Genworth Financial Inc. (GNW) priced its public offering of 48 million shares of its Class A Common Stock at $11.75 each. The underwriters have the option to purchase up to 15% of the offering from Genworth if they underwriters sell more than 48 million shares. The company intends to use the net proceeds for general corporate purposes.   The joint book runners for this offering are Goldman Sachs & Co. (GS), Bank of America (BAC) and Deutsche Bank Securities, a part of Deutsche Bank (DB).   The challenging market conditions combined with slowing global economies have influenced investment and spending decisions in the past few quarters as both consumers and businesses modulate their risk profiles in response. This has resulted in the slowdown of mortgage originations and consumer lending. Genworth experienced an elevated incidence of claims in its U.S. and international mortgage and lifestyle protection ...

By Simon van Norden

Today, we're fortunate to have Simon van Norden, Professor of Finance at HEC Montréal (École des Hautes Études Commerciales), continue as a guest contributor.

In my previous post, I wrote about some of the evidence linking serious banking crises to real estate market collapses. That evidence is far from iron clad; it is simply the observation that many banking crises in mature economies have their origins in a real estate boom and bust cycle. However, the idea is also intuitively appealing.

Remember that at the end of 2008, the Federal Reserve Board estimated that there was $12 Trillion of mortgage debt on residential properties in the US, with the Federal government and its agencies providing about 5% of the total, individuals 9% and the rest coming from the financial sector. The Case-Shiller composite index of housing prices has fallen 1/3 from its peak in

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SOLF, Solarfun Power Holdings Co. Ltd.

PMI, PMI Group Inc.

CSRH, Consorteum Holdings Inc, CSRH.OB

PennyOmega.com Watch List!

PennyOmega.com Watch List ! for Wednesday September 9, 2009

Our Picks at PennyOmega.com for Wednesday September 9, 2009 are:

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SOLF, Solarfun Power Holdings Co. Ltd.

SOLF develops, manufactures, and sells photovoltaic (PV) cells and PV modules. The company offers monocrystalline and multicrystalline silicon cells and modules, monocrystalline ingots, and raw materials.

SOLF’s subsidiary, Jiangsu Linyang Solarfun Co. Ltd., signed a letter of intent to develop two solar projects with an aggregate capacity of 600 megawatts in Hohhot City, the capital China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region; It will develop the two solar projects and a 100-megawatt photovoltaic module production facility.

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For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL - July 1, 2009 - Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Freddie Mac (FRE), MGIC (MTG), Bank of America (BAC), Nanosphere Inc. (NSPH) and Lear Corporation (LEA).

Get the most recent insight from Zacks Equity Research with the free Profit from the Pros newsletter: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5513

Here are highlights from Tuesday's Analyst Blog:

Housing Prices Still Falling

The April Case/Schiller Index shows that the decline in housing prices is not over yet. The best that can be said is that the rate of decline is slowing.

As the Freddie Mac (FRE) presentation pointed out yesterday (see

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The April Case/Schiller Index shows that the decline in housing prices is not over yet. The best that can be said is that the rate of decline is slowing. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the 10-city composite index fell to 151.27, a decline of almost 1.0% from March. On an annualized basis, this is an 11.6% rate of decline. On a year-over-year basis prices are down 18.0%, so the rate of decline was lower in April than earlier in the year, but prices falling at an 11.6% rate hardly seems like a green shoot to me. The data on the 20-city composite was very similar with a 0.9% monthly decline and a 18.1% year-over-year drop. From the May 2006 peak housing prices are down 33.1% based on the 10-city index and off 32.0% based on the

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“Stone him to death!” No kidding. Dilapidation may be coming back into style. That’s what one of Madoff’s victims proposed in front of the courthouse.

We’re in the “anger” stage, writes John Authers in the Financial Times. No more denial…now, people want blood.

After the South Sea Bubble blew up, in the 18th century, the Walpole government was faced with similar anger. It seized the property of the company’s directors and used it to pay off the victims. Then, a resolution was proposed in Parliament by which the bankers involved in the scandal would be tied up in sacks filled with snakes and tipped into the Thames River.

So far, Congress has not proposed stoning Fannie Mae or sending AIG directors to the bottom of the Potomac. But it must be warming to the idea.

“Congress is looking for heads to cut off,” says the French press.

One member of Congress – Senator Grassley –

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Highlights include Fannie Mae (FNM), Freddie Mac (FRE), General Motors Corp. (GM), Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM).The Obama Plan to help homeowners hold onto their houses by refinancing their mortgages is getting underway today. There are three core elements to the program.  All the details are available at: http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/reports/housing_fact_sheet.pdf.  To understand the program, it is important to conceptually separate homeowners into 4 categories. First are people who own their houses free and clear. This group accounts for 31% of all homeowners, and a somewhat lower total value of all housing -- about 25%. These folks are obviously not in trouble.This leaves about 51 million houses with mortgages on them. The 2nd group is those where the current loan-to-value (LTV) is under 80%. These people have the ability to refinance now, and ...

UBS has some interesting positive comments on Genworth Financial (NYSE:GNW) after the co announced it borrowed $930M of its $1.7B available credit facilities to repay $1.1B of senior notes maturing in 2Q09—after which GNW has no long-term debt maturing until 2011. According to UBS, GNW may be able to purchase a significant amount of this debt in the open market at a discount to par. Liquidity also appears sufficient at life and mortgage insurance operating company levels.Capital seems adequate for double-A S&P/AM Best ratings in near-termGNW reported a 3Q08 RBC ratio of 360% (levels typically consistent w/ double-A ratings). In 4Q08, it freed $115M in capital and was working on another $500M in capital-relief efforts (half internal). If credit losses are similar to 3Q08’s $(321)M, the firm thinks GNW may avert further downgrades through at least another quarter.Asset sales—if possible—would help GNW’s capital and liquidity ...

If you are looking for very cheap stocks, you may want to look for stocks that are selling below cash per share. What this means is if you take all the cash a company has and divide it by the number of shares, you get the cash per share. There are actually over 60 stocks out there, discovered by WallStreetNewsNetwork.com, which are trading below that cash amount. The following are a list of 11 stocks, all with market caps over $400 million, which are trading way below cash per share, therefore, with a Price to Cash per Share [PCS] ratio of way below 1. Keep in mind that many of these are foreign companies, many have high debt, and many are in struggling industries. Financials are based on several sources, but should be investigated before investing in any of these stocks. Mitsubishi UFJ ( MTU ...

Mortgage insurers are hardly popular among investors at the moment. But Andrew Snyder says MGIC Investment Corp. (NYSE:MTG) is likely to survive the real estate meltdown. And as shares are already down 95% from their peak in March 2007, further downside potential is limited.

More from Today’s Financial News:

Every month, millions of Americans write a check for mortgage insurance. If our mortgages are insured, how did we get into this mess? And what the heck is mortgage insurance, anyway?

If you have ever bought a house and could not come up with the standard 20% down payment, you may know a thing or two about private mortgage insurance (PMI). In fact, you probably paid thousands of dollars during the first ten or fifteen years of your mortgage in premiums to buy the unfamiliar insurance.

Millions of homebuyers are required to have PMI, yet few folks know much about it. They know even less

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