This is a guest post by Tom Adams, who spent over 20 years in the securitization business and now works as an attorney and consultant and expert witness on MBS, CDO and securitization related issues.

I don’t expect anyone to really come up with the perfect explanation for why Clinton lost and Trump won the presidential election.  But I do spend some time looking at these maps:

The first map is from RealtyTrac, and indicates the states with the largest foreclosure inventory in 2012. The second is a map of the key battleground states. In 2008 and 2012, Obama won these states. In 2016 Clinton lost them. There’s a lot of similarities between those two maps.

Even in the best economic environment, residential mortgage foreclosure is a long, messy process. The massive wave of foreclosures that hit these regions after the financial crisis had enormous consequences economically. They also…

JPMorgan Chase & Co (>> JPMorgan Chase & Co.) has agreed to pay U.S. authorities $264 million to resolve allegations it hired the relatives of Chinese officials in order to win banking deals, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department said in statements Thursday.

The SEC and Justice Department had been investigating over several years whether some of JPMorgan’s hiring efforts involved bribes, in violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The SEC will receive $130 million of the settlement, with $72 million going to Justice and $61.9 million to the U.S. Federal Reserve, which penalized the bank “for unsafe and unsound practices.”

JPMorgan did not admit or deny the charges. As part of its settlement with the Justice Department, a Hong Kong unit of the bank admitted to making quid pro quo hiring agreements with Chinese officials to win investment business.

Read on.

As the Charlotte City Council prepared to vote on a routine insurance contract with Wells Fargo Insurance Services this week, council member LaWana Mayfield blasted the bank for allegedly creating more than 2 million credit cards and bank cards without customer’s knowledge.

Mayfield tried to postpone the vote, saying the city needed to “set an example of who we do business with” and that it shouldn’t reward a company that has “historically had a negative impact on majority-minority communities.”

Mayfield’s criticism of Wells Fargo was a sharp departure from the role usually played by local elected officials, who typically have seen the city’s largest employers as partners. Even during the aftermath of the financial crisis, there was little pushback against Bank of America and Wachovia/Wells Fargo for the role they played.

Other governments have cut ties with Wells Fargo over the scandal, including the states of California, Ohio and Illinois.

Clatsop County is joining 11 other counties in a $50 million lawsuit against a private mortgage registry over recording fees.

The lawsuit alleges that Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, owes the counties millions of dollars in unpaid fees.

“We think we’re probably missing out on somewhere between $35,000 or $70,000 a year in filing fees,” Clatsop County Manager Cameron Moore said.

Under state law, whenever mortgage debt is bought or sold, the transfer must be recorded in county records. MERS, a private registry created in 1995 by the banking industry, has been serving as the owner of record. The mortgage-industry company has, for years, essentially transferred the beneficial interest of a property to itself, circumventing the typical filing fee owed to the county clerk’s office, Clatsop County Counsel Heather Reynolds told county commissioners last week.

Read on.

OKLAHOMA CITY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The law firm of Federman & Sherwood has initiated an investigation into Banc of California, Inc. (NYSE: BANC) with respect to possible violations of federal securities laws.

On October 18, 2016, an article published on Seeking Alpha alleged that Banc of California, Inc. (“BANC”) had concealed numerous connections between it and Jason Galanis, who has been convicted of criminal securities fraud, including that: (1) CEO Jason Sugarman was the founder, CEO, and indirect owner of a company controlled by Galanis; and (2) separately, Galanis controlled BANC’s founding shareholder. The Seeking Alpha article also alleged that BANC had used an off-balance sheet lender to make loans to insiders. On this news, shares of BANC fell to close at $11.26 per share on October 18, 2016.

Additionally, BANC stated in its Securities and Exchange filing on November 10, 2016, that it is delaying the filing of its Quarterly…

Five of the country’s biggest banks detailed tweaks to their business models in hopes of persuading regulators they could absorb significant financial distress without requiring taxpayer funds to stay afloat.

The stakes are high for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of AmericaCorp., and three others. If regulators deem these revisions of their so-called living wills—made public by the government Tuesday—to be insufficiently credible, those institutions could be ordered to hold higher levels of capital on their books, or to restructure and shed business lines.

Regulators are facing considerable pressure from politicians to use this process to break up the biggest banks, with many—notably Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren—arguing these institutions remain “too big to fail.”

Read on.

America’s biggest banks are closing hundreds of branches.

Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan shut 389 branches since the third quarter of last year.

Bank of America, which had over 6,000 branches before the financial crisis has now shrank to 4,629, according to third quarter accounts.  The bank has cut 112 financial centers from last year.

Paul Donofrio, CFO of Bank of America, said the closing of branches was part of a “shift to self-served digital channels, mobile, online, and ATM” in a 3Q earnings call transcript.

Read on.

A New Jersey law firm that helped Wells Fargo Bank N.A. foreclose on thousands of homeowners has sued the lender, saying the bank’s delayed efforts to fix its robo-signing problems led the law firm to collapse.

Lawyers for the Zucker, Goldberg & Ackerman law firm, which laid off most of its 335 workers last year, are accusing Wells Fargo of taking several years to comply with a 2010 New Jersey Supreme Court order that called for lenders to show that they were properly submitting mortgage details before foreclosing on a property.

The order, which required banks to submit their internal foreclosure policies, paralyzed foreclosures throughout the state. The average time for the foreclosure process—from filing the lawsuit to a sheriff’s sale—grew from about 200 days to about 1,000 days, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Newark.

Read on.

A group of senators is already asking the Department of Justice to use a new policyto target individuals at Wells Fargo for corporate misconduct (and maybe even more) in the wake of the fake account scandal surrounding the bank.

The senators’ push for prosecution seems to focus mainly on the executives at Wells Fargo, including departed CEO John Stumpf, for their roles in setting up and overseeing an incentive program that led to the bank’s employees setting up millions of fake accounts in consumers’ names in order to get sales bonuses.

But the state of California is making a move that could lead to a whole new world of hurt for Wells Fargo, its current and former executives, and the 5,000 former employees who opened the fake accounts.

According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, which has been all over this scandalsince the beginning

Housingwire:

Before Ohio, the city of Chicago, the state of California, and the state of Oregon all suspended ties with Wells Fargo in the wake of the scandal.

And now, two members of the legislative body that oversees the city and county where Wells Fargo is headquartered want the city to suspend any business with Wells Fargo as well.

To that end, two members of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, John Avalos and Jane Kim, plan to introduce a motion on Tuesday morning that would direct the city and county of San Francisco to cut business ties with Wells Fargo.

The supervisors will introduce the motion during press conference Tuesday morning on the steps of San Francisco city hall, and will be joined by representatives from theAlliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the California Reinvestment Coalition and CalPIRG.

Additionally, San Francisco Treasurer José Cisneros will take…