Category Archives: Banking industry

Eurocarnage Continues

Things are only going from bad to worse in Europe.

We Speak on PBS Newshour About Why No Bank Executives Have Gone to Jail

The cynic in me has to note that PBS Newshour decided to cover the issue of why no banksters have gone to jail on what has to be one of their lowest traffic days of the year. And I have a sneaking suspicion I got the call to go on the show because it was not exactly easy to find people willing to be taped late in the afternoon on the day before Thanksgiving.

German Bund Action Goes Badly; Bank of America CDS Spread Hit New High; EuroSovereign and US Bank Spreads Widen More. Will the Germans Finally Break Glass?

As our overly-long headline tells you, Wednesday was a really bad day in credit land. Not only has the reality of the severity and seeming intractability of the Eurozone mess started sinking in, but US investors seem finally to be facing up to the fact that a full blown crisis would not be contained and will engulf American banks. If you thought September-October 2008 events were nasty, they could look like a mere trial run for what may be in the offing.

The Financial Times coverage on the failure of the Bund auction is suitably grim:

Federal Judge Refuses to Dismiss Bank Break-In Case Against JP Morgan, Lender Processing Services

In the sordid underworld of foreclosure-related reporting, certain stories have started to develop a prototypical feel. Bank Forecloses on Wrong Home. Bank Forecloses on Home with No Mortgage. Bank Refuses Even to Talk About Short Sale. Bank Sends Borrower into HAMP-Created Hall of Mirrors and Forecloses Anyhow.

The problem with stories becoming cliched is that the force of the recognition of the injustice loses some of its punch with repetition. But one type of story still seems to trigger well warranted outrage in the public: Bank Breaks Into House.

The Fed Stress Tests While Europe Starts to Burn

Our headline at odds with the media reports on the newest confidence-bolstering ploy by the Federal Reserve, that of new, improved stress tests for the six banks at the apex of the US financial services industry looting operation: Bank of America, Citi, Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells.

There’s a noteworthy gap between the scenarios employed in the 1.0 version, which took place in early 2009, when the banks were told to get more capital or else, and the ones about to be implemented.

Haldane/Madouros: What is the Contribution of the Financial Sector?

Yves here. Andrew Haldane is the most important thinker, bar none, on the financial services industry today. This piece by Haldane and Vasileios Madouros, a fellow member of the Financial Stability team at the Bank of England. contains a key statement that needs to be drummed into policy makers and commentators: “Bearing risk is not, by itself, a productive activity.”

By Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England and Vasileios Madouros, Economist in the Financial Stability directorate of the Bank of England. Cross posted from VoxEU

Whilst few would argue that the financial crisis has not brought the real economy down with it, there is considerably less clarity about what the positive contribution of the financial sector is during normal times. This lead commentary in the current Vox debate on the issue focuses on the value-added of risk and government subsidies in national accounting, and makes an important distinction between risk-taking and risk management.

There is no doubting the financial sector has a significant impact on the real economy. Financial crisis experience makes this only too clear. Financial recessions are both deeper and longer-lasting than normal recessions. At this stage of a normal recession, output would be about 5% above its pre-crisis level. Today, in the UK, it remains about 3.5% below. So this much is clear: Starved of the services of the financial sector, the real economy cannot recuperate quickly.

But that does not answer the question of what positive contribution finance makes in normal, non-recessionary states. This is an altogether murkier picture. Even in concept, there is little clarity about the services that banks provide to customers, much less whether statisticians are correctly measuring those services. As currently measured, however, it seems likely that the value of financial intermediation services is significantly overstated in the national accounts.

An Open Letter to the Winter Patriot

By Mitch Green, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

The following letter reflects my view on the subject of civil disobedience…I offer my opinion as an Army veteran, student of the economy, and critic of an ongoing effort to wage economic war on the vast majority the population. If these words move you, I urge you to consider honestly the consequences if you decide to act.

As the Occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent? And if our nation’s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?

Satyajit Das: Extortionate Privilege – America’s FMD

Yves here. I’m putting myself in the rather peculiar position of taking exception to a guest post. One might argue as to why I’m featuring it. Das gives an articulate but nevertheless fairly conventional reading of views of market professionals about the US debt levels. For instance as you’ll see, it conflates state government deficits (which do need to be funded in now skeptical markets) with the Federal deficit. And this sort of thinking, due to fear of the Bond Gods, is driving policy right now.

In addition, he posits that depreciation of the US dollar continues apace. I’m always leery of what amount to trend projections. Complex systems often have unexpected feedback loops. There is an interesting question of whether markets have over-anticipated QE3. In addition, the dollar has fallen to the point where it is becoming attractive for manufacturers to repatriate activities. But given the loss of managerial “talent” (and here I mean people who know how to run operations, not executives) and infrastructure, there will be a marked lag before the weakened dollar produces the next leg up of domestic production.

By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)

Extortionate Privilege…

Given the magnitude of the US debt problem and the lack of political will, the most likely policy is FMD – “fudging”, “monetisation” and “devaluation”.

Mosler/Pilkington: A Credible Eurozone Exit Plan

By Warren Mosler, an investment manager and creator of the mortgage swap and the current Eurofutures swap contract and Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland

The Eurozone has certainly seen better days. The mess – to paraphrase a dodgy Irish politician – is only getting messier.

This is all avoidable, of course, and if the European authorities decided to take action and have the ECB backstop the sovereign debt of the periphery the whole crisis would come to an end. But the European authorities, for a variety of reasons, do not seem to want to do this. And even if they did there would be the issue of austerity: would they continue to force ridiculous austerity programs down the throats of the periphery governments? And if so, then for how long? Leaked documents from within the Troika show the austerity programs to be an abject failure and yet European officials continue to consider them the only game in town. So, we can only conclude at this stage that, given that European officials know that austerity programs do not work, they are pursuing them for political rather than economic reasons.

So, we contend that the periphery governments should have a credible exit strategy on hand and it is to this that we now turn.

Former AIG CEO Suing Treasury and Fed Over AIG Bailout

Hubris knows no bounds. AIG’s former CEO Hank Greenberg, who was a significant shareholder of AIG stock via C.W. Starr (which was basically an executive enrichment vehicle) is suing the Treasury and Fed over its rescue of AIG. He has hired litigation heavyweight David Boies, who famously made Microsoft CEO Bill Gates squirm when he put him on the stand in the Microsoft antitrust case.

While the public might similarly enjoy the spectacle of Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke through the wringer, based on the report from Gretchen Morgenson, this case reads like a stretch

Swiss Central Bank Forces MegaBanks UBS and Credit Suisse to Shrink and De-Risk

The Financial Times gives prominent play to a story that I suspect will go largely unnoticed in the US, that of the way that the Switzerland’s bank regulator, the Swiss National Bank, has forced its two biggest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, to shed risk in a serious way and shrink.

Matt Stoller: Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto Cracks Open the Financial Crisis

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Learn the name Catherine Cortez Masto, because she just took a big leap in front of every public servant in the country in terms of restoring faith in government. As Nevada AG, she actually indicted someone for blowing up our housing system. Specifically, she handed down 606 counts of felony or gross misdemeanor indictments on robo-signing against two employees of big bank subcontractor Lender Processing Services.

It’s pretty clear from the indictment that these are mid-level employees, one level up supervisors of fraud rather than top CEOs. And yet, even if this were as far as it goes, it would still be a big deal. These would be the only charges served involving the housing crisis and its link with the structurally corrupt securitization chain so far. By itself, these indictments signify that the fraudulent foreclosure game is over for the big mortgage servicers in Nevada, which is the center of the foreclosure epidemic. It says the rule of law matters, in at least one corner of the country.

Michael Olenick: Don’t Buy Mortgage Industry Hype on Mortgage Modifications

By Michael Olenick, founder and CEO of Legalprise, and creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha)

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) boasts that its members have modified over five million mortgages over the past few years. As a data analyst focused on patterns of foreclosure fraud, I’ve analyzed tens of millions of pieces of information. I was willing to take the MBA’s claims at face value but, years ago, came to the conclusion that the MBA and their members have a severe credibility gap.

Remember, the reason for advocating mods is that, properly structured, they are a win-win: investors take a lower loss than they would in a foreclosure, the borrower stays in his house, and another real-estate-price-depressing sale is averted.

But this “everyone comes out ahead” is not what I’ve seen. I’ve been able to check modifications, since they are recorded in public records. It quickly became apparent that while theses modifications are, at best, worthless, and more often than not border on an extension of the same predatory practices that resulted in the original mortgages.

These modifications are to mortgages as vultures are to predators, another opportunity to take one last bite out of people trying to keep their homes. Banks are “modifying” lots of loans, but to terms even more favorable to banks.