Category Archives: Regulations and regulators

New York’s Benjamin Lawsky Forces Resignation of CEO of Mortgage Servicer Ocwen Over Wrongful Foreclosures, Shoddy Records and Systems

New York State Superintendent of Financial Services Benjamin Lawsky has forced the resignation of the chairman and CEO of a mortgage servicer, Ocwen over a range of borrower abuses in violation of a previous settlement agreement, including wrongful foreclosures, excessive fees, robosigning, sending out back-dated letters, and maintaining inaccurate records. Lawsky slapped the servicer with other penalties, including $150 million of payments to homeowners and homeowner-assistance program, being subject to extensive oversight by a monitor, changes to the board, and being required to give past and present borrowers access to loan files for free. The latter will prove to be fertile ground for private lawsuits. In addition, the ex-chairman William Erbey, was ordered to quit his chairman post at four related companies over conflicts of interest.

The Ocwen consent order shows Lawksy yet again making good use of his office while other financial services industry regulators are too captured or craven to enforce the law. Unlike other bank settlements, investors saw the Ocwen consent order as serious punishment. Ocwen’s stock price had already fallen by over 60% this year as a result of this probe and unfavorable findings by the national mortgage settlement monitor, Joseph Smith. Ocwen’s shares closed down another 27% on Monday. And that hurts Erbey. From the Wall Street Journal:

Bill Black: Obama and Holder Choose Banksters Over Whistleblowers

Yves here. At this point, the Obama administration’s fealty to banksters is a “dog bites man” story. Nevertheless, it’s useful to catalogue particular incidents to show how consistent its behavior is. The latest case study is its shoddy treatment of whistleblowers.

Did Wall Street Need to Win the Derivatives Budget Fight to Hedge Against Oil Plunge?

Conventional wisdom among banking experts is that Wall Street’s successful fight last week to get a pet provision into the must-pass budget bill (or in political junkies’ shorthand, Cromnibus) as more a demonstration of power and a test for gutting Dodd Frank than a fight that mattered to them. But the provision they got in, which was to undo a portion of Dodd Frank that barred them from having taxpayer-backstopped deposits fund derivative positions, may prove to be more important than it seemed as the collateral damage from the 40% fall in oil prices hits investors and intermediaries.

Bill Black: Second Circuit Decision Effectively Legalizes Insider Trading

Yves here. Bill Black is so ripshit about a Second Circuit court of appeals decision that effectively legalizes insider trading that he doesn’t unpack the workings until later his his important post. Let’s turn to Reuters (hat tip EM) for an overview:

A U.S. appeals court dealt federal prosecutors a blow in their crackdown on insider trading on Wall Street on Wednesday, overturning the convictions of two former hedge fund managers charged with making illegal trades in technology stocks.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said prosecutors presented insufficient evidence to convict Todd Newman, a former portfolio manager at Diamondback Capital Management, and Anthony Chiasson, co-founder of Level Global Investors.

The court held that defendants can only be convicted of insider trading if the person trading on confidential information knew the original tipper disclosed it in exchange for a personal benefit.

What does this mean in practical terms? The court has just provided a very-easy-to-satisfy roadmap for engaging in insider trading legally.

Obama Administration Muzzling Its Climate Scientists

Yves here. The fact that Team Obama is gagging its climate scientists should come as no surprise. First, the Administration is obsesses with secrecy and image-management, as its extremely aggressive posture on classifying records and prosecuting leakers attests. Second, Administration climate policy is founded on a Big Lie. As Gaius Publius has written at length, its greenhouse gas measures exclude methane, the most potent greenhouse gas. That omission favors fracking, which fails the “clean green” test when you factor in methane releases. And that’s before you factor in contamination of water supplies.

Please Sign Urgent Occupy the SEC Petition Against Derivatives Deregulation

Text and links from Occupy the SEC follow:

Dear Friends,

This bulletin contains an update on what Occupy the SEC (occupythesec.org) has been up to lately, and what you can do to get involved.

Congress is on the verge of deregulating derivatives TODAY – Sign our petition to stop them.

Congress has historically used the end of the year as an opportunity to pass controversial legislation with little publicity, often using amendments to unrelated bills. This year is no different.

TODAY (December 10, 2014) our legislators are on the verge of approving two key provisions that would significantly roll back crucial parts of the Dodd-Frank Act’s derivatives (swaps) restrictions. Those provisions are Section 630 of the Senate Amendment to H.R. 83 (Omnibus Bill) and Title III of the House’s current version of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2014 (TRIA).

These provisions are nothing more than an attempt by Wall Street lobbyists and their friends in Congress to eviscerate important derivatives reforms implemented by the Dodd-Frank Act.

We need YOU to contact your legislators as soon as possible and tell them that you OPPOSE these sneaky deregulatory moves. If passed, these provisions would pave the way for further gutting of Dodd-Frank, which in turn would surely jeopardize our nation’s economy, line the pockets of wealthy financiers, and damage the fiscal health of every day Americans.

