Category Archives: Real estate

Efforts to Pretend “50 State” Attorney General Deal Moving Forward Looking More Desperate

For months, it has looked as if Iowa state attorney general Tom Miller and the Department of Justice has been effectively negotiating on behalf of the banks to try to secure a broad settlement to give the banks a talking point and create the perception that the mortgage mess is on the mend. In fact, it would not stop the train wreck in local courts, since a deal would not restrict the rights of borrowers. However, getting the AGs out of the equation would still be of benefit to the banks, since their investigations typically unearth information that assist private litigants.

But we have long thought that the settlement talks have been a weird PR exercise, in that if the talks were perceived to be getting momentum, they’d actually get momentum.

Michael Hudson: Mr. Obama’s Scare Tactics to Get Democrats to Vote for His Republican Wall Street Plan

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

You know that the debt kerfuffle is as staged as melodramatically as a World Wrestling Federation exhibition when Mr. Obama makes the blatantly empty threat that if Congress does not “tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform,” there won’t be money to pay Social Security checks next month. In his debt speech last night (July 25), he threatened that if “we default, we would not have enough money to pay all of our bills – bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses.”

This is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week now.

Massachusetts Attorney General Signals Likelihood of Nixing “50 State” Mortgage Settlement

The market-moving stories, namely the US debt ceiling drama and the rolling Greek/Eurozone mess, are crowding out anything other than tragedies (the Norway bombing, Chinese train wrecks) and good old fashioned high profile prurient interest (DSK and the Murdochs).

Let’s briefly cover an important development in the US mortgage saga. I’m told that the Department of Justice is putting the thumbscrews on state attorneys general to sign a mortgage settlement deal this week.

Should You Get Only $7000 if Wells Stole Your House?

If you are a too big to fail bank like Wells Fargo, the wages of crime look awfully good. RIp off as many as 10,000 people to the point where they lose their homes and your good friend the Fed will let you off the hook for somewhere between $1000 and $20,000 per house. And as we’ll discuss in due course, this deal isn’t just bad for the abused homeowners, it’s also bad for investors and sets a terrible precedent, which means its impact extends well beyond the perhaps 10,000 immediate casualties.

Oh, and how much does the Fed think you should be paid if you were foreclosed upon thanks to Wells?

Federal Home Loan Banks Challenge BofA Settlement, Say They May Be Owed a Lot More

This is getting interesting. I had heard that a lot of investors were unhappy with the proposed Bank of America settlement of liability for selling investors a garbage barge when they’d been promised something a tad better. But being unhappy is one thing, actually taking concrete steps to oppose the $8.5 billion deal (which heinously also included a broad release for chain of title liability) is quite another. While a group of investors who had pursued their own objections were quick to file a petition objecting to the settlement, they are small fry and their protest in isolation would probably be rejected by the judge.

The equation changed today with several Federal Home Loan Banks effectively saying they had been kept out of the loop and have reason to think the settlement is inadequate

Quelle Surprise! The Banks Lied and Robosigning Lives!

We’ve heard numerous bank executives swear piously before Congressional hearings that those “paperwork problems” that led major servicers to halt or slow foreclosures on a widespread basis last year were “mistakes”. That was already a really big lies, since “mistake” means the practice was not deliberate and was presumably isolated, when in fact robosigning was a widespread, institutionalized practice.

14 major servicers then swore in consent orders earlier this year that they’d stop doing all that bad stuff. But with compliance weak (the banks get to hire the overseers!), they appear to have decided they don’t need to change their ways all that much.

California AG Considering Joining New York, Delaware in Broad Probe of Mortgage Abuses

We’d said the 50 state attorneys general settlement was wobblier than the press cheerleading would lead you to believe. We’ve also said the California AG, Kamala Harris, was likely to be among the defectors. The odds of that increased today as she met with New York AG Eric Schneiderman to discuss joining the probe that he and Delaware AG Beau Biden have launched, which is the most extensive investigation undertaken to date.

It isn’t hard to see why the settlement talks are fracturing.

