By Sydney Sullivan

Without a doubt every foreclosure judge and any judge who has ruled in favor of the banks over duped homeowners should be required to watch The Wolf of Wall Street – not once but several times.

Every time the Courts consider ruling in favor of these decadent Wall Street creatures – they should be shoved into a room with a wide flat screen TV, handed a box of popcorn and ice cold Coca Cola and locked in there for 180 minutes – so they can see exactly what they are sustaining by ruling in favor of the banks.

A more general point is in order.  Atlanta is the culmination of destructive national trends and failing to mention Houston in the story was unfortunate.  First, the “reinventing government” movement decided the public sector was bad and the private sector was magnificent and said that the public sector should adopt private sector approaches including quite specifically “performance pay” based on quantitative measures.  This brought to the public sector the perverse incentives that were ruining the private sector and about to bring on Enron-era fraud epidemic and then the most recent three fraud epidemics.  Second, we were assured by proponents of the change that a concern for “reputation” would trump any perverse incentives.  What the proponents failed to see, of course, was that in both the private and public sectors the way to create a superb reputation was to report inflated data.  Reputation, instead of the “trump” ensuring good conduct, was…

The mortgage chicanery spotlight is once again focused on Wells Fargo & Co. and Ocwen Financial Corp. A federal False Claims Act whistleblower complaint unsealed yesterday claims that Ocwen, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer, was double dipping and keeping monies that should have been paid to Fannie Mae.

Ocwen Financial Corp. Facing Mortgage Servicer Fraud Case
Ocwen Financial Corp. is a leading mortgage servicer that services an estimated 1 million mortgages, collecting payments of behalf of banks and other entities. Mortgage servicers have taken over this function for many of the major banks and litigation asserting misconduct within the mortgage servicer industry abounds.

According to filers, Mr. and Mrs. Schiano, who filed the False Claims Act complaint in September in the Southern District of New York, Ocwen and Wells Fargo pocketed the payoff money derived from the Schianos refinancing their home mortgage and also reported a default to U.S. government…

Law360, Washington (March 31, 2015, 7:19 PM ET) — Two homeowners have told a New York federal court that Wells Fargo & Co. and Ocwen Financial Corp. illegally collected payments on mortgages they fraudulently declared in default, according to a False Claims Act suit made available Tuesday.
Originally filed under seal in September 2014, plaintiffs Mr. and Mrs. Schiano claim the companies diverted a payoff they had made for refinancing their home and told the loan’s owner, government sponsored entity Freddie Mac, that the pair had defaulted.

As a result, the suit claims, Freddie Mae only received 80 percent of the payoff of the first mortgage from its insurer, Genworth Financial, while Wells Fargo and Ocwen were able to secure a “double recovery” through the original payoff and subsequent refinancing.

“This ‘False Default’ scheme allowed Wells Fargo and Ocwen to obtain, and continue to obtain through…

Whether or not you believe that sky-is-falling narrative, Frank kept pushing for action on foreclosures, which by the end of 2008 threatened one in 10 homes in America. With the first tranche of TARP funds running out by the end of the year, Frank writes, “Paulson agreed to include homeowner relief in his upcoming request for a second tranche of TARP funding. But there was one condition: He would only do it if the President-elect asked him to.”

Frank goes on to explain that Obama rejected the request, saying “we have only one president at a time.” Frank writes, “my frustrated response was that he had overstated the number of presidents currently on duty,” which equally angered both the outgoing and incoming officeholders.

Obama’s unwillingness to take responsibility before holding full authority doesn’t match other decisions made at that time. We know from David Axelrod’s book that the Obama transition…

JP Morgan’s asset management division is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department, according to a Bloomberg report.

From the looks of it, federal investigators have spent years probing the division, looking for breaches of fiduciary duty by staff and inconsistent compensation disclosure, according to the report.

JP Morgan declined comment when contacted by Business Insider.

via JP Morgan asset management under investigation from federal agencies – Business Insider.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has a blunt message for the big Wall Street banksthat may withhold campaign donations to Senate Democrats in hopes of quieting her calls to break up the banks.

“It will not work,” Warren said in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post.

Warren has been a vocal advocate for reining in big banks that she says wield too much power in Washington after their recklessness triggered the 2008 financial meltdown.

Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have discussed ways to soften Warren’s strong tone, Reuters reports, and representatives of some have raised the idea of cutting campaign donations to Democrats. Only Citigroup — a frequent target of Warren’s criticism — so far is publicly withholding money from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Cutting donations, Warren said, won’t end her demands.

“They want a showy way to tell Democrats across the country to…

How do you improve the culture of Wall Street and restore faith in finance? Personally punish the industry’s bad apples, according to two longtime observers.

“I think we need to personalize the penalties for those who are sinners. It’s got to hurt them individually,” Charles Ellis, a prominent investment consultant and author, said at an event this week in New York on improving the financial industry.

Ellis, who founded institutional advisor Greenwich Associates, said that new laws after the financial crisis didn’t go far enough because companies—usually via public stock owners—still pay penalties for misbehavior, not people.

“We’ve got to get past the idea of sending it against shareholders and writing it off the balance sheet,” Ellis said.

John Rogers, former CEO of the CFA Institute and previously a topInvesco executive, agreed.

“Making senior management personally responsible resonates with me. That’s true for actors down inside the banks too…