I know a lot of readers miss Dave Dayen, who had a solid following at Firedoglake and among other things, covered the mortgage beat ably and energetically. He’s apparently been busy reporting, and just published a story in Washington Monthly on how the mortgage standards launched by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fall well short of what is necessary.
Read more...This post continues our discussion of the role of “independent” foreclosure review consultant Promontory Financial Group. Here we focus on what happened, or more important, didn’t happen in Promontory’s conduct of the reviews, and how that contrasts with the staggering fees the firm is widely believed to have earned.
Read more...This post continues our discussion of how Bank of America and its consultant, Promontory Financial Group, made concerted efforts to ignore and suppress evidence of harm to borrowers who asked for what was supposed to be an independent review of their foreclosure.
Read more...Wow, one of my big assumptions about mortgage putback cases has been turned on its ear, much to the detriment of Bank of America and JP Morgan. If you thought there were pitched legal battles on this front, a key ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff means you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Read more...There have been so many bailouts settlements of various bank mortgage misdeeds that it’s no doubt hard to keep them straight unless you are on this beat. But the short version is I’m delighted at this effort to throw a monkey wrench in the Bank of America settlement.
The more people look at the abruptly-arranged settlement of the OCC/Fed foreclosure reviews, the more they realize something does not smell right.
Read more...By George Feiger, CEO of Contango Capital Advisors. From Contango’s current “Heard off the Street” newsletter
We question whether the widely held judgment that the US handled its banking crisis much better than the Europeans will survive the inevitable upturn in interest rates.
Read more...One of the things we’ve lamented since 2010, before the robosiging scandal broke, is the use of forgeries and document fabrications to remedy otherwise fatal problems with foreclosure actions, such as a lack of proper signatures on a borrower promissory note.
It looks like document experts are finally getting their day in court.
Read more...All you need to know to get confirmation that Lender Processing Services got a great gift is to look at what its stock did on the day of the announcement of its $127 million settlement with 46 chump state attorneys general, on a day when the market was down generally:
Read more...A major intellectual blind spot in academia and among policy makers is the belief that making markets more liquid is always and ever a good thing.
Read more...In this post in our Bank of America foreclosure review series, whistleblowers describe how the bank and its independent consultant Promontory Financial Group designed and managed the tests so as to minimize findings of harm to borrowers.
Read more...This post is the second half of Part III in our Bank of America foreclosure review whistleblower series. Part III focuses on how the confusion and high cost of the foreclosure reviews weren’t simply the result of overly ambitious targets and poor design, oversight, and implementation of the reviews. These reviews never could have been done properly due to significant gaps and inaccuracies in the borrower records at Bank of America. That meant the only possible course of action was a cover-up.
Read more...Past whistleblower leaks from Bank of America and other reviews have pointed out how frequent changes to the review process, both from the OCC and from the independent reviewers, made the process disorderly. This confusion is likely to serve as a convenient excuse for why the costs of the reviews exploded, which was one of the two major rationales offered for shutting them down.
At Bank of America, the disorderliness of the project is only part of the story. Focusing on that aspect serves to exculpate OCC, the bank and Promontory. The dirty secret of these reviews is they could never have been done properly.
Read more...By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. .
This is the first interview that Chicago lawyer Anton Valukas has given since the publication of his 2,292 page report into the bankrutpcy of Lehman Brothers on March 11th, 2010. At that time, Valukas found strong evidence of financial and accounting fraud designed to deceive investors at the defunct New York-based investment bank. Valukas is surprised, especially given Lehman Brothers’ rampant abuse of Repo 105 to disguise its precarious financial position in the quarters ahead of its September 2008 collapse, that the former Lehman Brothers’ chief executive Dick Fuld or any other Lehman Brothers’ director has been charged with fraud or related offences.
Read more...In the executive summary to this series, we provided an overview of OCC/Federal Reserve foreclosure reviews which were abruptly settled at the beginning of January. Critics anticipated that the flawed design, of having supposedly “independent” review firms hired by the banks themselves, meant the reviews were highly unlikely to find much if any damage to homeowners. Leaks during the course of the reviews confirmed these concerns, revealing that the review process at many of the major servicers was chaotic and the reviews were designed and scored so as to make a finding of harm virtually impossible.
As bad as that sounds, the reality is even worse.
Read more...