A letter to the UK’s Financial Services Authority, by one of the victims of an apparent massive fraud perpetrated on SME customers of Halifax-Bank of Scotland (HBOS)
Read more...The editorial in today’s New York Times may be a sign that the tide is turning. The elites are starting to break ranks with the mortgage industrial complex.
Gretchen Morgenson reported yesterday that the Obama Administration was pressuring the New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to drop his opposition to the so-called 50 state attorney general mortgage settlement. The short form is the banks want a “get out of liability for almost free” card, which is patently absurd. Not only have they caused a colossal economic train wreck, but sadly, they remain such central actors that they need to be involved in remediation. Letting them off cheaply would be tantamount to putting a band-aid on gangrene.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller
everyone I know is working on some type of RMBS litigation. investors suing issuers, issuers suing originators, insurers suing issuers. wild – A tweet from a NYC corporate lawyer, 8/17/2011
Doesn’t it seems like we’ve been on the verge of a 50 state Attorney General settlement with the banks over robo-signing and mortgage securitization liability for nine months? It does, doesn’t it? Why is that? Maybe it’s because… that’s what journalists keep writing.
Read more...The US press appears to have the attention span of a gnat. The S&P downgrade, Euromarket driven stock gyrations, and the Republican presidential race jockeying have displaced older stories. Yet the News International phone hacking scandal is blowing up to Watergate-level proportions in the UK, with fresh evidence showing that Rupert and James Murdoch (at best) misled Parliament in their testimony last month. And since phone hacking appears to be widespread, not just at the now defunct News of the World, but potentially other News International entities in the UK, it isn’t hard to imagine that US news outlets also engaged in questionable and possibly impermissible conduct.
Yet the contrast between the US and UK coverage is marked, and it goes beyond the obvious explanation that l’affaire Murdoch is chock full of major domestic power players. The difference in presentation is marked. The stories in the Guardian, which did the real spadework, and the Independent (to pick two examples) are incisive, direct, and suitably scandalized. The latest stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg (to pick two counter-examples) have headlines almost designed to have the reader ignore the articles.
Read more...Wow, this is pretty remarkable.
Read more...As an old wag put it, “Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.”
Tonight, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times both ran stories charging that the revolution in Egypt had lost a great deal of public support. The reason they triggered by BS detector was that they both appeared the same evening. If this had been a domestic story, it would be not unreasonable to assume that a seeming coincidence of that sort was the result of a PR push, particularly in the absence of a major news event as a trigger. And as we will see, when I checked the UK media and Aljazeera, the gap in reporting was noteworthy.
Read more...It’s a bit curious that l’affaire Murdoch, which has dominated the news in England, has gotten some air time here, but not in proportion to its importance in the UK and potentially in the US. True, you have to know a bit of who has done what to whom over time, but stuff like hacking the voicemails of dead little girls and live major government officials, lying in Parliamentary investigations, paying hush money, and suborning the police isn’t that hard to explain. And it’s also hard to imagine that a culture that the US operations didn’t share at least some of the aggressive and reckless habits of its siblings across the pond.
At least one party, Calpers, which is the largest pension fund in the US, appears to have decided to use this revelation of the Murdochs’ feet of clay to open up an issue that was worth airing a long time ago: the hold the family maintains on News Corp.
Read more...Well, the debt limit crisis is upon us. Treasury Secretary Geithner says the US Government will not be able to meet all its obligations on August 3, unless the debt ceiling is increased by Congress. The Secretary says he is out of moves to extend this date. I don’t think that’s true. I think he can use proof platinum coin seigniorage to supply all the money needed to spend Congressional Appropriations.
Read more...The widening News International scandal is feeling more and more like Watergate. It’s intriguing to watch witness squirm when they are caught out. The Guardian, and in particular Nick Davies, broke many of the crucial pieces of the sordid tale of News International hacking and coverup payments. This Guardian video is accessible to non-UK viewers. Hat tip Buzz Potamkin:
Read more...The latest revelations in the widening News International scandal are simply stunning. “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” is apparently as true now as it was in Shakespeare’s day. The idea that a news organization would have the audacity to target a head of state, as News International papers the Sun and the Sunday Times did with Gordon Brown, and not with the usual tools of invective and gossip, but via the theft of personal information, raises the scandal to a whole new level.
Read more...Needless to say, I viewed this video of James Murdoch, which includes a defense of News International chief and former editor of News of the World Rebekah Brooks, with considerable suspicion. And I must say, his manner only confirmed my reservations:
Read more...For those of us on the wrong side of the pond, it’s hard to appreciate the significance of the News of the World scandal. A 2009 investigation of this News Corp tabloid for interceptions of messages to royal aides led to a private investigator and a News of the World employee being convicted and sentenced to prison. The current scandal centers on the paper hacking into the voice mailboxes of over 2000 individuals. Sources allege the victims include Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury secretary) George Osborne.
But the event that galvanized opinion, as most readers know now, was the hacking into the phone and deleting messages of a girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002, Milly Dowler. The removal of the messages allowed the voicemailbox, which had been full, to take more messages, all for the purpose of getting more juicy messages from her desperate friends and relatives, at the ghoulish cost of giving them the false hope that she had deleted them and was therefore still alive.
Read more...Bill Clinton’s favorite attack dog, James Carville, once said of Paula Jones: “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.”
Add a few zeros, and you can get the cooperation of much bigger players.
The noted financial services industry analyst Bill Clinton weighed in on the proposed $8.5 billion Bank of America mortgage settlement. Per Bloomberg:
Read more...Jon Daniellsson of the LSE has spotted something odd about the Basel III debate on capital levels…
Read more...A recent post by Ezra Klein, “What ‘Inside Job’ got wrong,” manages the impressive feat of being spectacularly off base, rhetorically dishonest, and embarrassingly revealing of the lack of a moral compass all at once.
Since being off base is a major part of Klein’s brand, I suppose one should not be surprised; those who’ve had the good fortune to have limited contact with his output can read Jon Walker’s “Ezra Klein: Insurance Exchanges Don’t Work and Must be Expanded Dramatically,” or Physicians for a National Health Care Program’s “Does Ezra Klein really think ‘managed care didn’t kill anyone’?” for two of many examples.
I’m going to shred this piece in some detail, first, because it will be entertaining, and second, I hope that it will encourage readers to take a cold, bloodyminded look at the excuses made for malfeasance in our elites.
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