In the last few days, the Department of Justice (as well as the SEC) filed a case against Bank of America over a 2008 prime mortgage securitization that takes breaks some new ground in fraud allegations and is also saber-rattling in the form of launching a criminal investigation into JP Morgan’s sale of mortgage backed securities.
So what’s with the new-found religion?
Read more...Before readers start throwing brickbats at me, understand that I am no fan of the Google Glass project. But the killer app for Google Glass could be protecting citizens from authoritarian policing.
Read more...In a weird but more disturbing analogue to chain of title abuses, where banks would forge signatures and fabricate documents to remedy the failure to transfer assets properly to securitization trusts, Reuters reported today that the Drug Enforcement Agency would doctor up where it got evidence from so it could use it in court. Now why would the DEA bother to go to all that trouble? Chorus: Because if a decent defense lawyer found out where it came from, it would in most cases be inadmissible.
Read more...Just as government corruption and private sector looting have exploded in the last thirty years, so too have police shakedowns. Iin some places, such as a stretch of road in East Texas, civil forfeiture is a mechanism for local cops to separate people with out of state or rental license plates from their jewelry and cash. In other places, cars and even homes are the objects of the official seizures.
Read more...Jessica Silver-Greenberg at the New York Times has an important account of how a system created by banks to catch scam artists like check-kiters has morphed over 20 years into a shadow credit reporting system.
Read more...Retired CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in absentia in Italy for a rendition/kidnapping operation, is picked up in Panama on an Interpol warrant, hits the news for a day, and then is allowed to fly back to the U.S. where he disappears — and despite the Edward Snowden case, the Washington media doesn’t even blink.
Read more...Even more so than most cities, Chicago has had the best government money can buy. In this case, the money is willing to engage in a scorched-earth policy of crushing local investors and wrecking the city budget to achieve its end of taming unions and making Chicago even easier pickings for looting via infrastructure sales.
Read more...The bankruptcy filing and underlying train wreck of the once prosperous city of Detroit carries so much symbolic and practical baggage as to be beyond the scope of a single post. So rather than attempt to do a deep dive, particularly since the media and various experts are still weighing in, I thought I’d offer some high level observations and let readers provide more information, observations, and links.
Read more...A Real News Network interview with Chris Hedges precipitated a lively, thoughtful discussion of the mess we are in as a civilization and whether we can pull ourselves out of what looks like a nosedive.
I thought readers might enjoy continuing the exchange, and the latest release in this Real News Network series should provide ample grist for debate.
Read more...Yves here. This post illustrates yet another sign of decay among the ruling classes: that of not even bothering to go through the motions of following stipulated political and regulatory processes.
Read more...One of hedge fund manager David Einhorn’s saying is “no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” An article in Washington Monthly, Special Deal by Haley Sweetland Edwards, deep dives into one big and largely hidden reason why medical costs in the US are out of control and are unlikely to be reined in any time soon.
Read more...Spitzer is the only major U.S. politician whose deeds, and not simply words, prove that he does not think corporate titans are too big to jail. And as New York City Comptroller, he’d have subpoena power.
Read more...Yves here. I suspect NC readers can go even further will Bill Black’s question!
Read more...Yves here. Last week, we used a the latest release of an every-other-year report by Transparency International on corruption to discuss the need to come up with more granular descriptions of the many forms it takes. This post on a major bribery scandal in Spain will hopefully elicit reader comment on the common forms of corruption in the EU and how they’ve changed over time.
Read more...I’m going to be brief, in part because the CFTC’s probable demonstration of lack of gumption is still in play, while the SEC’s was expected but nevertheless appalling. But the bottom line is that even though we seem some intermittent signs of the officialdom recognizing that big banks remain a menace to the health and well-being to the general public*, the measures to constrain them continue to be inadequate.
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