Category Archives: Media watch

Morgenson Runs Peterson Institute Propaganda Against “Entitlements” Meaning Medicare and Social Security

I’m generally a Gretchen Morgenson fan, since she’s one of the few writers with a decent bully pulpit who regularly ferrets out misconduct in the corporate and finance arenas. But when she wanders off her regular terrain, the results are mixed, and her current piece is a prime example. She also sometimes pens articles based on a single source, which creates the risk of serving as a mouthpiece for a particular point of view. And the one she chose to represent tonight is one that is in no need of amplification, that of the Peterson Foundation’s well-funded campaign to gut Social Security and Medicare.

Greece must restructure

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking on CNBC along with Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman about the European sovereign debt crisis. I also wrote a piece in the New York Times about the same issue, concentrated on Greece. While Marc and I differ somewhat in tone, we are both […]

Bank Tout Dick Bove Proves His Ignorance in Defending of His Meal Tickets

Is Dick Bove’s put-foot-in-mouth-and-chew exercise yesterday proof of the eagerness of the banking industry to push back against any and all interference in their ability to milk the public, or merely that Bove is a great negative indicator (one of his most famous calls was to buy Citi in early March 2008. You’d have lost more than 3/4 of your money if you’d followed his advice.)

News that New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has opened an investigation into the mortgage activities of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America sent Bove into a tizzy

Judge Dismisses Sanctions Motion by Lender Processing Services Against Attorney Suing It

In catch up mode….

A few weeks ago, we discussed a motion Lender Processing Services agains Nick Wooten, an attorney who has sued LPS in several jurisdictions for impermissible legal fee sharing. We not only indicated that the suit was spurious, but we also questioned why Housing Wire was trumpeting a desperate and not likely to succeed effort by its largest advertiser. That goes beyond being credibly comprehensive in coverage to being simply crass.

On the Treasury’s Curious Denial That Geithner Blocked Deal on Irish Debt

This is getting interesting. The US Treasury has roused itself to issue a narrow denial of an op-ed in the Irish Independent by one of Ireland’s most highly respected economists (by virtue of his having predicted a very severe housing crash), Morgan Kelly. To recap briefly, Kelly said that the IMF was willing last November to haircut €30 billion of unguaranteed bonds by roughly two-thirds on average, but that Geithner’s disapproval on a conference call killed the idea:

The deal was torpedoed from an unexpected direction. At a conference call with the G7 finance ministers, the haircut was vetoed by US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner who, as his payment of $13 billion from government-owned AIG to Goldman Sachs showed, believes that bankers take priority over taxpayers. The only one to speak up for the Irish was UK chancellor George Osborne, but Geithner, as always, got his way.

The Irish Independent today reported on the Treasury’s objection:

Housing Wire Again Runs PR Masquerading as News on Behalf of Its Big Client, Lender Processing Services

The very fact that this item “LPS fires back with motion seeking sanctions against Alabama attorney,” was treated as a news story by Housing Wire is further proof that Housing Wire is above all committed to promoting client and mortgage industry interests and only incidentally engages in random acts of journalism.

LPS is desperate to create a shred of positive-looking noise in the face of pending fines under a Federal consent decree, mounting private litigation, and loss of client business under the continued barrage of bad press. Housing Wire, who has LPS as one of its top advertisers, is clearly more than willing to treat a virtual non-event as newsworthy to help an important meal ticket.

Crowdsourcing Questions for the First Press Conference by a Fed Chairman Tomorrow

Readers may know that tomorrow at 2:30 PM, Ben Bernanke is hosting the first press conference ever held by a Federal Reserve chairman ever. It’s remarkable that an official widely described as “the second most powerful person in America” has managed to sidestep basic measures of accountability to the public and transparency like this for so long.

We are participating in an effort spearheaded by the Dylan Ratigan show to crowdsource questions for reporters tomorrow.

Here, there, and everywhere

All the banks are fed up with regulation and they’re all going somewhere else.

Why Liberals Are Lame (Part 2)

It may seem churlish to pick on a specific, well intentioned liberal organization to illustrate a rampant pathology within what passes for the left in the US. Nevertheless, examples serve as important case studies and hopefully will help both the object of presumably unwanted attention and its broader constituency understand that many of their campaigns actually undermine the causes they purport to represent.

Let’s look at an example, an e-mail from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to constituents of Alabama’s Spencer Bachus, the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and self-proclaimed Best Friend of Banks (“My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks”):

Lender Processing Services Behind More Record-Keeping Botches and Foreclosure Forgeries

Lender Processing Services has played a singularly destructive role in the mortgage servicing industry. The firm not only offered document fabrication services through DocX, a company it acquired and was forced to shut down after the Department of Justice started sniffing about, but is being revealed to be involved in more abuses as far as borrower records and legal process are concerned. Readers may recall that it is also the target of two national class action suits on illegal legal fee sharing which if successful will produce multi-billion-dollar damages.

This abuses matter due to the role that LPS has come to play. It is the biggest player in default services, meaning it acts as the de facto selector and supervisor of foreclosure mills via its system, LPS Desktop, which manages and oversees the work of local law firms on behalf of its bank servicer clients. It also provides the servicing platform for more than half of the servicing industry. And as our two latest examples show, the company clearly places its profits over integrity of records and due process.

Guest Post: On the Government Cover-Up of Gulf Dolphin Deaths

Yves here. This post may strike readers as off topic, but it sits at the locus of several Naked Capitalism topics of interest: the Deepwater Horizon blowout and its aftermath, animals (particularly dolphins, which are more altruistic than people and quite likely as smart), Obama administration duplicity, and reading between the lines of media reports.

By a retired physician who worked several years in the medical communications and pharmaceutical industry who writes as Francois T

From a Reuters story yesterday, “Government tightens lid on dolphin death probe”:

The U.S. government is keeping a tight lid on its probe into scores of unexplained dolphin deaths along the Gulf Coast, possibly connected to last year’s BP oil spill, causing tension with some independent marine scientists.

Wildlife biologists contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to document spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples for the agency were quietly ordered late last month to keep their findings confidential.