Banking Committee member Sherrod Brown wants to know whether banks changed any behavior after penalties

WSJ (sub. req.):

A powerful Democratic senator has launched an inquiry into bank misconduct, asking top financial institutions to turn over information about the settlements they have entered into with federal agencies over the past decade. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, asked banks in a letter dated Sept. 30 to to provide details of any “legally enforceable judgment, agreement, settlement, decree or order dated January 1, 2005 to the present,” involving 15 federal agencies including the Department of Justice, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and several Treasury Department units. The inquiry could add fuel to growing criticism by lawmakers and others that such settlements have failed to deter repeated bank misbehavior.

Doesn’t take personal responsibility…Bernanke needs to crawl back under the rock with Greenspan…

Here’s FT with Bernanke’s take:

The former chairman of the Federal Reserve has hit out at Congress for failing to do its part to bolster America’s rebound from the financial crisis, saying the US central bank had been unfairly criticised when the recovery “failed to lift all boats”.

In his newly published memoir, Ben Bernanke admitted the Fed had failed to spot some of the dangers building before the financial crash, and said that the controversial rescues of Bear Stearns and the insurance company AIG had damaged its political standing and “created new risks to its independence”.

As suggested by the title of his book, The Courage to Act, Mr Bernanke argues that the Fed’s policies under his leadership were justified and helped usher in a stronger recovery than in many other countries. He draws a…

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that she will lay out her plan to rein in Wall Street “abuses” within the next week.

“I’m going to be proposing in the next week what I think will be the best way to go after Wall Street abuses and rein in the too-big-to-fail banks and other institutions,” Clinton said at an Iowa campaign stop.

Clinton said her plan would focus on more than banks, taking into account any kind of financial institution that causes disruption in the marketplace.

“What I’m proposing is that we go after the risk,” Clinton said. “If they are so big that they are causing disruptions in the marketplace, that’s a risk. So I have what I consider to be a more comprehensive approach toward what we need to do to rein in the big institutions, including the banks.”

Clinton also indicated that she would address…

Since January 2014, HousingWire has reported on what appears to be a tragic trend of suicides and mysterious deaths of financial executives and bankers.

Here is just a little of our past coverage.

Gee ya think, Ben? Now that the statute of limitations is up, everybody wants to talk tough against Wall Street!

Zerohedge:

First, tomorrow Ben Bernanke will be on CNBC’s Squawk Box to promote his book, the same CNBC which from a credible financial channel has metamorphosed into an outlet whose only purpose is to cheerlead the stock market and get as many people invested in the next and final Ponzi as possible. He will also discuss the disastrous state of the post-post-bubble economy and the latest plunge in payrolls.

Second, today as part of the same book promotion tour (supposedly because nobody wants to pay Bernanke $250,000 to listen to an hour of bullshit now that the Fed no longer has credibility) he had this exchange with the USA Today’s Susan Page:

Q. Should somebody have gone to jail.

Bernanke: Yeah, yeah I think so. I have objected for…

Rebecca Mairone scarcely deserves a mention in the annals of finance, except for this: She’s the only executive of a major U.S. mortgage lender found liable for her part in the 2008 financial crisis.

Mairone was chief operating officer for a division of Countrywide Financial Corp., the California giant that came to symbolize the excesses of the subprime era. While top executives there and elsewhere walked away, Mairone, now 48, was targeted in a civil case by federal prosecutors. In October 2013, a Manhattan jury found her liable for misrepresenting the quality of mortgages her company sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff called her testimony “implausible” and slapped her with a $1 million fine. Bloggers said she helped destroy the U.S. economy and should be jailed or worse.

Two years later, Mairone is heading back to court in an attempt to overturn that ruling…

AURORA, Colo. — A loan service company based in Florida has one Aurora man afraid he’s about to lose his home.

So he reached out to the FOX31 Denver Problem Solvers trying to find help.

We have been digging, working for weeks to help solve loan collection problems for a man in Aurora who says he’s also dealing with a language barrier.

But we found the company has more barriers than just language, when it comes to dealing with frustrated customers.

Vi K. Tran shows us some of the paperwork he says he’s collected. He’s trying to keep his home in Aurora from going into foreclosure.

“I’m so upset about it,” said Tran. “I want to solve the problem; They don’t want to.”

“They” is Ocwen Loan Servicing of central Florida, essentially a debt collection company now handling his mortgage after he ran into some hard times.

“They told me ‘your…