If you thought the Friends of Angelo program, via which Countrywide gave very favorable mortgage terms to assorted Congresscritters, was pretty bald-faced, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
It appears the best way to get a deep principal mod in America is to represent a clear and present danger to the mortgage industrial complex.
Read more...eaders may know that Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, has created a big stir in the UK by shedding light on the scale of offshore banking and the numerous types of harm it does. We’ll be hosting a FireDogLake Book Salon tomorrow at 5 PM Eastern 2 PM Pacific.
Not only did I enjoy this book (it manages the difficult feat of being a lively and accessible discussion of banking and taxation), but it is certain to be one of the most important books of the year.
From the FDL overview of the book:
Read more...Although we were big fans of the HuffPo piece yesterday on the DC war over debit card regulation, Adam Levitin was a bit less happy since the article focused on the politics and was on why the card fees were burdensome to merchants.
Although a few readers tried arguing the bank position and did not get a terribly enthusiastic reception, Levitin explains the real problem: the actions of the Visa/MasterCard duopoly are pretty clear antitrust violations, but as he pointed out via e-mail, the US pretty much does not do antitrust any more. The Chicago school of economics indoctrination of judges via an orchestrated “law and economics” movement (see ECONNED for an overview) has resulted in judges not seeing competitive problems anywhere. The Department of Justice has lost a slew of recent antitrust cases at the Supreme Court, so they’ve lost the appetite to pursue them.
But (to give an indication of how bad the behavior of the card networks is), the normally supine DoJ has been active in payment cards.
Read more...There’s a sad little story in the “NY/Region” section of the New York Times, which illustrates a not often enough discussed sort of wreckage resulting from the housing mess: that of deaths resulting from foreclosures.
Think I’m exaggerating? There have been cases of suicides, or murder/suicides of people losing their homes. But that can’t necessarily be attributed to foreclosure per se, but of personal financial disaster, with the foreclosure being the literally fatal blow. So while one can attribute their deaths to the financial crisis and therefore to the reckless behavior of major financial firms, it’s hard to pin it on foreclosures per se.
But there are some deaths that can, indisputably, be blamed on foreclosures or more specifically, the negligent management of foreclosed properties.
Read more...Yves here. Please be sure to read to the end of the post, where Miles discusses what level of equity he thinks banks should carry.
By David Miles, Monetary Policy Committee Member, Bank of England. Cross posted from VoxEU.
The global crisis has called into question how banks are run and how they should be regulated. Highly leveraged banks went under, threatening to drag down the entire financial system with them. Here, David Miles of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, shares his personal views on the optimal leverage for banks. He concludes that it is much lower than is currently the norm.
Read more...As established readers know, we’ve been writing since mid 2010 about the widespread, possibly pervasive, failure of mortgage securitization originators to convey the notes (the borrower IOU) to securitization trusts as stipulated in the deal documents, well before the robo signing scandal broke. This abuse matters because the transaction procedures were designed carefully to satisfy certain legal requirements, among them rules contained in the 1986 Tax Reform Act regarding REMICs, or real estate mortgage investment conduits, which required that the securitization trust receive all its assets by 90 days after closing and that all assets conveyed to the trust have to be “performing”, as in not in default. Failure to comply with the rules is a prohibited act and subject to taxation at a rate of 100%, and additional penalties may apply.
Now, with the Federal government under enormous budget pressure, shouldn’t the authorities be keen to go after tax cheats? The headline of a Reuters article, “IRS weighs tax penalties on mortgage securities,” would suggest so. But don’t get your hopes up. The lesson is don’t jump to conclusions when big finance is involved.
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager Cross posted from New Deal 2.0.
Bernanke’s QE2 program has hurt savers, done nothing for banks, and eviscerated middle class living standards.
The U.S. Federal Reserve signaled the end of its controversial $600 billion bond-buying program as planned. And not a moment too soon.
Read more...There is a very peculiar article by Steven Davidoff up at the New York Times: “As Wall St. Firms Grow, Their Reputations Are Dying.” It asks a good question: why does reputation now matter for so little in the big end of the banking game? As we noted on the blog yesterday, a documentary team was struggling to find anyone who would go on camera and say positive things about Goldman, yet widespread public ire does not seem to have hurt its business an iota.
