Hope you enjoy this chat. I did, despite its predictably depressing conclusion. Stewart and Barofsky do a good job of conveying how DC works and why that guaranteed “a thoroughly broken financial system” would stay intact.
Read more...By Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector-general of the troubled asset relief programme and is currently a senior fellow at NYU School of Law. He is the author of ‘Bailout’. Cross posted from the Financial Times with permission
Now that Tim Geithner has resigned as US Treasury secretary, it is time to survey the damage wrought from four years of his approach to the financial crisis.
Read more...This post continues our discussion of how Bank of America and its consultant, Promontory Financial Group, made concerted efforts to ignore and suppress evidence of harm to borrowers who asked for what was supposed to be an independent review of their foreclosure.
Read more...Wow, one of my big assumptions about mortgage putback cases has been turned on its ear, much to the detriment of Bank of America and JP Morgan. If you thought there were pitched legal battles on this front, a key ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff means you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Read more...I know cynicism-hardened Naked Capitalism readers will expect the answer to the question in the headline to be “no”. But based on a summary of the filing at Bloomberg (and having conferred with lawyers on this beat), the answer looks more like “possibly yes”.
Read more...The more people look at the abruptly-arranged settlement of the OCC/Fed foreclosure reviews, the more they realize something does not smell right.
Read more...Yves here. Remind me never to get on Bill Black’s bad side.
Read more...By George Feiger, CEO of Contango Capital Advisors. From Contango’s current “Heard off the Street” newsletter
We question whether the widely held judgment that the US handled its banking crisis much better than the Europeans will survive the inevitable upturn in interest rates.
Read more...One of the things we’ve lamented since 2010, before the robosiging scandal broke, is the use of forgeries and document fabrications to remedy otherwise fatal problems with foreclosure actions, such as a lack of proper signatures on a borrower promissory note.
It looks like document experts are finally getting their day in court.
Read more...All you need to know to get confirmation that Lender Processing Services got a great gift is to look at what its stock did on the day of the announcement of its $127 million settlement with 46 chump state attorneys general, on a day when the market was down generally:
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
It’s early, but Salon has published on January 30, 2013 either the funniest or saddest column of the year to date: “Are Banks Too Big To Prosecute?”
Read more...One of the things that has been galling is watching various officials tasked to protect the public from financial services miscreants is to have them prattle meaningless statistics about how the number of actions of various sorts that they’ve taken is up relative to the previous incumbents. That’s tantamount to a MASH unit tallying up what a great job they did in improving the vaccination rate while not even looking at a huge rise in the mortality rate and questioning whether their response was adequate.
Read more...A Bears-style video on MMT was posted earlier this month. While I like the innovation of a Sharon Stone-ish head and her smashed up interlocutor, and I think this video is well done, I have my doubts as to whether this approach is an effective way to educate people about MMT.
Read more...By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel
Remarkably, on the same day two Senators (one of them named in the article) reminded Eric Holder that Lanny Breuer said this….
Read more...I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution, and as a result of bringing that case, there’s some huge economic effect — if it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly, counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly — it’s a factor we need to know and understand.
In this post in our Bank of America foreclosure review series, whistleblowers describe how the bank and its independent consultant Promontory Financial Group designed and managed the tests so as to minimize findings of harm to borrowers.
Read more...