Please sign our petition now by clicking on the following link, which will allow you to send automatic emails to your Congressional Representative and Senators.

http://www.petition2congress.com/17017/petition-against-11th-hour-dilution-dodd-frank/

Elizabeth Warren Escalates Fight over Treasury Nominee Antonio Weiss, Goes to War with Wall Street Wing of Democratic Party

Earlier this week, we wrote about how the New York Times’ Dealbook, the creature of Wall Street sycophant Andrew Ross Sorkin, had launched a fierce campaign against Elizabeth Warren’s latest move, her opposition to the Obama administration’s nomination of Lazard’s Antonio Weiss, a mergers and acquisitions banker. Warren’s grounds for objecting to Weiss were straightforward: his experience was no fit for the requirements of his proposed Treasury role. On top of that, he had been involved in and therefore profited from acquisitions called inversions that Treasury opposes because they reduce the taxes paid by the acquirer, which uses the acquired company to move its headquarters to a lower-tax jurisdiction.

Dealbook published three Warren-bashing columns in as many weeks; the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal ran editorials making similar arguments, suggesting that all were picking up on the same talking points out of Treasury. One tell: the Times had to issue a correction on one of its pieces because it relied on a Treasury document that exaggerated Weiss’ accomplishments.

Warren upped the ante in a speech on Tuesday, making Weiss, who is now head of investment banking at Lazard, a symbol of what is wrong with the relationship between the government and Big Finance: that of far too much coziness between the large, influential players and financial regulators. And in sharpening and further documenting her critique, she has put the Robert Rubin wing of the Democratic party in her crosshairs.

Jeffrey Sachs Channeled His Inner Bill Black – and Obama and Holder Ignored Him Too

Yves here. This post by Bill Black serves to illustrate the difficulties of effecting change. As much as Black in particular has been a forceful and articulate advocate for tougher bank regulation and prosecution of executives, arguments like his get at most polite lip service from the enforcers. Recall that Black is far from alone. Others who’ve called for a more tough-minded approach include Charles Ferguson of Inside Job, Eliot Spitzer, Neil Barofsky, Joe Stiglitz and Simon Johnson.

We are seeing more and more of the elite willing call for more aggressive measures to combat bank misconduct.

Bill Black: Mortgage Appraisal Fraud is Baaack…Because Bank Execs Profit From It

Yves here. Financiers and their media amplifiers keep trying to blame their bad conduct, like mortgage appraisal fraud, on powerless customers, so people like Bill Black have to keep swatting down their misrepresentations. Sadly, this crisis topic is back all too soon due to lack of regulatory vigilance.

Chicago Public Schools’ $100 Million Swaps Debacle Demonstrates High Cost of High Finance

I’ve been late to write up an important series published by the Chicago Tribune earlier this month on a costly swaps misadventure by the Chicago Public Schools. Like all too many state and local government entities, the Chicago Public Schools were persuaded to obtain $1 billion of needed ten-year financing not through the time-and-tested route of a simple ten year bond sale but the supposedly cost-saving mechanism of issuing a floating-rate bond and swapping it into a fixed rate. An impressive, expert-vetted analysis of the deal by the Chicago Tribune estimated that the school authority has in fact incurred $100 million in present-value losses on that $1 billion bond issue.

Bill Black: The New York Times Thinks Jailing Banksters Would Cause a “Bind”

Yves here. Bill Black continues to heap well-deserved scorn on efforts to defend New York Fed president William Dudley’s revealing performance in Senate testimony last week. In its efforts to pretend that the New York Fed can’t possibly be expected to regulate, the Grey Lady goes beyond the usual hoary canard that jailing banksters is just too hard (as in trying to say that what they perpetrated didn’t break any laws, when plenty of writers, such as Charles Ferguson, long form in Predator Nation, and yours truly, among plenty of others, have cited both legal theories and fact sets that show the reverse). The additional bogus claim is….drumroll…that keeping banks out of criminal and improper conduct is somehow inconsistent with making sure they “operate successfully”. In other words, the Times is effectively saying that banks have become so dependent on criminal and near-criminal conduct as profit sources that regulators dare not deprive them of that out of fear of weakening their financial performance.

Paul Martin, A Regulator Who Said No to Banks

Paul Martin, who was Canada’s finance minister before he became prime minister, is widely seen as implementing the policies that led Canada to get through the crisis virtually unscathed. This is the summary of Martin’s key actions as finance minister from INET: In general, Martin has received justifiable plaudits but often for the wrong thing. […]

Big Investors Rebelling Against Private Equity Fees

In a remarkable and long-overdue change in attitude, institutional investors are starting to tell private equity titans that they think they don’t earn their outsized pay. And that’s before you get to all the grifting they’ve been exposed to be doing on top of that.

The Wall Street Journal described a confrontation at a conference in Paris, with a pension fund manager responsible overseeing private equity investments calling out the unjustifiable level of private equity fees.

Bill Black: Dudley Do Wrong Rejects Being a “Cop” and Embraces “Foaming the Runways”

William Dudley, the President of the New York Fed, is not a stupid man. He is, however, wholly unfit to be a regulator. He has now admitted that publicly. It is time for him to return to Goldman Sachs so that he can be replaced by someone expressly chosen to be a vigorous regulator who will embrace the most critical function of a financial regulator – to be the tough “regulatory cop on the beat.”