SAN FRANCISCO — Wells Fargo must defend itself against a class-action lawsuit brought by homeowners who accuse the banking giant of failing to modify mortgages that the residents sought to change amid the foreclosure crisis unleashed by the Great Recession, attorneys said Tuesday.
The plaintiffs in the case believe that Wells Fargo did not keep the promises it had made to homeowners in terms of modifying the terms and conditions of their mortgages.
William K. Black
February 2, 2016 Bloomington, MN
It is time to break out one of our two family rules again – it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody. How fraudulent is finance even now? The Wall Street Journal reports that “big money managers” want to bring back “liar’s loans.” I am trying to write much shorter columns, so there will be many columns in this series because the WSJ article so beautifully exemplifies the lies that the industry and the media told about liar’s loans before and after 2008.
Spoiler alert: liar’s loans, as the name admits, are pervasively fraudulent. Only fraudulent lenders make liar’s loans as a regular business practice. These home loans make the officers wealthy through the “sure thing” of the “fraud recipe” for “accounting control fraud.” The WSJ, of course, ignores these facts and presents instead falsehoods provided by fraudulent officers.
The following is a script from “Anonymous, Inc.” which aired on Jan. 31, 2016. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Graham Messick and Kevin Livelli, producers.
If you like crime dramas and movies with international intrigue, then you probably have a basic understanding of money laundering. It’s how dictators, drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and other crooks avoid getting caught by transforming their ill-gotten gains into assets that appear to be legitimate.
They do it by moving the dirty money through a maze of dummy corporations and offshore bank accounts that conceal their identity and the source of the funds.
And most of it would never happen without the help — witting or unwitting — of lawyers, accountants and incorporators; the people who actually create these anonymous shell companies and help move the money. In fact, the U.S. has become one of the most popular places in the world to do it.
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Randomly Distributed Trial Court Justice: A Case Study and Siren from the Consumer Bankruptcy World
Forthcoming in American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review
by Gary Neustadter*
“Between February 24, 2010 and April 23, 2012, Heritage Pacific Financial, L.L.C. (“Heritage”), a debt buyer, mass produced and filed 218 essentially identical adversary proceedings in California bankruptcy courts against makers of promissory notes who had filed Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy petitions. Each complaint alleged Heritage’s acquisition of the notes in the secondary market and alleged the outstanding obligations on the notes to be nondischargeable under the Bankruptcy Code’s fraud exception to the bankruptcy discharge. The notes evidenced loans to California residents, made in 2005 and 2006, which helped finance the purchase, refinancing, or improvement of California residential real property. When issued, the notes were secured by junior consensual liens on the real property, but subsequent foreclosure of senior consensual liens, precipitated by the mid-decade burst of the housing bubble, left the notes unsecured.
This article reports an empirical study of these bankruptcy adversary proceedings. Continue reading
Deadly Clear 