The OCC is bravely trying to spin the horrorshow of its botched foreclosure reviews as some sort of positive outcome. It is apparently now trying to present its dereliction of duty in figuring out how to compensate borrowers as no big deal.
Read more...Yes, sports fans, you read that headline correctly. The top 1% has captured all of the income gains since 2009 and then some, roaring ahead while the rest of the population slipped behind.
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
Ireland and Portugal have, recently, tested the water of the money markets with some success. But does this mean that they are out of the woods?
Read more...It takes a lot of chutzpah for Obama to recycle a watered-down version of a 2008 campaign commitment and present it as his brightest, shiniest promise in the State of the Union address laying out his second term priorities.
Read more...Lambert Strether blogs at Corrente.
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. … As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
With this post, I’ll conclude analysis of Obama’s second Inaugural speech (the first post is here) – just in time for the SOTU!
Read more...I know a lot of readers miss Dave Dayen, who had a solid following at Firedoglake and among other things, covered the mortgage beat ably and energetically. He’s apparently been busy reporting, and just published a story in Washington Monthly on how the mortgage standards launched by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fall well short of what is necessary.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil
If I were to put forward to you that we can learn as much if not more about human cognition, epistemology and methodology from the clinically insane as from our philosophers would you think me to be engaging in hyperbole, pseudo-intellectual claptrap and pretentious avant-garde nonsense? Perhaps you would, but I maintain that this is perfectly true and in what follows I hope to show it.
Read more...This post continues our discussion of the role of “independent” foreclosure review consultant Promontory Financial Group. Here we focus on what happened, or more important, didn’t happen in Promontory’s conduct of the reviews, and how that contrasts with the staggering fees the firm is widely believed to have earned.
Read more...Today we release the two latest posts in our whistleblower series on the Bank of America foreclosure reviews, focusing on the role of the “independent” consultant hired to perform the reviews, Promontory Financial Group.
Read more...By Wolf Richter, San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit.
Friday evening when no one was supposed to pay attention, Google announced that Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt would sell 3.2 million of his Google shares in 2013, 42% of the 7.6 million shares he owned at the end of last year—after having already sold 1.8 million shares in 2012. But why would he sell 5 million shares, about 53% of his holdings, with Google stock trading near its all-time high?
Read more...Lambert here: I don’t want to be “all Keystone, all the time” because there are plenty of other resource extraction issues to contend with. That said, Keystone is a big deal, a decision seems likely in the near term, this timely post arrived over the transom (hat tip MA), and Klare moves the ball forward with a lot of detail and linky goodness.
By Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left, just published in paperback. Originally published at TomDispatch.
Presidential decisions often turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns. Such is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, is slated to bring some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. In the near future, President Obama is expected to give its construction a definitive thumbs up or thumbs down, and the decision he makes could prove far more important than anyone imagines. It could determine the fate of the Canadian tar-sands industry and, with it, the future well-being of the planet. If that sounds overly dramatic, let me explain.
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