Category Archives: Politics

Doug Smith: A Stiletto In The Back Of Sane Housing Markets

By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me

The recent federal budget deal eliminated $88 million of HUD funding for non-profit housing counselors. According to this report, these groups use roughly half the funds for foreclosure counseling and half for homebuyer education and qualification. The report says a separate foreclosure counseling effort is also being reduced by $65 million.

Historically, non-profit housing groups focused on low-income folks. But, for many years, people with moderate incomes – nurses, police, teachers and others in what used to pass for the middle class – have also sought help. The core purpose of the non-profits is simple: help people achieve affordable home ownership. This entails educating them on the realities of ownership, helping them shift credit, consumption and savings behavior, advising on how to avoid the worst practices of real estate and mortgage brokers — even at times doing lending. All of which together means, in effect, doing the real work of underwriting that has long since been abandoned by the too big to fail banks who, in their eagerness to increase volumes and squeeze out costs through technology and ‘modeled’ strategies, eliminated the capacity for this careful work.

Most non-profit groups are quite good at what they do. Yet, Obama, Boehner and others have now taken resources away from these groups. These cuts are cruel. They are also mind-numbingly stupid.

More Shots Across MERS’s Bow

Admittedly, this act of rebellion against MERS, the electronic mortgage registry by a Pennsylvania county is comparatively minor, but nevertheless illustrates the efforts various local bodies are taking to assert their authority against a system imposed without regard to state and local real estate laws.

Montgomery County estimates that it has lost $15 million in recording fees due to MERS, which its Recorder of Deeds, Nancy Becker, says has also made a mess of title records. She is working to get the county to cease doing business with banks that make use of MERS, and has launched an effort to get other counties in the state to follow suit.

Bill Black: Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall)

Yves here. This post by Bill Black is important because it presents and dissects an ugly example of failure of morality and common sense within what passes for the elite in the US.

Earlier this week, Matthew Yglesias defended the Administration’s distaste for pursuing fraud investigations against financial players:

….the Obama administration felt it was important to restabilize the global financial system. That meant, at the margin, shying away from anxiety-producing fraud prosecutions. And faced with a logistically difficult task, that kind of pressure at the margin seems to have made a huge difference. There simply was no appetite for the kind of intensive work that would have been necessary.

I’m not as persuaded as, say, Jamie Galbraith is that the failure to do this is a key causal element in our economic problems. Indeed, I’d say that if you look at the situation literally, Tim Geithner’s judgment was probably correct.

This line of thinking is a favorite of authoritarians. Democracy, justice, and capitalism are messy affairs. All sort of repressive measures can be justified in the name of stability and safety. And the irony here is that the firms directly responsible for the most disruptive economic event of the last eighty years are to be shielded from the long arm of the law….in the name of stability, the one output they have clearly failed to provide.

Will German Push for Greece Restructuring Tank the Greek Banking System?

Funny what a difference a few months makes. Whenever this blog would suggest that Greece, and potentially other eurozone members, might have to restructure their debts, the idea was treated by some readers as a nefarious euroskeptic plot, particularly since badmouthing embattled governments could worsen their conditions by raising their funding costs.

It might now be accurate to upgrade discussion of a Greek default to being an Anglo-Saxon plot.

Proposed Bill on Foreclosure Fraud and Servicer Standards Shows Shortcomings of Attorney General and Federal Regulatory Responses

It’s more than a tad ironic that Senator Carl Levin released a strongly-worded report on Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis, focusing on abuses and failures of oversight in the residential mortgage and CDO markets, when the officialdom is engaged in yet another whitewash of further crisis fallout, that of servicing and foreclosure related abuses.

One effort at pushback comes via a bill proposed today by Senator Sherrod Brown and Representative Brad Miller, the Foreclosure Fraud and Homeowner Abuse Prevention Act of 2011. While some provisions need further work, it’s an ambitious and badly needed effort that targets many servicer abuses.

Senator Levin Claims Goldman Execs Perjured Themselves Before Congress on Mortgage Testimony

As readers may know, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations just issued another report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis. This is a far more focused and damning document than the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, which was produced at considerably more expense and was undermined by dissent among its commissioners (which in fairness appears to have been by design).

I confess to having only gotten partway through the document and plan to issue a more thorough discussion in the next few days. However, some things are clear at this juncture.

Might Elizabeth Warren Get the CFPB Nod After All?

A Wall Street Journal report suggests that Elizabeth Warren might wind up getting nominated to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau despite fierce Congressional opposition because other possible nominees have turned down the job, in many cases because they want Warren to have it:

White House officials seeking someone to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have so far failed to find a nominee, with several candidates rebuffing the administration’s overtures, according to people familiar with the process.

Regulators Issue Weak Consent Orders to Whitewash Mortgage Abuses

Last week, we inveighed against an effort by Federal banking regulators to undermine the 50 state attorney general settlement negotiations on foreclosure and mortgage abuses. This affair is becoming a pathetic spectacle, in that the state initiative, which looks to be an exercise in form over substance, still might prove to be enough of a nuisance to the banks that the Powers that Be in Washington feel compelled to do what they can to hamstring it. The first effort was to have a joint settlement, which we dismissed as a barmy idea given the disparity in state and Federal issues. Not surprisingly, the Feds withdrew after the first negotiating session with the banks.