Mirabile Dictu! SEC Prods Banks Over Mortgage Litigation Reserves

When the SEC wakes up and starts acting like a regulator, you know something serious is afoot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the securities agency, spooked by Bank of America setting aside over $20 billion for mortgage-related liability, has sent letters to “a number of banks” asking them to do a better job of disclosing what their legal liability is (the elephant in the room is of course the mortgage mess) and making adequate reserves. Per their story:

Bank of America $8.5 Billion Mortgage “Settlement” Under Fire

We took an immediate dislike to the so called Bank of America mortgage settlement, in which the trustee for 530 mortgage trusts, Bank of New York, has entered into deal in which the bank will pay $8.5 billion to settle not only putback liability (having to compensate investors by buying back loans that never should have been put in the trusts in the first place) but also chain of title liability to investors (otherwise known as “my dog ate your mortgage”; note this would NOT impair the ability of homeowners to raise that issue in foreclosure).

We criticized the deal as being bad for homeowners (as in likely to accelerate foreclosures, rather than alleviate them, as claimed), bad for investors (due to the amount being too low for putbacks and an outrageous sellout based on the waiver for chain of title problems) and rife with conflicts of interest. Indeed, almost immediately after the settlement was announced, a group of investors who had been pursuing their own claims on three of the trusts in the settlement filed a petition as a means of objecting to the deal and its failure to provide a means for investors like them to opt out.

Two public officials, Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, and Representative Brad MIller, who is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, apparently also suspect the pact does not pass the smell test and are asking some tough questions.

Quelle Surprise! DoJ Pushing State AGs to Whitewash Servicing Abuses; Failure to Investigate Confirmed

The latest report by Shahien Nasirpour at Huffington Post confirms two things you’ve heard here and on some other sites following this sorry affair: first, that Tom MIller, Iowa attorney general who is leading the 50 state attorneys general negotiations on mortgage abuses, is a liar, and second, that any settlement will be a whitewash.

Did Sheila Bair Save the US From Complete Financial Meltdown?

When a moderate (meaning anachronistic) Republican proves to be a more tough minded regulator than Democrats, it serves as yet another proof of how far the county has moved to the right. Bair, in a long “exit interview” with Joe Nocera, says a number of things that would have been regarded as commonsensical and obvious in the 1980s, yet have a whiff of radicalism about them in our era of finance uber alles. For instance: Bear should have been allowed to fail, TBTF banks are a menace (well, she doesn’t say that, but makes it clear she regards them as repugnant), bank bondholders should take their lumps.

Bair was alert to the dangers of subprime, having recognized how dangerous it could be in the early 2000s (when a smaller version of the market blew up, taking homeowners along with it), and was not a believer of the Paulson/Bernanke party line that subprime would be “contained”. She long championed mortgage mods as better for lenders, borrowers, and the economy, and has fought an uphill battle with the Administration on that front. With the IndyMac failure, which put the subprime lender/servicer in the FDIC’s lap, she pushed hard to develop a template for how to do them, which then was ignored by the Administration (they did HAMP instead, an embarrassment which she refused from the outset to endorse).

The piece serves as an indictment of the banking industry toadies in the officialdom, namely the Treasury, Fed, and OCC. One priceless quote:

More on $8.5 Billion BofA Settlement Conflicts: 2/3 of Trustee’s RMBS Business is From BofA

No wonder Bank of New York was so eager to roll the investors to whom it is nominally responsible and sign up for a settlement deal in which it effectively sold their interests out (and didn’t bother even going through the motions of advance notice, much the less consultation). Bank of America not only used the carrot of a very juicy indemnification, it had the stick of the amount of RMBS trustee business it has directed to Bank of New York and presumably could send elsewhere on future deals if it became displeased.

Government: The Dominant Player in US Credit Markets?

The latest column by Gillian Tett provides further support for our pet thesis: that the role of the state in banking is so great and the subsidies so wideranging that they cannot properly be considered private companies and should be regulated as utilities.

Key extracts:

What Sexual Favors Were Exchanged So That Clinton (and Bloomberg) Pimped for the $8.5 Billion BofA Mortgage Settlement?

Bill Clinton’s favorite attack dog, James Carville, once said of Paula Jones: “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.”

Add a few zeros, and you can get the cooperation of much bigger players.

The noted financial services industry analyst Bill Clinton weighed in on the proposed $8.5 billion Bank of America mortgage settlement. Per Bloomberg: