It’s become conventional wisdom to denounce Congressmen as know-nothings who routinely harass businessmen by hauling them before investigations and asking them uninformed questions. Tuesday, we saw a refreshing and badly needed contrast to that stereotype in the form of a comparatively short (less than three hour) hearing by the Senate Banking Committee on the foreclosure/securitization […]
Read more...It’s more than a bit puzzling when readers get upset when once in a great while, we point out how the case against banks on a particular issue is overstated. The reaction seems to be that we’ve suddenly gone soft on financial firm miscreants, which is about as wide of the mark as you can […]
Read more...Two media outlets tonight, Reuters and a Washington Post blog post, discussed the idea of a relatively quick settlement of the probe by 50 state attorneys general into robo signing and other foreclosure-related abuses. What is interesting is the timing of these sightings, which came the same day of the release of the Congressional Oversight […]
Read more...On the eve of Senate Banking Committee hearings into mortgage securitizations and the release of a Congressional Oversight Panel report covering the same terrain, the mortgage securitization industry has a full bore pushback underway. A story in the New York Times bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant. Remember the sympathetic New York […]
Read more...Following up on my last, John Dizard takes a different line from Ambrose. What Dizard wants is a sovereign default system, and he wants it now, not in 2013. The starting point is last week’s Eurobungle: Last week’s crisis in “peripheral” euro area bond markets was the consequence of a series of own goals by […]
Read more...Various Eurosceptics are piping up this morning, and no wonder. Unfortunately some of the interesting stuff is behind the FT’s magnificently unstable subscription firewall, which, in an attack of paranoia, or megalomania, has decided today, as it occasionally does, to deny access to everything, even the free bits, subscriber or not. It is like something […]
Read more...As far too diffidently implied in this post on Friday, looking out for an Irish bailout over the weekend turned out to be a mug’s game. There was a splendid swirl of authoritative reports about bailout talks and rebuttals by various Irish spokesmen, sampled here. But here we are: no bailout, with the Irish government […]
Read more...We’ve described in various posts how evidence is growing that the participants in mortgage securitizations sometime early in this century appear to have ignored the requirements of a variety of laws and their own contracts. We believe the most serious and difficult to remedy problem results when the parties involved in the creation of a […]
Read more...As an article in today’s New York Times makes clear, Robert Shiller has joined a group of behavioral economists that is advocating the use of propaganda and the sublter forms of manipulation of the public that Walter Lippmann famously called “the manufacture of consent.” In one sense, this ugly development is coming full circle. Lippmann […]
Read more...We’re a little puzzled at the attention a Florida robo-signing case has garnered. A plaintiff tried arguing that robo signing alone constituted a reason to dismiss a foreclosure. That’s such a stretch that it is no wonder a judge decided against the borrower argument. Mind you, we think robo signing is serious because it is […]
Read more...Banks are going to qiuite some lengths to avoid doing principal mods. I’d love to know how Bank of America will book this loan versus the it one currently has. Lawyers for borrowers have been pushing principal mods when the bank is having trouble proving standing and is suddenly very willing to negotiate. But deals […]
Read more...First posted at New Deal 2.0 Lynn Parramore: What do you make of the 2010 Election? Thomas Ferguson: The 2010 election was not like others. It was certainly not simply 2006 in reverse, this time with the Republicans winning by a landslide. There is an obvious cumulative process at work here, with first one party […]
Read more...Yesterday evening the yield on the Irish 10-year was up near 9%; Merkel reaffirmed her tough line on bond haircuts: Speaking in Seoul, where she is attending the G20 summit, Dr Merkel acknowledged her demands have upset the markets but insisted it was unfair for taxpayers to be saddled alone with the cost of sovereign […]
Read more...If you were to believe the banks, the concern over foreclosure “improprieties” is way overdone. They claim that the robo signers really weren’t doing anything seriously wrong, the banks just need to redo some paperwork, and everything else about foreclosures is just fine. Yet Bank of America, having made the implausible claim that it had […]
Read more...Yves here. The idea that Social Security is in trouble is very much in dispute (although you’d never know that reading the MSM). Even to the extent that fixes are required, some simple ones (one of the biggest, raising the ceiling on payroll taxes, plus an increase in retirement age) would do the trick. This […]
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