Matt Taibbi is back at Rolling Stone – God Bless America!
Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talkingShe tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore. Continue reading
By FLOYD NORRIS
It’s no fun to be a banker these days. It is not just the increased regulation. It’s the lack of trust.
“At what point does this stop?” asked Gary Lynch, the former director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission who has gone on to jobs with many leading Wall Street firms and is now global general counsel at Bank of America.
He was referring to the escalation in penalties being levied on banks, culminating in the $13 billion JPMorgan Chase was forced to pay for a series of transgressions. Continue reading
ROLLING STONE – FEATURE:
Chase, Once Considered “The Good Bank,” Is About to Pay Another Massive Settlement
By MATT TAIBBI
POSTED: July 18, 12:20 PM ET
During the financial crisis, while Dr. Evil-ish Wall Street villains like Goldman and Lehman Brothers were getting all the bad press, pundits continually referred to J.P. Morgan Chase as the “good bank.” The myth of Chase as the finance sector’s one upstanding rock of rectitude reached its zenith in July of 2009 with an embarrassingly hagiographic piece in the New York Times entitled, “In Washington, One Bank Chief Still Holds Sway.” In that one, the paper breathlessly praised Jamie Dimon for emerging from “the disgrace of his industry” to become Barack Obama’s “favorite banker.”
It’s about time somebody recognized it. David Reiss and Brad Bordon posted a dynamic review of the most recent ‘slap down the banks’ cases of Saldivar and Erobobo and the potential impact on the [failed] REMIC tax shelters in REFinBlog.
David Reiss writes: “Brad Borden and I have warned that an unanticipated tax consequence of the sloppy mortgage origination practices that characterized the boom is that MBS pools may fail to qualify as REMICs. This would have massively negative tax consequences for MBS investors and should trigger lawsuits against the professionals who structured these transactions. Courts deciding upstream and downstream cases have not focused on this issue because it is typically not relevant to the dispute between the parties. Continue reading
While fishing for bank-related patents this gem surfaced and jumped into the net. At first it wasn’t apparent it was a keeper because the UETA issue has not been in the forefront of foreclosure defense. However, taking the time to dissect the document it became apparent that, as some of us have suspected, there is a mandatory methodology from the origination of the mortgage loan on a trip to the securitized trust that includes the EXPLICIT CONSENT of the obligor (homeowner).
Yup… It appears the road to securitization needs an electronic record that the “issuer” aka the “obligor” has explicitly consented to at the time of origination. Yeah, ya think maybe that was the real intention of MERS aka Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.? But it looks like it didn’t have all its ducks in a row. This is a lot to digest – but you need to know and understand this information in order to plead your case correctly before the courts. Continue reading
By Shelley Erickson, January 18, 2013
The contents in the synopsis of the Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse will bring you up to speed on how, why and what happened causing the recent crimes against the homeowners by the banks, S&P and our politicians that led us into the HAMP & MOD SCAM AND NOW SETTLEMENT SHAM. Continue reading
The banner NY Times headline was compelling, A Banker Speaks, With Regret By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 30, 2011 The NY Times begins:
“If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess. As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.
“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you… Continue reading
By David DeGraw
Continuing from Part I on DEADLY CLEAR:
You can read the suits filed against each individual bank here. For some more information read Bloomberg: BofA, JPMorgan Among 17 Banks Sued by U.S. for $196 Billion. Noticeably absent from the list of companies being sued is Wells Fargo.
And the suits just keep coming…
BofA sued over $1.75 billion Countrywide mortgage pool
Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) was sued by the trustee of a $1.75 billion mortgage pool, which seeks to force the bank to buy back the underlying Continue reading
By John-Michael Haines
For many Americans, saving money involves depositing part of our paycheck into a bank savings account. Sure, some people stash their cash under the mattress, but most of us are members of a large national bank that we trust to keep our money safe. Continue reading WASHINGTON— Uncle Sam wants you — to rent a house from Uncle Sam.
The Obama administration said on Wednesday that it was soliciting ideas on how to turn the federal government’s inventory of foreclosed houses into rental properties that could be managed by private enterprises or sold in bulk.
The goal, the administration said, is to stabilize neighborhoods where large supplies of empty, foreclosed properties have hurt property values. In addition, the plan is an effort to clear the nation’s balance sheet of real estate holdings that, because they have been difficult to sell individually, have hung over the housing market and stunted sales of existing homes and new construction. Continue reading
Deadly Clear 