Yearly Archives: 2013

The CFPB’s New Stealth Usury Law on Mortgages and Why It’s Desirable

With the looming debt ceiling pigfight consuming a lot of financial media bandwidth, some important stories are not getting the attention they warrant. One is on the hard fought and finally settled qualified mortgage rules just finalized by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin in a new post describes how the new QM rules are a defacto usury law for the 21st century. Despite his good discussion of the QM and the history of usury laws, however, he peculiarly does not explain why usury laws are a good thing. Perhaps it seems obvious, given the explosion of economically unproductive consumer debt since they’ve effectively been eliminated.

Let me give you the reason why well designed usury laws are desirable, then I’ll turn the mortgage-related issues specifically.

NC Ranked #2 Among 100 Anglo-Saxon Financial Blogs

We are glad to be rank well in a new finance blog tally (thanks to loyal NC readers!), even though this survey is tongue in cheek (it has a methodology which has some logic to it but simultaneously pokes fun at methodologies).

Links 1/13/13

Bill Moyers: Paul Krugman Explains the Keys to Our Recovery

lambert strether blogs at Corrente

I’m tempted to call this one Krugman Agonistes. Why? Here’s the video, and don’t listen to Morning Edition, if you still do; listen to this:

Eric Tymoigne: Public Debt, Debt Ceiling and Monetary Sovereignty: Some Accounting Realities

By Eric Tymoigne, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College and Research Associate at The Levy Economics Institute. His research expertise is in: central banking, monetary economics, and macroeconomics.

The public debt is the outstanding U.S. Treasury securities (USTS). It includes both marketable (T-bills, T-notes, T-bonds, TIPSs, and a few others) and non-marketable securities (United States notes, Gold certificates, U.S. savings bonds, Treasury demand deposits issued to States and Local Gov., all sorts of government account series securities held by Deposit Funds). What are the means to reduce the public debt?

Links 1/12/13

Links 1/11/13

UBS Risk Management Fiasco Illustrates Hidden Big Bank IT Time Bombs

Yves here. One of the sources of risk in big and even moderately big banks that does not get the attention it deserves is information systems

Philip Pilkington: The Origins of Neoliberalism, Part III – Europe and the Centre-Left Fall under Hayek’s Spell

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.

– Sun Tzu

Another Nightmare, “Zombie Title” Shows How Servicer Refusal to Foreclose Hurts Stressed Homeowners and Communities

One of the popular conservative memes is to fulminate that lots of Americans have been living “rent free” in homes slotted for foreclosure, taking advantage of the fact that court dockets are crowded. An important Reuters piece documents the flip side of this picture: what happens when the servicer starts foreclosure but keeps the property in limbo-land, and the homeowner has decamped, on the mistaken assumption that foreclosure was imminent? The Reuters tag phrase for this syndrome, “zombie title” doesn’t begin to do justice to the horrorshow that borrowers experience.