The U.S. government let a high-profile mortgage case against Bank of America quietly fizzle out this week.

The Department of Justice had until Monday to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up its “Hustle” lawsuit against the Charlotte-based bank. In May, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed findings against the bank in the 2012 case, the first civil fraud suit brought by the Justice Department over home loans sold to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not comment on the decision to let Monday’s deadline pass. A Bank of America spokesman also declined to comment.

Hold off on the balloons and cake for Jamie. He’s off of Trump’s list.

It’s probably safe to say that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon won’t be the treasury secretary after all.

Wall Street has been abuzz for the past two weeks with speculation that the 60-year-old head of the largest U.S. bank by assets would run the Treasury Department for President-elect Donald Trump. CNBC reported on Nov. 10 that advisers close to Trump were suggesting Dimon for the vital Cabinet role.

However, a source speaking to NBC News said a Dimon appointment is not going to happen.

In fact, Trump “doesn’t respect” Dimon, the source said, adding that the bank chief “was never under consideration” for the appointment and was not on “any Trump-approved list.”

That may be just as well considering that the sources who initially spoke to CNBC had indicated Dimon wasn’t interested anyway.

Read on.

The U.S. government should go after payouts to former Wells Fargo & Co (>> Wells Fargo & Co) executives involved in a scandal over unauthorized accounts now that a federal regulator has said it has the power to do so, lawmakers said on Monday.

The San Francisco-based bank reached a $190 million settlement with federal regulators after admitting employees opened as many as 2 million accounts without customer consent.

That September deal allowed Wells Fargo to make “golden parachute” payments to departing executives. But on Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees many federal banks, voided those terms.

On Monday, two leading Democratic lawmakers urged the OCC to move ahead and revoke compensation to relevant executives.

“Bank executives shouldn’t get golden parachutes while employees making $12 an hour get shown the door,” U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio told Reuters in a statement.

Read on.

From Reuters:

Deutsche Bank is looking to cut its loan securitization business further starting with repackaged U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the matter said, as the lender braces for a large fine in the United States for alleged mis-selling of such debt.

A final decision about this core business is set to come early next year, the people said, and securitization cutbacks could become a central part of an expected strategic overhaul at the bank, once U.S. authorities have settled on a penalty.

“We have already shrunk the business over the last two to three years,” a person with direct knowledge of the bank’s plans said. “It could shrink a lot more. Not only sales and trading, but also in origination.”

As expected, the title insurers are now walking back their prior wave of title policies where the property is (a) faulty at inception and (b) acquired by illegal use of nonjudicial process. The problem is simple: if the methods or means of foreclosure was illegal, States like Hawaii say the sale is void and title is restored to the homeowner.

“Investors” who buy property at foreclosure auctions are making claims arising out of their attempts to resell property acquired at auction. The title is either clouded or nonexistent leaving them to claim compensation from the title insurer who issued the title policy.

It all started when according to very high placed sources I have in the title insurance business, the decision was made that both the original title policy and the policy issued at foreclosure auction was probably bad. They attempted to include exceptions to coverage, essentially saying that the…

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.