Slate:

Hillary Clinton is consolidating her support among Wall Street donors and other businesses ahead of a general-election battle with Donald Trump, winning more campaign contributions from financial-services executives in the most recent fundraising period than all other candidates combined.

The Democratic front-runner has raised $4.2 million in total from Wall Street, $344,000 of which was contributed in March alone. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of fundraising data provided by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the former secretary of state received 53% of the donations from Wall Street in March, up from 32% last year and 33% in January through February, as the nominating contests began.

The analysis of campaign-finance reports shows that some Wall Street donors have shifted their financial support from Republican candidates who dropped out of the race, such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, to Clinton in recent months.

Held Hostage by a Home

By Anonymous

Depending on reader response- this column may become an ongoing Sunday feature on LivingLies. Let us know what you think.
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Although Neil Garfield eloquently describes the legal dynamics of foreclosure, there is also a human battle waged in millions of homes nationwide that remains hidden behind walls of shame, fear and anger. Families are torn apart by the stress and uncertainty that financial burdens bring. A home, no matter how modest or grand, is a foundation of family life- and when it is torn away by companies without legal standing to do so- the pain is compounded because of the injustice.

Most families who fall behind on their debts, do not do so deliberately. Usually financial debt is caused by job loss, illness, divorce, or simply being induced into obtaining more credit than the family can service-by companies who carry no risk…

International Business Times:

Days after Trump’s decisive primary win in Indiana, his campaign indicated that it was growing. Team Trump has added a finance chair: Steven Mnuchin, the founder of a private equity firm that received a government-funded jackpot after the 2008 housing collapse.

Mnuchin, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, heads up Dune Capital. The investment firm put together a holding company in 2008  — attracting investors like J.C. Flowers, a George Soros investment fund and Paulson & Co. — that then bought up $32 billion worth of IndyMac bank assets for the cut-rate price of $13.9 billion. Renaming the bank OneWest, Mnuchin’s consortium invested $1.3 billion and got the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to assume responsibility for the majority of future losses. The FDIC lost an estimated $8.5 billion to $9.4 billion in the deal — while the holding company made money with the taxpayer-subsidized set-up.

“Steven is a professional at…

A former employee accused Wells Fargo & Co of instructing workers at a call center to refrain from telling customers about lost deeds or other missing documents, and of firing the worker who called the policy unethical, according to a lawsuit made public this week.

Duke Tran, who was a customer service specialist at the bank, says that his supervisor berated him for telling a husband and wife that their loan contract was missing from an internal system.

Tran and others later received an email instructing them not to tell customers about situations “where we have a lost contract, deed, any type of document, really, but especially when it relates to securing a property,” according to a copy of the email filed with the lawsuit.

The email told the employees “to say that we need to do further research or something similar” and then to escalate the phone call to…

In an oddly ironic twist, today Donald Trump announced that he has picked as chairman of his newly launched fundraising operation none other than a former employee of the bank he has repeatedly criticized in the past, and which he used as a foil to criticize Ted Cruz: Goldman Sachs.

Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built a fortung of $46 million before launching his own hedge fund.

While employed at Goldman, he purchased the remains of IndyMac Bank (now known as OneWest Bank), the Pasadena, California-based mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008. “Notoriously press-shy, the executive endured 2011 protests on the lawn of his Bel…

Cities are arguing that they, too, were damaged by risky loans, and that they should be able to take the lenders to court to regain their losses.

In the wake of the housing crisis, surprisingly few people or institutions have been held accountable for the risky lending practices that nearly wrecked the U.S. economy.  That’s partly because the people who were most damaged by the foreclosure crisis—the people who lost their homes—don’t have the resources to bring lawsuits.

But the families who lost their homes weren’t the only ones hurt by the foreclosure crisis. So there’s an argument to be made that they shouldn’t be the only ones who can go after the lenders. Cities, for example, lost tax revenue when homes sat vacant, and saw property values within their boundaries decrease when vacant and boarded-up homes sat empty. Cities had to pay for police and fire protection to keep…

Carefully timed deals help big money managers skirt dividend taxes in 20 countries, confidential documents show.

German companies are known for paying some of the heftiest dividends among world stocks, one reason U.S. investment giants such as BlackRock and Vanguard are among the biggest holders of German shares.

But Wall Street has figured out a way to squeeze some extra income from these stocks. And German taxpayers pay for it.

A cache of confidential documents obtained by ProPublica and analyzed in collaboration with The Washington Post, German broadcaster ARD and the Handelsblatt newspaper in Düsseldorf details how Wall Street puts together complex stock-lending deals that drain an estimated $1 billion a year from the German treasury.

Similar deals extend beyond Germany, siphoning revenue from at least 20 other countries across four continents, according to the documents, which show how “dividend-arbitrage”…