Some of Davidoff’s observation are useful, but his article goes wide of the mark on much of its analysis of why Wall Street has become an open cesspool of looting and chicanery (as opposed to keeping the true nature of the predatory aspects of the business under wraps as much as possible).
Read more...Economics of Contempt is aptly named. While his stand alone pieces on various aspects of regulation are informative, if too often skewed towards officialdom cheerleading (he too often comes off as an unpaid PR service for Geithner), his manner of engaging with third parties leaves a lot be desired. He often resorts to the blogosphere version of a withering look rather than dealing with an argument in a fair minded manner. This then puts the target in a funny position: do you deal with these drive-by shootings which have either not engaged or misrepresented your argument, by cherry picking and selective omission? If you do, you can look overly zealous or argumentative. But if you do nothing, particularly if it’s in an important area of regulatory debate, you’ve let disinformation, at the expense of your reputation, stand.
Read more...It’s time we come up with a new handle for the Office of the Controller of the Currency. It is difficult to convey how shameless this regulatory-agency-turned-slut for the banking industry has become. It’s the Stage 4 disease version of where our government is heading at a rapid clip: officials masquerading as serving the public interest when they are uber lobbyists for the pet whims of their supposed charges.
So what do we call the OCC? The Office of Capital Corruption? The Office of Criminal Capitulation? I have no doubt readers will have even better ideas (and don’t be constrained by the acronym).
Read more...Reader Hubert soliders on in the lonely task of continued Lehman spadework. He highlighted this section of FCIC testimony from Warren Buffett:
I think that if Lehman had been less leveraged there would have been less problems in the way of problems. And part of that leverage arose from the use of derivatives. And part of the dislocation that took place afterwards arose from that. And there’s some interesting material if you look at, I don’t exactly what Lehman material I was looking at, but they had a netting arrangement with the Bank of America as I remember and, you know, the day before they went broke and these are very, very, very rough figures from memory, but as I remember the day before they went broke Bank of America was in a minus position of $600 million or something like that they had deposited which I think J.P. Morgan in relation to Lehman and I think that the day they went broke it reversed to a billion and a half in the other direction and those are big numbers.
Hubert muses:
Read more...You heard it first in the blogopshere. From the New York Times:
Read more...The Federal Reserve’s experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt has pumped up the stock market, reduced the cost of American exports and allowed companies to borrow money at lower interest rates.
But most Americans are not feeling the difference, in part because those benefits have been surprisingly small….
The noose is tightening around Lender Processing Services.
Last week, various news outlets revealed that Federal banking regulators had issued consent orders against major servicers, MERS, and LPS. Kate Berry of American Banker pointed out that LPS is exposed to making payments to servicers:
Read more...In addition to the 14 biggest mortgage servicers, two of the biggest vendors to the industry received cease-and-desist orders from regulators Wednesday. One was stronger than the other.
Lender Processing Services Inc. and Merscorp Inc.’s Mortgage Electronic Registration System were both cited for “significant compliance failures” and “unsafe and unsound business practices” related to foreclosures. Regulators are requiring both companies to hire independent consultants, take remedial steps to address past failures and hire additional staff.
But only LPS, a publicly traded company in Jacksonville, Fla., that provides foreclosure-related services to banks, faces the possibility of having to reimburse servicers and borrowers if an independent review finds anyone was financially harmed by its failure to properly execute mortgage documents….
By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Forthcoming September 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)
John Quiggin (2010) Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us; Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford
R. Christopher Whalen (2011) Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream, John Wiley, New Jersey
Michael E. Lewitt (2010) The Death of Capital: How Creative Policy Can Restore Policy, John Wiley, New Jersey
“Mortmain”, derived from medieval French meaning “dead hand”, refers to legal ownership of property in perpetuity. Jurisprudence, to varying degrees, has sought to prohibit the control of property by the “dead hand”. Unfortunately, economic thinking seems to be controlled by dead economists or as John Quiggin, himself an economist, argues – “living dead” economists.
Read more...One of the few upsides of the patently silly negative watch announcement for US Treasury bonds was that it elicited colorful and instructive commentary (see our view, along with Mark Thoma’s and Barry Ritholtz’s at the New York Times’ Room for Debate). Some sightings:
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