The infamous James Carville quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” seems more applicable to official Washington than the much-maligned Paula Jones.
Read more...Rust Consulting, which handled the borrower mailings during the Independent Foreclosure Review and is now acting as paying agent, continues to screw up in every way imaginable.
Read more...During the protracted negotiations over what was to become the 49 state/Federal mortgage settlement, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman was hailed as a progressive leader and California’s Kamala Harris was characterized as an opportunist.
Turns out the opportunist cut a much better deal for her constituents than the supposed true believer.
Read more...Jack Lew really needs to get better at lying in public. So far, he’s making a hash of it.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
The LIBOR price-fixing scam has cost at least $110 million — in the state of Oregon alone!
Read more...By Abigail Field, an attorney and writer
Eric Schneiderman gets buyers’ remorse. But can he do anything about it?
Read more...The consternation at the not-exactly-a-surprise nomination of billionaire Penny Pritzker to be Commerce Secretary, is sadly much less than is warranted. That suggests that the Forbes 400 member will survive her confirmation hearings. And in a telling bit of synchronicity, last week some fauxgressives set about amplifying an article in the Nation that big bank lobbying efforts were the reason Dodd Frank was amounting to very little. As we’ll discuss, both reflect how much Obama supports the interests of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).
Read more...Yves here. I had really wanted to write this piece, but Lynn Parramore beat me to the punch. There’s been almost universal enthusiasm for Brown-Vitter, legislation proposed by Sherrod Brown and David Vitter to get tough with the too-big-to-fail banks. The legislation is sufficiently stringently written that if it were enacted (big if), it would force the banks to make changes to maintain anything remotely resembling their previous profit margins. Goldman and Morgan Stanley would probably drop their banking licenses and the other US systemically dangerous banks would presumably downsize by hiving off major operations.
So what’s not to like? The problem is that the enthusiasts haven’t looked behind the curtain. This bill is being pushed, hard, by big insurers, who would be major winners.
Read more...It’s been far too long in coming, but Jamie Dimon may finally be getting his comeuppance.
Read more...As is par for the course, the financial media is telling a story about a major US company from the perspective of the investing classes, rather than the broader public.
Read more...Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money! But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.
Read more...Your humble blogger was surprised when Obama nominated Mary Jo White to head the SEC, since her reputation as a tough prosecutor is at odds with Obama’s well established pattern of catering to banks (the fact that he gives them only 97% of what they want is nevertheless offensive enough to their tender sensibilities). I surmised that there had to be an angle here…
Read more...It appears that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Fed dropped the ball yet again on vetting firms involved in the Orwellianly-named Independent Foreclosure Review (IFR) for conflicts of interest. Michael Olenick’s expose on Allonhill, one of the “independent consultants” hired by Wells Fargo, led to Allonhill’s role being curtailed considerably.
But there’s no way to curtail the role of Rust Consulting, a firm that has been central in the Independent Foreclosure Reviews virtually from their onset. And as we’ll see, Rust has ample conflicts of interest when it was engaged to handle mailings and outreach under the IFR, and is about to become even more conflicted.
Read more...Yves here. Coverage of the horrific fertilizer plant explosion has taken a back seat to reporting of the Boston Marathon bombings. Yet more people died in the Texas tragedy, which was also preventable.
Read more...We’ve written before about the perverse phenomenon known as “zombie title.” Kate Berry of American Banker provides an update.
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