By Richard Smith, spelunker of the Web. We started Robert Cowley’s web bio here and this is the second installment. We will be in Mayfair, London, or on the Gold Coast of Australia, and the story involves a dead Daily Mail journalist, a great racing driver, and a bad racing driver: a very bad one, […]
Read more...Just when you think things have gotten as bad as they can, whether in matters of great import of small, they manage to get worse. I should be inured to relentless Obama propagandizing by now, but to make sure the public doesn’t miss the fact that they are lucky enough to be governed by someone possessed of true genius, the pre-election PR is now taking on heavy-handed cult of personality overtones. As if Obama has enough in the way of personality for anyone to notice.
Read more...By Richard Smith, proud scion of a 5,000-year-old line of soot-smeared metal bashers, (purportedly). An early version of this post was born prematurely, and then, since blogging is more forgiving than obstetrics, hurriedly stuffed back into the womb by the flustered midwife. This is the fully developed version.
Robert Cowley, aka Earl Cowley, aka 2nd Baron Ardwhallan, aka Sir Robert Cowley, aka the Right Honorable Robert Cowley, is a faker, fantasist, social climber, fraudster and con man from Australia.
I suppose I could stop there, but it wouldn’t be much of a biography, and Cowley has such a shadowy and fantastical pedigree that it would be a shame not to record some of it: the traces he leaves aren’t always durable, but they are always vivid while they last.
Read more...By Richard Smith, who is easily distracted.
I promised in my last meander, about international scammers and media screwups, that my next post was going to be set in Australia. But I found this little gem, while looking for something else, and so the exotic locations this time are Colombia and Vancouver (the big Canadian Vancouver, not the little Vancouver in Washington, US, which, as it happens, might also get a look-in in a future post in this rambling series).
But this one is still about scammers and media screwups, so we are still on track, sort of. Here’s BBC World Business giving Rahim Jivraj an opportunity to puff his pump-and-dump Colombian mining company, Mercer Gold.
Read more...I know it’s dangerous to judge an article by its synopsis, but Harvard Business Review articles, unlike their academic cousins, are designed to be easy-breezy, so there is much less risk in taking one of its previews at face value. Here is what the HBR says Yale economist Robert Shiller presents longer form in its January-February edition:
Read more...We’ve been giving examples off and on about how servicers scam borrowers. Examples include impermissibly deducting fees before applying payments to interest and principal; force placed insurance, inflated prices on and excessive frequency of broker price opinions, and in altogether too many cases, treating payments that are on time as late. What many observers fail to appreciate is that these are tantamount to scamming investors. If a borrower goes into default, any bogus charges will be deducted from the sale of the house, and hence come out of investors’ hides.
Lisa Epstein of Foreclosure Hamlet is a mortgage document maven and has been looking extensively at investor reports and compared them to court documents and has found serious discrepancies.
Read more...One of the common complaints from banks that the concerns raised by borrowers over robosigning are mere “paperwork” problems, that everyone who is foreclosed on deserved it, and no one was really hurt. That is patently false, as there have been an embarrassing number of instances where someone with no mortgage was foreclosed on, as well all too many cases of servicer-driven foreclosures. And that’s before we get to damage to property records.
Attorney Timothy Fong called our attention to a below the radar form of chicanery that is predictable when you have nonjudicial foreclosure with no significant oversight and agents who lack incentives to do a good job.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore. Cross posted from Alternet.
Back in the Gilded Age, venality was the rule in Congress. Bribes were as common as tobacco pipes. Lawmakers fattened their bank accounts through insider deals, with the needs of ordinary people an afterthought. Nelson Aldrich, a powerful Republican who served in the Senate from 1881 to 1911, was that corrupt era’s political poster boy, serving on the Finance Committee and using his position to invest in railroads, sugar, rubber and banking deals that made him rich.
Sound familiar? It should. We’re well on our way to repeating that money-crazed chapter in American history as a growing list of legislators use their office to play the game, “Who Wants to Be a Multi-millionaire?”
Read more...As readers may know by now, 49 of 50 states have agreed to join the so-called mortgage settlement, with Oklahoma the lone refusenik. Although the fine points are still being hammered out, various news outlets (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal) have details, with Dave Dayen’s overview at Firedoglake the best thus far.
Read more...A number of writers, such as Mike Lux, Bob Kuttner, Matt Taibbi, and Justin Krebs, have been willing to convey the Administration message that the current version of the mortgage settlement is a “much tougher deal” and even a pretty good deal, thanks to Schneiderman’s intervention.
It is important to note that any recent improvement in terms has come at the cost of Schneiderman moving from being decidedly against the settlement to being in the “maybe/maybe not” camp as an apparent part of his decision to join an Administration investigation on mortgage abuses. But as we have stressed, the fact that the Obama team is pushing to wrap up the settlement agreement before the probe underway is a very bad sign. How can you settle when you don’t know the full extent of the bad conduct?
In addition, the change in Schneiderman’s posture has undermined the solidarity of the dissenting attorneys general, which is no doubt what Obama hoped to achieve.
While there is every reason to believe there has been some improvement in terms due to the resistance of Schneiderman and other state attorneys general (Beau Biden of Delaware, Martha Coakley of Massachusetts, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Kamala Harris of California), the notion that, per Mike Lux, “the settlement release is tight” appears to be patently false.
Read more...Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.
Philip Pilkington: Your book seems to me a much needed antidote to the mainstream economics textbooks and can either be read alone or together with them. I think that’s a great approach because it allows students to become familiar with what is being taught in the classroom but also allows them to take a critical perspective on this material. So, let’s start with the format of these textbooks.
Read more...By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me
Earlier this month, Matthew Yglesias of Slate tweeted “EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”
It’s hard to choose what is most ridiculous here…
Read more...To some readers, the answer to the headline may seem obvious: Yes, American management is clearly worse than it was, say, thirty or fifty years ago, because short-termism is endemic among public companies, and short-termism leads to all sorts of bad outcomes, like underinvestment and accounting gaming.
But that analysis is simplistic. Short-termism simply shows that management has adopted good for them, bad for pretty much everyone else (save maybe their bankster allies) goals and are pursuing them aggressively.
A comment by John Kay of the Financial Times has the effect of raising much more fundamental questions about the caliber of top managers.
Read more...The Gibraltar regulator confirms by email that James Richards company Baron Traders Limited is registered in Gibraltar.
Read more...By Michael Olenick, founder and CEO of Legalprise, and creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha)
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) boasts that its members have modified over five million mortgages over the past few years. As a data analyst focused on patterns of foreclosure fraud, I’ve analyzed tens of millions of pieces of information. I was willing to take the MBA’s claims at face value but, years ago, came to the conclusion that the MBA and their members have a severe credibility gap.
Remember, the reason for advocating mods is that, properly structured, they are a win-win: investors take a lower loss than they would in a foreclosure, the borrower stays in his house, and another real-estate-price-depressing sale is averted.
But this “everyone comes out ahead” is not what I’ve seen. I’ve been able to check modifications, since they are recorded in public records. It quickly became apparent that while theses modifications are, at best, worthless, and more often than not border on an extension of the same predatory practices that resulted in the original mortgages.
These modifications are to mortgages as vultures are to predators, another opportunity to take one last bite out of people trying to keep their homes. Banks are “modifying” lots of loans, but to terms even more favorable to banks.
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