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Rudolph Giuliani must pay the $148 million debt he owes two Georgia election workers — despite his bankruptcy, the pair said in a new complaint, Bloomberg Law reported. The judge overseeing the former New York City mayor’s chapter 11 case shouldn’t allow Giuliani to use bankruptcy to avoid the debt because bankruptcy law blocks the discharge of debt incurred through “willful and malicious injury,” the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, said in a filing Friday. Freeman and Moss were awarded $148 million in December after a court found Giuliani liable for defaming the pair by accusing them of rigging 2020 election results for Joe Biden. He filed for bankruptcy shortly after. A ruling in favor of Freeman and Moss in the bankruptcy case would prevent Giuliani from clearing what is by far his biggest debt. Giuliani has reported having $10.6 million in assets against almost $153 million in liabilities.

Texans will get the biggest share of President Joe Biden’s newest effort in canceling billions of dollars in student debt, a sign that more borrowers in the state have struggled to pay off longstanding loans, Bloomberg News reported. Residents in the Lone Star State that have signed up for a new income-driven repayment program known as SAVE will receive $116.6 million of the $1.2 billion awarded, according to data released by the White House. California, which has 8.5 million more residents than Texas, will see $114.8 million in relief. The forgiveness is the latest incremental effort by the Biden administration to cancel student debt after the Supreme Court blocked its one-time forgiveness plan last June. The nearly $138 billion the administration has canceled so far is less than half of the $400 billion the Congressional Budget Office said would be wiped out under the broad-based plan, and has primarily impacted a narrow group of borrowers who meet certain qualifications. The Biden administration announced on Feb. 21 that some 150,000 borrowers will receive a cumulative $1.2 billion in student-debt forgiveness under the income-driven repayment program known as SAVE. Borrowers enrolled in the plan who initially took out $12,000 or less in federal loans and have made at least 10 years’ worth of payments qualify for their remaining balance to be forgiven.

Housing market trends are shaping up in favor of a solid 2024 for U.S. homebuilders — as long as mortgage rates don't jump back to the highs they hit late last year, the Associated Press reported. Sales of new homes rose nationally in 2023 for the first time in two years, climbing 4.2% from a year earlier, according to the Commerce Department. This bucked the trajectory of the broader housing market, which remained mired in a deep slump as sales of previously occupied U.S. homes sank roughly 19% to a nearly 30-year low. Homebuilders were able to mitigate the impact of higher interest rates on home shoppers by lowering prices and offering incentives like paying buyers’ closing costs or buying down the rate on their mortgage. They also benefited from a chronically low inventory of existing homes on the market. Those market trends are expected to help give homebuilders a leg up again this year, Wall Street analysts say. Moody’s Investors Service projects that new U.S. home sales will increase 5% in 2024, citing strong demand among millennials and a healthy job market.

