Even though most people face some form of financial stress in their lifetime, and the financial crisis upended the affairs of many who had been comfortable, the poor and near poor contend with ongoing difficulties.
Read more...We just e-mailed the following message, along with a spreadsheet of signatures and messages, to Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Mary Shapiro, Sheila Bair, Ed DeMarco, and John Walsh. Thanks for your interest and involvement in curbing bad practices in the mortgage arena.
Read more...Can we have a free market when the average trade is less than a minute?
Read more...Arkansas officials stumped as birds fall from sky Reuters. Eeew. Expedia stops selling American tickets Financial Times Rare panda cow born on farm near Campion Loveland Reporter Herald (hat tip reader Michael T) “Internet a very large-scale spying machine” – info leaking site co-founder Russia Today (hat tip reader Scott A) Finding the one I […]
Read more...I’ve said that the efforts to clean up mortgage abuses will not have gone far enough until we see some foreclosure mill attorneys disbarred, and better yet fined and/or put in jail. And that is harder than it ought to be.
One of the frustrating issues in trying to rein in fraud is the way that essential accessories, namely, accounting firms and law firms, are close to beyond the reach of the law. For instance, if a law firm clearly permitted perjury or engaged in document fabrication that led someone to have their house foreclosed upon when they were actually current on their mortgage, the wronged homeowner could not sue the law firm. It could only sue the party that was the plaintiff in the suit (presumably a trust). Perversely, the only parties to a transaction that can sue banks and accountants are their clients, even when those firms were integral actors in scams.
Read more...One of the most frustrating parts of the financial reform game is how powerless most of us really are, most of the time. Take this story:
Read more...Top policymakers at the Federal Reserve are fighting efforts to rein in widely reported bank abuses, sparking an inter-agency feud with the FDIC and the Treasury Department. The Fed, along with the more bank-friendly Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is resisting moves to craft rules cracking down on banks that charge illegal fees and carry out improper foreclosures.
I’m of the school that PowerPoint has served as the breeding ground for many misguided efforts to gussy up simple messages with unproductive or even worse, confusing and misleading graphics. This is an example of the opposite, a very good use of visualization of a large and complex data set by Hans Rosling, who has made a near art form of this sort of thing. Notice how the tradeoff between wealth and life expectancy flattens once a reasonable level of wealth has been achieved.
Read more...This Year, Change Your Mind Oliver Sachs, New York Times
Device mimics complex bird-song BBC
Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed Slashdot
Read more...This post first appeared on August 24, 2008
Go Willem Buiter! The London School of Economics prof and former Bank of England and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development official has been saying for some time that the Fed suffers from “cognitive regulatory capture” and has been far too responsive to the needs of Wall Street. It’s been puzzling to watch his detailed, well argued criticisms go unnoticed, particularly when they have been offered at forums where one would think they’d be impossible to ignore (for instance, a conference co-hosted by the New York Fed where Buiter presented a pretty harsh paper on what he called the North Atlantic Financial Crisis).
Well, he finally seems to have gotten through, perhaps because he is forward enough to criticize Fed officials to their face at an event they are hosting. Or maybe it’s because the pattern of conduct he decries is so patently obvious that the key actors can no longer fool themselves.
Read more...Thanks to all readers of Naked Capitalism for your interest and support. Wishing you all happiness, health and prosperity in 2011!
New Year’s Eve Fireworks Sydney Morning Herald (hat tip Crocodile Chuck). Trust me, ringing in the new year is more fun down under, with some exceptions this year: 200,000 displaced in Australia floods Raw Story
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