Yearly Archives: 2011

Links 6/25/11

Florida Governor Floats Huge Gimmie for Banks: Taking Foreclosures Out of the Court System

Florida continues to show a rather disconcerting willingness to throw its citizens’ rights under the bus to help the banks. The state created special foreclosure courts to clear up a substantial backlog, which might not have been such a bad idea if they had been properly implemented. However, they were staffed with retired judges, many of whom seemed to put speed over due process. There have been numerous reports of judges refusing to hear motions or evidence presented by borrowers, to the point where the ACLU contested the procedures used as violations of due process.

To some degree, this has become moot since these kangaroo courts are expected to be shuttered (they required an extension of funding to continue). Moreover, new foreclosure filings have slowed in Florida as a result of the robo-signing scandal. The revelation of widespread abuses by banks has led some judges to dismiss cases with dubious documentation; judges are also complaining that banks are seldom coming to hearings on foreclosure cases.

Never fear, with government bought and paid for in America, someone was certain to try a fix. The Florida governor has, in effect, suggested that if banks can’t meet the existing requirements for foreclosure, then the solution obviously is to lower them.

What can the Fed do?

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns The Federal Reserve has released its latest statement on the state of the US economy.Its Chairman Ben Bernanke has now spoken to the press as well. The overall assessment was rather downbeat. (video below) Monetary Policy’s Impotence If you compare the Fed statement to its previous one, you will understand the […]

Links 6/24/11

Ezra Klein Should Stick to Being Wrong About Health Care

A recent post by Ezra Klein, “What ‘Inside Job’ got wrong,” manages the impressive feat of being spectacularly off base, rhetorically dishonest, and embarrassingly revealing of the lack of a moral compass all at once.

Since being off base is a major part of Klein’s brand, I suppose one should not be surprised; those who’ve had the good fortune to have limited contact with his output can read Jon Walker’s “Ezra Klein: Insurance Exchanges Don’t Work and Must be Expanded Dramatically,” or Physicians for a National Health Care Program’s “Does Ezra Klein really think ‘managed care didn’t kill anyone’?” for two of many examples.

I’m going to shred this piece in some detail, first, because it will be entertaining, and second, I hope that it will encourage readers to take a cold, bloodyminded look at the excuses made for malfeasance in our elites.

Matt Stoller: Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going AND Put You in Debtor’s Prison?

Matt Stoller is a current fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His Twitter feed is @matthewstoller. More than a third of all states allow debtors “who can’t or won’t pay their debts” to be jailed. In 2010, according to the Wall Street Journal, judges have issued 5,000 such warrants. What is behind the increased pressure to […]

Michael Hudson: Whither Greece? Without a National Referendum Iceland-Style, EU Dictates Cannot be Binding

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

The fight for Europe’s future is being waged in Athens and other Greek cities to resist financial demands that are the 21st century’s version of an outright military attack. The threat of bank overlordship is not the kind of economy-killing policy that affords opportunities for heroism in armed battle, to be sure. Destructive financial policies are more like an exercise in the banality of evil – in this case, the pro-creditor assumptions of the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and IMF (egged on by the U.S. Treasury).

As Vladimir Putin pointed out some years ago, the neoliberal reforms put in Boris Yeltsin’s hands by the Harvard Boys in the 1990s caused Russia to suffer lower birth rates, shortening life spans and emigration – the greatest loss in population growth since World War II. Capital flight is another consequence of financial austerity. The ECB’s proposed “solution” to Greece’s debt problem is thus self-defeating. It only buys time for the ECB to take on yet more Greek government debt, leaving all EU taxpayers to get the bill. It is to avoid this shift of bank losses onto taxpayers that Angela Merkel in Germany has insisted that private bondholders must absorb some of the loss resulting from their bad investments.

The bankers are trying to get a windfall by using the debt hammer to achieve what warfare did in times past.

Two Michigan Counties Sue Fannie and Freddie for Nonpayment of Mortgage Transfer Fees

I’ll be brief because this article from the Michigan Messenger (hat tip furzy mouse) stands on its own. Readers may recall that some registers of deeds (the county officials responsible for recording mortgage transfers) are less than happy at the way MERS has deprived their governments of income by skipping recording fees for some mortgage transfers (that was the point, after all) and making a mess of title records.

Two counties in MIchigan, Oakland and Ingham, have decided to do something about it. To my knowledge, this is the first litigation of this type

Bill Gross: Bond Vigilante, Minsky Convert

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns In the end, I hearken back to revered economist Hyman Minsky – a modern-day economic godfather who predicted the subprime crisis. “Big Government,” he wrote, should become the “employer of last resort” in a crisis, offering a job to anyone who wants one – for health care, street cleaning, or slum […]

Links 6/23/11

Bill Black: Dawn of the Gargoyles – Romney Proves He’s Learned Nothing from the Crisis

By Bill Black, an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is a white-collar criminologist, a former senior financial regulator, and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Mitt Romney chose to unveil the economic plank of his campaign for the Republican nomination with a speech in Aurora, Colorado decrying banking regulation. He could not have picked a more symbolic location to make this argument, for Aurora is the home and name of one of the massive financial frauds that caused the Great Recession. Lehman Brothers’ collapse made the crisis acute and Lehman’s subsidiary, Aurora, doomed Lehman Brothers. Lehman acquired Aurora to be its liar’s loan specialist. The senior officers that Lehman put in charge of Aurora, which was inherently in the business of buying and selling fraudulent loans, set its ethical plane at subterranean levels.

Aurora sealed Lehman’s fate by serving as a “vector” that spread an epidemic of mortgage fraud throughout the financial system and caused catastrophic losses far greater than Lehman’s entire purported capital. Aurora epitomizes what happens when we demonize the regulators and create regulatory “black holes.” Romney literally demonized banking regulators as “gargoyles” and claimed that banking regulations and regulators were the cause of the economy’s weak recovery.

Sunny Sheu: Murdered for Investigating NY Foreclosure Judge Joseph Golia?

The details are thin but they sure don’t smell right. The short form is that Sunny Sheu had his house stolen from him by fictive buyers who used forged documents. Judge Golia of Queens engaged in what appears to be highly questionable behavior in failing to reverse the sale. Sheu started investigating the judge, was told by policeman who specifically referred to information he had provided about Golia, and that if he didn’t drop it, he’d wind up dead. Sheu disregarded their warning and did wind up dead. The authorities are also refusing to honor requests for information regarding Sheu’s death made under New York’s Freedom of Information Act. This story has been publicized by Foreclosure Fraud and The Daily Bail and I hope it gets more traction.