Even by the standards of bank thuggishness, the move by the ECB against Greece last night was a stunner. Americans have become used to banks taking houses under dubious pretexts when both the investors and borrowers would do better with a writedown. But to see the ECB try take a country is another matter entirely. As one seasoned pro said, “If anyone had tried something like this against a country with a decent sized military, the tanks would be rolling.”
Read more...Yet more twists in the tale of the giant pyramid fraud, Virgin Gold Mining Corporation: Plan “C” starts to come unravelled.
Read more...We’ve cautioned readers that Greece is in a very weak bargaining position relative to its financial overlords in the Troika. As much as Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is making sound, logical arguments and presenting proposals that if anything are too accommodating, despite initial cool reactions, many of Greece’s soi disant partners are diehard neoliberals and/or are politically constrained. Varoufakis is approaching them as if they can deal in good faith, when their idea of “good faith” comes from a punitive parallel universe.
Three important meetings today will provide a better sense of whether Greece is gaining any political ground in its uphill battle to roll back austerity.
Read more...Even with the impressive oil rally of the last two days, it isn’t clear that producers and lenders are out of the woods. While some analysts contend that the bottom is in, others see the rally as technical, driven in large measure by short-covering, and likely to fade.
The uncertainty lies in what is really happening on the production side
Read more...We said that the ECB held the trump cards in dealing with Greece, via being able to impose conditions on its access to the Emergency Liquidity Authority. We thought the ECB would send an initial signal as to how opposed it was to Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ bold proposals in whether it imposed conditions and how severe those were on the Greek Central bank’s request to access ELA funds, which it is sure to approve to tomorrow.
It turns out the ECB isn’t waiting that long to let its views be known.
Read more...Rather than listen to thousands of borrower complaints, housing advocates, foreclosure attorneys, market experts and, well…, us, the Obama Administration tried to paper over the many problems in the mortgage servicing market by creating the foreclosure settlement (officially the National Mortgage Settlementof 2012), as well as the earlier OCC enforcement actions against big mortgage servicers.
Now we have the disaster of Ocwen, the fifth largest servicer in the country, imploding as a result of the settlement charade.
Read more...We’ve said that Greece had a weak negotiating position in trying to get a better deal from its creditors. That is playing out before our eyes. Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has stepped down some of his early proposals even before formal talks have begun. This is a sad but predictable situation, since the Germans and the other members of the northern bloc are not at all willing to cut Greece much if any slack, since that would lead bigger, more powerful countries to try to slip the yoke of austerity.
The tragic thing about this situation is that Varoufakis is simply describing economic reality and has a number of sound ideas for how to make conditions better for Greece, which in the end will also lead to better results for its lenders.
Read more...While most NC readers are skeptical about quantitative easing and negative interest rates, those reactions are often aesthetic: they are so far away from any normal operation of financial markets that something has to be wrong with the idea. The problem is that while that instinct may be (and we’d argue is) correct, policy wonks who have drunk the Fed’s Kool Aid will treat those who have visceral negative reactions as simply having a case of novelty aversion, which means they can be ignored.
Ed Harrison provides comparatively short and accessible explanation of why QE and negative interest rates are bound to bomb. I encourage you to send his post to friends and colleagues who’d like to be able to discuss in a more rigorous manner why these approaches are deeply flawed.
Read more...Is Syriza’s bold promise of hope for Greeks about to become a false dawn?
Read more...Victims of austerity and their allies around the world may be placing too much hope in Syriza.
Read more...A US court ruling has warped the otherwise precise meanings of three key words – “republic”, “sovereign”, and “default” – leading to absurdities like a New York district court holding the Republic of Argentina in “contempt of court”! The entire understanding of sovereign debt and its restructuring is being read through private “contract law” that cannot address the complex questions that are inherently public in nature, à la questions around restructuring Argentina’s debt. It appeared that a misreading of key words could benefit some vulture funds, but so far no one has seen as much as a penny! Maybe they never will.
Read more...Please read past the finger-wagging “private lenders are (barely) starting to come back to Greece, better not spook them” talk. This piece provides a useful overview of how the composition of lenders to Greece has changed over time. You can see how significant banks once were and how they were quiet deliberately displaced by various “official” creditors.
Read more...We’re having two posts on the Greek elections tonight, since the media accounts are so slanted as to merit discussion. The notion that a democratically elected government would put broad social interest over continued, self-destructive sacrifices to financiers and their allies in European governments is so threatening that a large swathe of media outlets seem […]
Read more...I was going to start out saying yesterday was the saddest day in Europe in 50 years, or something like that, because of the insane and completely nonsensical largesse the ECB permits itself to launch, aimed at once again saving a banking system, but which will not only not help the European people, it will make things even much worse than they already are. Which is also, lest we overlook that ‘detail’, entirely thanks to the ECB/EU/IMF Troika.
Read more...Robosigners and the foreclosure mill attorneys who worked with them filed millions of bogus affidavits. So where are the disbarments?
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