President Joe Biden’s administration announced that more than 150,000 borrowers will receive $1.2 billion in student loan forgiveness under a program unveiled in January seeking to provide relief for Americans who had been making payments for at least a decade, Bloomberg News reported. The move — which benefits those enrolled in the government’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan — wipes out loans for those who borrowed less than $12,000 for their higher education. Other income-driven repayment plans also forgive balances, but only after 20 or 25 years of repayment. “With today’s announcement, we are once again sending a clear message to borrowers who had low balances: If you’ve been paying for a decade, you’ve done your part, and you deserve relief,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement. The latest round pushes the total relief approved by the Biden administration to nearly $138 billion, benefiting 3.9 million borrowers. That number could grow as more people become eligible for forgiveness under the SAVE program, which has 6.9 million people enrolled. Administration officials have declined to estimate how many borrowers will eventually see loans forgiven under the program.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday grappled with a North Dakota convenience store's challenge to a contentious debit card "swipe fee" rule set by the U.S. Federal Reserve, with some of the justices appearing split over the case's possible implications, Reuters reported. Arguments in the case focused on whether the store was too late in bringing its 2021 lawsuit challenging a 2011 Federal Reserve regulation governing how much businesses pay to banks when customers use debit cards to make purchases. The store, called Corner Post and located in Watford City, appealed after lower courts threw out the lawsuit on the basis of missing the six-year statute of limitations that generally applies to such litigation. The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices and some of its conservatives seemed to differ on the implications of allowing such lawsuits after the six-year deadline. The store argued that it should not be bound by that statute of limitations because it opened for business in 2018, meaning its legal injury arose only after the deadline passed. Swipe fees are determined by Visa, MasterCard and other card networks, with a cap of 21 cents per transaction set under the Fed's 2011 rule.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday turned away a bid by landlords to challenge rent stabilization laws in New York City that cap rent hikes and make it harder to evict tenants, Reuters reported. The justices declined to hear appeals by property owners and industry groups of lower court rulings that found the price and eviction controls did not violate what is known as the "takings clause" of the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which bars the government from taking property without compensating owners. New York City's modern rent stabilization system, enacted in 1969, was designed to address a shortage of affordable housing by capping rent increases and curbing the authority of property owners to evict tenants. The law, which was passed by New York state legislature and is implemented by the city, generally applies to buildings constructed before 1974 with at least six units, covering nearly one million apartments — around half of all apartment rentals in New York City. A city government panel each year decides the percentage increase landlords can charge for rent-stabilized units. According to proponents, rent stabilization measures protect communities by reducing tenant dislocation and homelessness, and by allowing residents to have long-term homes in a neighborhood. The New York law was amended in 2019 to expand tenant protections, drawing legal challenges from landlords and trade associations seeking higher investment returns and more control over their property.

Arbor Realty Trust rose from its roots on Long Island, N.Y., to become a property-finance powerhouse. As a major lender to Sunbelt apartment buyers, it helped fuel a speculative real estate frenzy in 2021 and early 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported. That boom ended when interest rates shot up, imperiling borrowers’ ability to make payments on Arbor’s loans that were often repackaged into bonds and sold to investors. Now, the company is contending with a wave of property owners struggling to pay interest on their floating-rate debt. Borrowers of a quarter of Arbor’s securitized debt were late on debt payments as of mid-January, according to the data company CRED iQ, which analyzed figures from the bonds’ trustee. Borrowers of around 9% of the debt were 30 or more days late. Most borrowers who were late on January payments eventually paid, an Arbor spokesman said, and he said 5.8% of Arbor’s securitized debt payments are still not current on January payments.

U.S. consumer prices rose more than expected in January amid a surge in the cost of shelter, but the pick-up in inflation did not change expectations that the Federal Reserve will start cutting interest rates in the first half of this year, Reuters reported. The largest increase in prices in four months reported by the Labor Department on Tuesday came against the backdrop of labor market strength and economic resilience. Some economists also blamed difficulties adjusting the data for seasonal fluctuations for the stronger-than-expected inflation readings. "Today's data is not what markets or the Fed would have liked to see, but it's important not to over react and jump to the assumption that an inflationary resurgence is developing," said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management. "A March cut is completely off the agenda, but May could still be in play if economic activity plays ball and finally starts to show the impact from prior Fed tightening." The consumer price index (CPI) increased 0.3% last month after gaining 0.2% in December, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said. Shelter, which includes rents, accounted for more than two-thirds of the rise in the CPI. New weights, published last week, which saw the housing share rising and that of new and used cars lowered, were used to calculate the January consumer price data.

When New York Community Bancorp posted large losses last month and warned of more difficulties to come, it pointed to a significant cause for concern: troubled loans in a sinking corner of the New York City apartment market, the Wall Street Journal reported. NYCB is the city’s largest lender on rent-stabilized apartments. About $18 billion of its loans are backed by the city’s rent-stabilized units, representing more than 20% of its total loan book. Many of these loans were made when developers had more flexibility to upgrade rent-stabilized units and then boost the rent to market rate, or convert them to condominiums. In 2019, new laws capped the amounts that landlords can raise rents at these properties. Though these buildings could still deliver steady returns, business plans that were based on steeper rent increases no longer penciled out. Property values started to plummet. Sale prices of buildings containing rent-regulated units have fallen 34% since then, according to Maverick Real Estate Partners, a private-equity fund manager. Some rent-stabilized multifamily buildings have sold for half — or even less than half — of what owners paid for them before the 2019 law went into effect.