And Hillary Clinton’s final day as Secretary of State was February 1, 2013. From Zerohedge,the following list is of her 92 private speeches raking in $21.7 million in just the past three years.

RICHMOND (KCBS) – Richmond city leaders were moving ahead with a plan to head off the foreclosure crisis, a plan that is not without controversy.

The city has offered to buy more than 600 underwater mortgages at below the homes’ current value.

“If they are unwilling to negotiate a sale of the loans, which we want them to do, then we will consider using eminent domain as another option topurchase these loans at fair market value,” said Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin.

Read on.

TRENTON – Legislation died this month that would have let superstorm Sandy-impacted homeowners delay foreclosures and put off mortgage payments until 2019.

Gov. Chris Christie conditionally vetoed the proposal on the last day of the now-expired legislative session, and lawmakers didn’t take up his recommended changes. That means the idea must start the legislative process from the beginning if it is to become law.

People whose homes are being repaired or elevated and have been juggling rent payments and mortgage payments would have been able to apply to postpone mortgage payments for up to three years. Any foreclosure proceedings would have been delayed for three years, as well.

Christie’s conditional veto would have had judges, rather than the state Department of Community Affairs, decide whether to include a mortgage in the program. That’s how the idea was structured when it was originally advancing, but the details were changed in the…

Marketwatch:

1. My favorite cartoon this week sums up this problem nicely:

2. Here’s one for U.S. investors preparing for the expected weekend blizzard:

Criticism of US government leniency on Wall Street legal transgressions is now being covered widely – even by trade publications such as the National Mortgage Professional Magazine. On January 18, the trade publication ran an article about Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) condemning the most recent US government settlement with a “too-big-to-fail” financial firm, in this case Goldman Sachs, for illegal abuse of the mortgage market:

Sen. Warren used her Facebook page to denounce the agreement, noting that the settlement sum was “barely a fraction of the billions investors lost” while arguing that Goldman Sachs was not properly penalized for its actions.

“That’s not justice – it’s a white flag of surrender,” she wrote. “It’s time to end this farce. These companies think they’re above the law – and too many government officials go along with them. A first step would be to pass the bipartisan Truth in Settlements Act to…

Chinese officials predict economic turmoil for the global economy.  State Councillor Yang Jiechi told G-20 representatives in Beijing that recent volatility and “constant changes and intense transformations” will lead to unprecedented challenges to the world.  “It is not possible to completely discard the possibility that an economic crisis could once again take place, and the problem should not be neglected,” he said in the meeting, adding “preventing or reducing negative effects from countries’ domestic policy measures is a pressing task.”

A China Problem?

A growing number of analysts are fearful that a new economic downturn may gin, not because of a drag from the United States, but from disappointment in China. Prior to Yang’s comments, data from China’s 2015 two-way trade report showed that the country’s trade had fallen 8 percent on a year-over-year basis to $3.96 trillion, far below the 6 percent growth that the government had hoped for.

Sunday’s Presidential Democratic Debate on the issue of Wall Street was pretty intense by the three candidates.

CNN:

To do it, Clinton had to go back more than 15 years, and shine a light on a decision that her husband, by his own admission, would come to regret.

“You’re the only one on this stage that voted to deregulate the financial market in 2000,” Clinton said, making reference to his support for former President Bill Clinton’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

The law effectively gave bankers, or “sophisticated traders,” free rein from pre-existing oversight mechanisms when they wanted to make deals on the sidelines of the major stock exchanges, in “over-the-counter” trading.

Clinton himself would later cop to having made a serious mistake in signing…

Wall Street and Hollywood have at last one thing in common: a lack prominent roles for women.

And when the two industries get together, like in “Wall Street,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” women are more likely to be naked in a bubble bath or portrayed as the weepy wife than as an investment banker putting together a deal.

Until now.

“Equity,” — the first project of Hollywood insiders Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas — is set to debut at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 26.

It is the first female-driven Wall Street film, the two actors, who last year formed Broad Street Pictures, claim.

The film stars Anna Gunn from “Breaking Bad” as Naomi Bishop, a 40s-ish investment banker who, while fighting to get a promotion leads a controversial tech IPO.

It’s being billed as the first post-financial crisis Wall Street film —…

It is up to the voters to decide which Presidential candidate has a better plan to go over Wall Street execs and end the commercial banks from engaging in the investment business and not simply have the same repeated bank offenders to continue to pay a fine and sign a non-prosecution agreement in order to avoid jail time.

USUncut:

According to Hillary Clinton, if you were a victim of the foreclosure crisis, it was probably your fault.

The only problem with that argument is that it’s not even close to factually correct.

Clinton in 2007: Homeowners “should have known they were getting in over their heads”

When Clinton ran for president during her second term as New York’s U.S. Senator, she gave a tepid speech at the NASDAQ headquarters on December 5, 2007 — before the financial crisis reached a boiling point — about reforming Wall Street’s housing loan practices, largely…

Gawker:

Newly released data for 2015 shows that this message is filtering down to you, the average idiot (and the average idiot pension funds and whatnot that have all your retirement money). From the Wall Street Journal: “Clients yanked $207.3 billion in 2015 from U.S.-based mutual funds that hand pick their positions while pouring $413.8 billion into funds that mimic broad indexes for a fraction of the cost, according to new data from research firm MorningstarInc… The movement of money in 2015 was the first net outflow from traditional money managers since the 2008 financial crisis and the largest-ever from actively managed U.S. stock funds.”

If the average actively managed mutual fund charges something like 1.5% a year in fees, that means that last year this industry lost more than $3 billion of our money that would have gone into their pockets, and then into prime Manhattan…