capital Economics expects the housing crisis to end this year, according to a report released Tuesday. One of the reasons: loosening credit.

The analytics firm notes the average credit score required to attain a mortgage loan is 700. While this is higher than scores required prior to the crisis, it is constant with requirements one year ago.

Additionally, a Fed Senior Loan Officer Survey found credit requirements in the fourth quarter were consistent with the past three quarters.

However, other market indicators point not just to a stabilization of mortgage lending standards, but also a loosening of credit availability.

Banks are now lending amounts up to 3.5 times borrower earnings. This is up from a low during the crisis of 3.2 times borrower earnings.

Banks are also loosening loan-to-value ratios (LTV), which Capital Economics denotes “the clearest sign yet of an improvement in mortgage credit conditions.”

In contrast to a low of 74 percent reached in mid-2010, banks are now lending at 82 percent LTV.

While credit conditions may have loosened slightly, some potential homebuyers are still struggling with credit requirements.

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Mortgage rates dropped for most types of mortgage products this week, led by a huge drop in average rates for 5-year adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said in a recent report.

According to the MBAs Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending February 24, average rates for 5-year ARMs decreased to 2.78 percent from 2.94 percent the previous week. The 2.78 percent mark is the lowest seen for the 5-year ARM by the MBA since the association began tracking that product in January 2011.

Despite this large weekly drop in rates for 5-year ARMs, the overall share of mortgage activity associated with ARMs actually decreased to 5.0 percent from 5.3 percent of total applications a week earlier.

Average rates for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages (those with conforming loan balances of $417,500 or less) fell to 4.07 percent from 4.09 percent one week earlier, while 15-year fixed-rate mortgages fell to an average of 3.36 percent from 3.38 percent the previous week.

Mortgage rates remained near survey lows last week, but refinance volume fell slightly, Michael Fratantoni, Vice President of Research and Economics at the MBA, said in a statement.

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