Category Archives: Real estate

Michael Olenick: How Banks and Their Lawyers Win at the Expense of Investors and Homeowners

By Michael Olenick, creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick or read his blog, Seeing Through Data

The focus of news stories on mortgage abuses often focus on the immediate victims, the borrowers, but that’s far from a complete tally of the losers. And they also typically fail to look hard enough at the winners and the way they are able, again and again, to burn everyone but themselves.

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Barney Frank: Obama Rejected Bush Administration Concession to Write Down Mortgages

Here’s Barney Frank, in an exit interview recently in New York Magazine, revealing unwittingly that Obama during the transition rejected a Bush administration concession to write down mortgages.  Here’s what Barney said.

The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it.  This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it.

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Michael Olenick: WhaleMu – JP Morgan’s Next Surprise?

By Michael Olenick, creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick or read his blog, Seeing Through Data

In an admittedly strange twist of timing JP Morgan, the same JP Morgan that just announced a surprise $2 billion loss caused by the “London Whale,” became the first and only of 26 banks disclosing subprime investor data to flip me the digital bird, refusing access to the public loan-level performance data for their Washington Mutual loans.

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More on Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis

As readers may know, a recent post, “Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis,”discussed the first half of the Frontline series, “Money, Power & Wall Street.” Producers Mike Wiser and Martin Smith sent a letter taking issue with this review, and I made an exception to my usual practice and posted their missive.

The major dispute is over whether their series lets the financial services industry off too lightly.

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Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance

Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America despite incontrovertible evidence that he does not represent their interests. There are many contributing factors, including his considerable skills as a speaker and his programmatic effort to neuter liberal critics by getting their funding cut.

A central component of the seemingly impenetrable Obama mythology is his personal history: a black man, son of a broken home, who nevertheless got on the fast track to financial success by becoming editor of the Harvard Law Review, but turned instead to working with and later representing a particularly disadvantaged community, the South Side of Chicago.

Even so, this story does not quite add up.

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Yet Another Mortgage Settlement Gimmie: Conflicting Servicing Standards Play into Hands of Banks

It’s bad enough that the overhyped mortgage settlement was a big victory for the banks at the expense of homeowners and the rule of law. It let servicers out of considerable liability at very low real cost, and even that is offset by the transfer from pension funds and savers to the banks by letting them write down securitized first loans without wiping out bank owned second liens that sit behind them.

But we now learn there are other gimmies that appear to have resulted from negotiating incompetence.

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Top Experts Diss Housing Market Bullishness, Foresee Protracted Headwinds

The housing bulls seem unable to contain themselves. Today, in a prominently featured Bloomberg story, “Sales of New U.S. Homes Exceeded Estimates in March,” experts cheerily discuss a “firming” housing market and call for a bottom this year. Funny how these predictions for a real estate recovery seem to be a moving target.

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The Ministry of Truth Speaks: American Prospect Tries to Pass Off Mortgage Turncoat Schneiderman as Hero

I’m not looking forward to months of pre-election image-burnishing fabrication. The nausea-inducing offering of the day, The Man the Banks Fear Most from the American Prospect, gives us an idea of what we have in store.

The good news is that this revisionist history on the craven sellout by Eric Schneiderman on the mortgage settlement appears to be in response to a damaging New York Daily News article last week.

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