The current end run is apparently led by the Ministry of Bank Boosterism more generally known as the OCC and comes via consent decrees that were issued Wednesday.

William Hogeland: Created Equal? Founding Era Tensions on Economic Fairness

Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History who blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0

In 1776, rowdy Democrats fought for equality. But their notions didn’t suit early elites.

“All men are created equal,” the Continental Congress famously announced in the document that came to be known as the Declaration of Independence. These are powerful words — and reflecting on America’s founding struggles over money and finance can give the familiar phrase new resonance. For even as Thomas Jefferson was drafting the Declaration in a small, hot room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, the democratic popular finance movement was blooming in America. Throughout the country, ordinary people placed all hopes on America declaring independence from England. Equality was indeed their goal. And by this, they meant economic fairness: A newly level playing field where they could compete for prosperity.

Near the room where Jefferson wrote, the most successful of those democratic movements was coming to fruition in Philadelphia’s Carpenter’s Hall. To the artisans, laborers, mechanics, and militia privates gathered there, declaring independence from England offered an amazing chance for creating a new kind of government, fostering fairness for the less propertied, even the unpropertied; obstructing traditional high-finance privilege; and giving the ordinary people access to representation and economic opportunity. Right down the street from the Pennsylvania State House where the Congress met, supporters of this democratic movement were seizing the moment of crisis with England to bring about an economic revolution in America. And their 1776 Pennsylvania constitution made economic equality into law for the first meaningful time anywhere.

Initial Award of Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity: Calomiris, Higgins, and Mason Paper on Mortgage Settlement

It seems more than a bit peculiar that, per American Banker, financial services industry participants have paid for three academics to issue a lengthy paper attacking a leaked draft settlement between state attorneys general and mortgage servicers. We have pointed out in multiple posts that the state AGs bargaining position is weak due to the lack of investigations. If the banks don’t like the terms, they can tell the AGs to see them in court.

But far more interesting is how embarrassingly bad this paper, “The Economics of the Proposed Mortgage Servicer Settlement,” by Charles Calomiris, Eric Higgins, and Joe Mason, is, yet how the economics discipline continues to tolerate special-interest-group- favoring PR masquerading as research.

In real academic disciplines, investigators and professors who serve big corporate funders have their output viewed with appropriate skepticism, and if they do so often enough, their reputation takes a permanent hit. Scientists who went into the employ of tobacco companies could anticipate they’d never leave that backwater. Even the great unwashed public knows that drug company funded research isn’t what it is cracked up to be.

But in the never-never realm of reality denial within the Beltway, as long as you can get a PhD or better to grace the latest offering from the Ministry of Truth, it gives useful cover to Congresscritters or other message amplifiers who will spout whatever big donor nonsense they are being asked to endorse this week.

Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats)

Political scientist Tom Ferguson prepared a short but important paper for the INET conference last weekend on how Congress got to be as polarized as it is today. His answer: it was redesigned quite deliberately by conservative Republican followers of Newt Gingrich starting in the mid 1980s and their methods were copied by the Democrats. Their changes resulted in firmer control by leadership (ie, less autonomy of individual Congressmen) and much greater importance of fundraising (which increased the power of corporate interests).

The extent of corruption may surprise even jaundiced readers.

“Summer” Rerun: Why You Should Hate the Treasury Bailout Proposal

This post first ran September 21, 2008 A mere two weeks ago, the Fannie/Freddie rescue was called “the mother of all bailouts” by some commentators. If the plans of the Administration come to fruition, it will shortly be surpassed by the $700 billion mortgage rescue plan proposed by Hank Paulson late last week. The increase […]

Faulty Reasoning Behind Calomiris Post Dodd Frank Reform Proposals

I hate to take issue with a post by Mike Konczal on some Dodd Frank reform ideas posed by Charles Calomiris in “Beyond Basel and Dodd Frank“, since Mike is usual a source of reliable analysis. But that’s why it’s particularly important to let one of the rare times he goes off beam not to lend credence to reform ideas that are sorely wanting.

The problem in general with Dodd Frank and subsequent fixes is they don’t come close to doing what needed to be done, which is dramatically reduce the ability of financial players to wreck the economy for fun and profit. The fact that the banks howl bitterly over some half-hearted measures should not be mistaken for effectiveness. The big dealer banks have realized that they’ve emerged more powerful and better able to extract rents than before the crisis, so why not press their advantage? Their new position is that any restriction on their profit-seeking is an intrusion and should be beaten back. Witness some recent evidence: their foot-dragging on clearinghouses for swaps. The normally accommodating New York Fed is forming a group to “compel” the banks to live up to their commitments. Of course, with enablers like Timothy Geithner, who has signaled that he is leaning toward exempting foreign exchange derivatives from Dodd Frank implementation, the banks don’t have to fight all that hard.

Let’s turn to the current debate.