Yves here. I wasn’t planning on liveblogging this hearing, but listing to the introductory remarks, the knives are really out for JPM. In all the post-crisis hearings I’ve watched, I’ve never seen such unanimity between the Democrats and the Republicans on the severity of the problem and the need for more regulation.
Read more...There is so much grist in the just-released Senate Permanent Subcommittee report on the JP Morgan London Whale trades that the initial reports are merely high level summaries, which is understandable. Even with the admirable job done by the committee in documenting its findings and recommendations, it will take some doing to pull out the critical observations and convey them to the public. Plus the hearings tomorrow should provide good theater and further hooks for commentary.
But some critical findings emerge, quickly. We here at NC were particularly harsh critics of JP Morgan’s conduct, and disappointed in the media’s failure to understand that the information JP Morgan presented as it bobbed and weaved showed glaring deficiencies in risk controls. Yet the failings described in the report are even worse than we imagined.
Read more...By C.P. Chandrasekhar, Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
If the international media are to be believed the world, still struggling with recession, is faced with a potential new threat emanating from China. Underlying that threat is a rapid rise in credit provided by a “shadow banking” sector to developers in an increasingly fragile property market.
Read more...There is a very useful and accessible article at BBC (hat tip Richard Smith) on the information technology hairballs and baked-in level of future problems at major banks. The article was prompted by widespread problems at NatWest this week in accessing accounts.
Read more...Over the last two and a half years, Wells Fargo, like most of the major mortgage servicers, claimed that it had a “rigorous system” to insure that mortgage documents were accurate and complete. The reason this mattered was that there was significant evidence to the contrary. Foreclosure defense attorneys found repeatedly that, for securitized mortgages, the servicer or foreclosure mill attorney would present documents to the court that failed to show the borrower’s note (a promissory note) had been transferred properly to the trust. This mattered not only on a borrower level, but indicated that originators of the mortgage securitizations hadn’t bothered transferring the notes properly to the trusts that were to hold them. This raised the ugly specter of what was called “securitization fail,” that investors had been sold securities that they had been told were mortgage backed when they might in practice not be.
The robosiging scandal was merely the tip of the iceberg of mortgage and foreclosure problems that resulted from the failure to adhere to the requirements of well-settled state real estate law. The banks maintained that there was nothing wrong with mortgage ownership or with the records. All they had were occasional errors and some unfortunate corners-cutting with affidavits. If they merely re-executed all those robosigned documents, all would be well.
Wells Fargo’s own actions say the reverse.
Read more...Yves here. This post is useful in that it suggests short, simple ways to debunk the idea that deficit cutting is a good thing and to make the argument politically palatable. The trouble some readers will have is in positing that Obama is interested in policies that are good for middle class Americans, as opposed to his wealthy backers.
Read more...It’s hard to fathom the celebratory mood in the US markets, save that the moneyed classes are benefitting from a wall of liquidity reminiscent of early 2007, when risk spreads across virtually all types of lending shrank to scarily low levels. Then the culprit was not well understood, although Gillian Tett discerned that CDOs were a huge source of leverage, and in April 2007, an analyst, Henry Maxey at Ruffler, LLC, did an impressive job of piecing together how levered structured credit strategies were driving market liquidity.
Now it’s a lot easier to see what is afoot.
Read more...One of the dangers of trying to understand what is going on in the Eurozone if you are a hapless but interested American isn’t simply that you’d have to be fluent in a lot of languages to keep on top of the media, but the media themselves are, as NC readers know well, not exactly reliable. Look at how much dictation from business and political leaders masquerades as news in the US. And we have a less controlled press than, say, Italy does.
So I will give readers some fresh data points and let you duke it out.
Read more...It turns out Lambert’s mother-in-law research is pretty good.
Read more...The Wall Street Journal today stresses that a lot of Democratic congressmen are unhappy about the botched settlement process but are unlikely to do more than beef because the new Comptroller of the Currency, Tom Curry, was selected by Obama.
But the more people poke at the settlement, the more creepy crawlies emerge.
Read more...By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen
Anyone paying a smattering of attention justifiably raised a skeptical eyebrow at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s assurances to Congress that the Independent Foreclosure Reviews revealed hardly any borrower harm from servicer malfeasance. One has to marvel at this wondrous finding, particularly since just about no one who has gotten close to the records who was not paid for by banks has come up harm estimates remotely this low. Which raises another question: did the OCC lie (or more charitably, artfully fudge numbers) to Congress?
Read more...Natalie Martin has a post up at Credit Slips about an paper by Ginger Chouinard on a form of credit reporting that has managed to remain beneath the policy radar despite its considerable importance, and how it can do even more harm that the sort we’ve all come to know and hate.
Read more...It’s unlikely that the destabilizing of the political calculus in Europe resulting from impressive showing of anti-austerity candidates in Italy will end prettily or nicely. However, Europe had already put itself in the position of having only bad choices. So the question is who suffers, and the public in periphery countries are starting to rebel against being broken on the rack while Eurocrats and pampered German and French bankers feel no pain.
Read more...Arjun Jayadev at Triple Crisis provides a quote from Thomas Phillipon that somehow never sees the light of day in the financial press:
Read more...…the unit cost of intermediation is higher today than it was a century ago, and it has increased over the past 30 years. One interpretation is that improvements in information technology may have been cancelled out by increases in other financial activities whose social value is difficult to assess.
Quite a few readers excitedly sent a link to a Bloomberg editorial, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” which summarizes a study by Kenichi Ueda of the International Monetary Fund and Beatrice Weder di Mauro of the University of Mainz that the editors used to extrapolate that the five biggest US banks are “barely profitable” if they weren’t able to borrow at artificially cheap rates thanks to the market perception that they are too big too fail.
The Bloomberg article, while analytically flawed, still winds up being too charitable.
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