Mary Jo White has been a major disappointment as the SEC head. Ms. White was a tough prosecutor when she was a U.S. Attorney in NY. And I have to concur with the former SEC officials. She needs to stop bowing down to the repeated crime offenders big banks!

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

In early 2013, before Mary Jo White was confirmed as the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), I wrote a post predicting she would be a bankster codling fraud in the post, Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy. Here’s an excerpt:

Obama’s nominee to head the SEC, Mary Jo White, is just another gatekeeper appointed to make sure no one ever goes after the Wall Street crime syndicate.  As I have written about many times in the past, Obama does not…

The former head of Lehman Brothers has insisted it was “not a bankrupt company” at the time of its collapse in 2008.

In one of his first public appearances since the firm’s demise – where it filed for the largest bankruptcy in US history – Dick Fuld claimed that the US Federal Reserve could have saved Lehman Brothers.

The 69-year-old said the bank was “mandated into bankruptcy”, and went on to blame the 2008 global financial crisis on a “perfect storm” of factors – including rising unemployment and higher interest rates, which made mortgages unaffordable for many homeowners.

Mr Fuld also defended his decision-making in the run up to the financial crisis, adding: “Hindsight is 20-20. There is no ‘if this’ or ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda’. You make a decision with the best information you think you have.”

However, the financier admitted that “not a day goes by when I don’t think…

Freddie Mac auctioned off 1,052 delinquent nonperforming loans serviced by Ocwen on May 21 as part of its Standard Pool Offerings.

The loans’ aggregate unpaid principal balance is $201 million. LSF9 Mortgage Holdings was the winning bidder.

The sale is expected to close in July, subject to the Federal Housing Finance Agency NPL sale requirements. It is Freddie’s third sale of deeply delinquent loans from its mortgage investment portfolio this year.

These loans have been delinquent for three years on average. Those auctioned were offered as a single pool of mortgage loans. Previously modified mortgages that later became delinquent comprise 29% of the aggregate pool balance.

Read on.

An investment banker jumped to his death from the window of his million-dollar apartment in the Financial District on Thursday, sources and authorities said.

The 29-year-old man plunged from the 24th floor of the luxury Ocean apartment building at 1 West St. at about 10:40 a.m. and landed on a guardrail near the northbound Battery Park Underpass, narrowly missing a black SUV.

The man’s body was mangled by the impact, leaving one of the vehicle’s passengers horrified, witnesses said.

“I went outside, and the woman in the car was screaming, ‘I didn’t know where he came from!’ ” said Hans Peler, 48, a manager at the building’s parking garage.

“It happened right in front of our guy who waves cars in with the flag. He was so shaken up, I told him to go home.”

Read on.

Assistant Attorney General, Leslie Caldwell, Speaking at Press Conference May 20, 2015

When the U.S. Department of Justice held its press conference on Wednesday to announce that five mega banks were each pleading guilty to a felony charge, paying big fines and being put on probation for three years, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Leslie Caldwell specifically took a battering ram to the reputation of Swiss bank, UBS.

Four banks — Citicorp, a unit of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays — pleaded guilty to an antitrust charge of conspiring to rig foreign currency trading while UBS pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud for its earlier involvement in rigging the interest rate benchmark, Libor.

In explaining why the Justice Department was ripping up the non-prosecution agreement it had negotiated with UBS in December 2012 over its involvement in the Libor fraud and now charging…

Not in the U.S.!

LONDON — Banks have paid billions. Regulators and prosecutors have extracted guilty pleas from financial institutions. Dozens of employees have been fired, and at least one chief executive has lost his job.

Now, on Tuesday, the first trader in the sprawling, half-decade-old investigation into the rigging of global benchmark interest rates will go on trial in Southwark Crown Court.

The British authorities have charged Tom Hayes, a 35-year-old former trader from Citigroup and UBS with eight counts of conspiracy to commit fraud. Mr. Hayes’s indictment claims that he was a ringleader among more than a dozen traders engaged in what the authorities say was a brazen attempt to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, a reference rate used to set various others, including those for student loans and mortgages.

Mr. Hayes has pleaded not guilty to all eight charges. His lawyer…

Go Elizabeth!!!

NEW YORK (Reuters) – US Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for U.S. Department of Labor hearings on whether banks accused of rigging foreign exchange markets should be allowed to manage retirement accounts, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

“When banks plead guilty to a crime, federal agencies must do more than look the other way,” Warren told the Financial Times. “The SEC has already granted waivers to each of these banks without any detailed explanation, but it is not too late for the Department of Labor to hold a public hearing before it decides that such brazen lawbreakers can be trusted managing workers’ retirement accounts.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-is-calling-for-public-hearings-on-banks-2015-5#ixzz3b7y536d9

After years of criticizing regulators for lax enforcement of securities law, Elizabeth Warren finally has an outspoken ally on the inside pushing for a crackdown on Wall Street offenders.

Kara Stein, the junior Democrat on the Securities and Exchange Commission, has quickly become one of its more ruthless enforcers, making trouble for Wall Street, and aligning herself with Warren’s views as part of a powerful regulator that polices the financial industry.

Stein has opposed giving free passes, or waivers, to badly behaving financial companies so that they can keep doing certain types of business as if nothing happened. Before she started dissenting, the waiver approval was often a routine formality at the SEC.

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Though she may not have the Massachusetts senator’s star power or political ambition, Stein has rattled financial companies, several banking lobbyists said.

“If you have a motion for a waiver pending before the SEC, Stein is…