Monday morning headlines

Subprime mess: OC's New Century Financial said this morning that it's losing all short-term funding from its bank lenders, another nail in the coffin of the mortgage company. This is a very big deal because independent mortgage lenders rely on short-term financing from Wall Street and the big commercial banks to keep operating. Without that pipeline, New Century can't lend money and is essentially out of business. The company says it doesn't have sufficient liquidity to satisfy financial agreements. It's hard to believe this place can last much longer. Bloomberg

New Century up close: Talk about inspecting the sausage factory. The WSJ takes a peek at the New Century corporate culture and finds a place that liked to party, spend lots of money on booze and junkets, and approve loans to folks who couldn't even begin to pay them back. These are not nice folks. Well, consider the opening anecdote:

Ruthie Hillery was struggling to make the $952 monthly mortgage payment for her three-bedroom home in Pittsburg, Calif., last summer when a mortgage broker called. The broker persuaded the 70-year-old Ms. Hillery to refinance into a "senior citizen's" loan from New Century Financial Corp. that she thought would eliminate the need to make any payments for several years, according to her lawyer. Instead, the $336,000 adjustable-rate loan started out with payments of $2,200 a month, more than double her income. In December, Ms. Hillery received notice that New Century intended to foreclose on the property. Then, earlier this month, after a formal demand by the lawyer, New Century agreed to refund all its fees and cancel the loan once Ms. Hillery gets refinancing elsewhere. The lawyer, Alan Ramos, says the loan never should have been made. "You have a loan application where the income section is blank," Mr. Ramos says. "How does it even get past the first person who looks at it?"

Amgen troubles: Friday's decision by the FDA to issue special warnings on its widely prescribed anemia drugs, Epogen and Aranesp, could make this a tough day for the Thousand Oaks biotech giant. In early trading, the stock is down 2.79 percent (the overall market is flat) and UBS downgraded the shares to "reduce" from "neutral." Other houses are weighing in as well. Amgen will make a presentation tomorrow at Cowen & Co.'s health care conference in Boston. AP

Tribune update: At last some specifics about Sam Zell's proposal to take over the Chicago-based parent of ther LAT. Barron's reported over the weekend that the offer is valued at about $13 billion, with Zell putting in as much as $300 million. The plan, which Tribune directors could consider at a meeting on Saturday, involves Zell being in partnership with an employee stock ownership plan. Zell, in effect, would hand over control of Tribune to the ESOP. In return, tax deductions generated by the ESOP will sweeten the share price that Tribune could pay existing shareholders. Barron's reported that Zell wants to become chairman of the surviving entity.

"300" on 70: So how on earth does Frank Miller's graphic novel about the battle at Thermopylae in 480 BC manage to pull in $70 million at the box office in the opening weekend? One explanation could be a heavy marketing effort on MySpace.com, along with trailers featuring Nine Inch Nails music. Apparently, there's been buzz about "300" since a comic book convention in San Diego last summer. Warner Bros. estimates that 60 percent of "300" audiences were male and 52 percent were under 25 (I thought the numbers would be even more skewed). LAT

Environmental villainy: Having grown tired of the usual bad guys - drug lords, dictators, company CEOs - Hollywood is turning to an enemy that's really all of us. NYT reports that features ranging from the "The Simpsons Movie" to a remake of "Creature From the Black Lagoon" to James Cameron's "Avatar" will have environmental themes of one sort or another. Despite the success of Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," soul searching topics don't normally do very well at the box office.

MySpace news service: Or what masquerades as news these days. It's really an aggregator service that's intended to keep users on the site instead of going elsewhere for the latest stories on Paris or whomever. The new venture could launch in the second quarter, according to the NY Post.

Plunging homes sales: We're talking about a 31 percent drop in February from a year earlier, according to the Business Journal, which gets its numbers from HomeData Corp. (other reports will be out in the next week or so). But even with that sales drop, the median price of an existing L.A. County home remained unchanged at $550,000 (it's been stuck at around that level for nearly a year). Prices and inventory seems to vary a lot by region (the Westside still has lots of buyers but limited inventory).