Category Archives: Media watch

Banker Derangement Syndrome II: William Cohan Can Give No Reason for Not Appointing Warren, Except Some People Don’t Like Her

As we indicated, this is the second post in a series on Banker Derangement Syndrome, in which people who might once have been sensible are acting as mindless mouthpieces of particularly rancid banking industry propaganda. We suspect it has to do with being too long in close proximity of zombie banks; they probably need to suck grey matter out of the living to keep functioning.

William Cohan wrote a particularly wretched piece for Bloomberg on why Elizabeth Warren should do everyone a favor and put herself on the next train out of DC. There is a decent case to be made against having Warren head the CFPB, but that’s not what Cohan provided. He instead made a weak argument (if you can even call it that) and got screechy to cover for it.

Affordable Housing Groups Once Again Acting As Human Shields For Banksters

I’m not going to quote George Santayana tonight, as much as his famous saying verging on cliche fits. But will some people never learn?

Another useful cliche is that politics makes for odd bedfellows. But that notion is misapplied in a New York Times article tonight, which tries to convince readers that affordable housing advocates and mortgage financiers playing on the same team is a new development. Huh? Per the Times:

The weight of the mortgage crisis fell heavily on lower-income and minority communities…..That left consumer advocates and civil rights groups frequently at odds with bankers, mortgage lenders and their lobbyists during the debate over the financial regulation act last year, which aims to rein in the subprime mortgage excesses that inflated the housing bubble.

Now, as banking regulators are rewriting the rules for the mortgage market, unusual alliances have sprung up in opposition to tighter lending standards. Advocacy groups like the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization, on the one hand, and the American Bankers Association on the other, are joining together to fight rules they say could make home loans less affordable for minority and working-class Americans…

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”):