Category Archives: Banking industry

David Dayen: Administration Outside Review Group on NSA Includes Co-Designer of HAMP Peter Swire

The President announced his “outside experts” for reviewing NSA surveillance policies last week, and everyone had a chuckle about the fact that the “outside experts” are apparently only “outside” in the sense that they no longer work for the President. An outside group featuring former OIRA head, rumored judicial appointment, longtime Obama friend and husband of the current UN Ambassador Cass Sunstein isn’t very outside.

David Dayen: Click-Bait Law Enforcement as Schneiderman Ignores Systemic Wall Street Fraud, Sues Trump University

The pitch-perfect parody of the year goes to The Onion for their editorial from CNN.com’s managing editor (whose actual name was used in the story), “Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning.”

It goes on from there, basically defining the phenomenon of click-bait, where websites run deliberately titillating stories with little or no redeeming value in a desperate stab for attention.

I think yesterday counts as the first-ever clickbait lawsuit, filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

A Very Profitable Part Of Banking Goes Totally To Heck

Refinancing mortgages is a phenomenally profitable and nearly risk-free business for banks, and one of the few growth sectors that were actually spawned by the Fed’s herculean efforts to force down long-term interest rates through waves of quantitative easing. Banks went on a hiring binge to shuffle all this paper around and extract fees along the way before they’d dump most of these mortgages into the lap of government-owned and bailed-out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And then they’d run.

What is Shadow Banking?

There is much confusion about what shadow banking is and why it might create systemic risks. This column presents shadow banking as ‘all financial activities, except traditional banking, which require a private or public backstop to operate’. The idea that shadow banking is something that needs a backstop changes how we think about regulation. Although it won’t be easy, regulation is possible

CFPB Examiners Find Mortgage Servicing Business Remains a Sewer

Not that we needed additional evidence, but the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found more fraud and theft inside the nation’s mortgage servicing operations. CFPB has examiners in both bank and non-bank servicers; this is the first time non-bank servicers have faced such scrutiny. And their new report on Supervisory Highlights for the summer shows that extremely little has changed, despite a gauntlet of settlements that were supposed to end this conduct (OK, not really).

What Paul Krugman Should Have Learned from James Tobin but Didn’t

Paul Krugman last week wrote yet another response on the issue of “how banks work”. The problem is that Krugman’s critical source for his argument, James Tobin, in fact has taken the position the opposite of Krugman’s on monetary operations, as do central bankers.

Bill Black: The Banksters Master Irony – Push Summers & Geithner for Fed Due to Their Regulatory Zeal

The big banks are desperate to prevent Janet Yellen from being appointed as Bernanke’s successor to run the Fed. Their sexist attacks have backfired.

Bill Black: Obama’s FBI Channels the Tea Party – Partner with the Banks and Blame the Poor for the Crisis

Yves here. This is the latest installment of Bill Black’s forensic work into why the FBI, which had in the past been a critically important working oar in investigating banking industry frauds, was nowhere to be found before and after the global financial crisis. This post, on how the Mortgage Bankers’ Association, succeeded in getting the FBI focused solely on frauds made on banks, as opposed to by banks, is an ugly and critical bit of the story.

Bill Black: The Incredible Con the Banksters Pulled on the FBI

Yves here. Bill Black continues his forensic work about the dogs that didn’t bark in both the runup to and the aftermath of the crisis.

How the Pending Trans-Pacific Partnership and EU-US Trade Deals Will Gut National Regulations, Hurt Budgets, and Undermine Sovereignity

Yves here. We’ve written from time time about the latest plans underway to further degrade the lives of ordinary citizens in order to fatten the bottom lines of major multinationals, namely, two major US-led international trade pacts. Even though the US media has given these pending deals scant attention, they represent a far-reaching effort to restructure basic legal and regulatory frameworks.

The Real Foreclosure Scandal: Why Have Virtually No Lawyers Been Disbarred?

Even now, years after the subprime market’s death in 2007, new stories of mortgage chicanery or accounts providing more evidence of known abuses keep surfacing.

Quelle Surprise! Administration Lied About Mortgage Fraud Results, Numbers 4 to 10 Times Too High

Normally I’d relegate a good job of news spadework to the daily Links feature, but Bloomberg caught out Attorney General Eric Holder in such an egregious lie that this failed con job merits ample, widespread publicity and well-deserved derision.

So Why is the Administration Trying to Look a Smidge More Aggressive About Going After Banks?

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?