News Topic: Too Big to Fail (TBTF)

I'm generally skeptical about corporate charitable donations.  My sense is that they are primarily a transfer of value from shareholders to managers, rather than a value-enhancing investment in goodwill.  So on the DC Metro, what did I see today, but ... Read full article

There's been mounting pressure on the acting head of the FHFA, Ed DeMarco to order Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to undertake principal reductions. ... Read full article

Lost in the attention to the state-federal mortgage servicing settlement is the other major servicing fraud settlement:  the $8.5B deal between BONY as trustee for various MBS trusts and Countrywide (Bank of America) over putback claims for securitization ... Read full article

Last October, I wrote a post entitled "Robosigning 2.0" that discussed some job ads for outsourced OCC foreclosure reviews.  I predicted based on the job ad qualifications that the foreclosure reviews would be nothing other than a whitewash. ... Read full article

Here's a bombshell : the San Francisco City Assessor commissioned a serious audit of foreclosure documentation filed in the past few years. The audit examined 400 foreclosures.  It found problems with 85% of them, often multiple problems. ... Read full article

Steve's title was subtle, so in case anyone missed it, here are the materials on Public Citizen's website . The petition calls on the Federal Reserve and the Financial Stability Oversight Commission to use their authority under Dodd-Frank to ... Read full article

Adam Davidson wrote up an interesting apologia for Wall Street in the NY Times last week, which I think is ultimately a call for better regulation, rather than bank-hating. ... Read full article

I had the privilege today of hearing Federal Reserve Board Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin deliver the keynote address to the Section on Financial Institutions at the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting.  Governor Bloom Raskin's topic: ... Read full article

There's been a lot of media coverage of the recent ruling of the NY Supreme Court (that's the trial court, not the final Court of Appeals) in MBIA v. Countrywide, a suit by the monoline bond insurer against Countrywide for fraud, negligent ... Read full article

The last 24 hours have witnessed some remarkable historical revisionism on financial regulation coming out of the GOP. First, we had one of the most bizarre and simply untrue attack ads I've ever seen, courtesy of Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS ... Read full article

What would you do if you were running an insolvent company? The smart thing is to bet big:  go with a high-risk/high-return strategy.  If the gamble pays off, you're solvent, and if not, well, you're already insolvent.  You're playing with ... Read full article

The United States has no housing policy. And there's none on the horizon either. That's a scary thing, given the centrality of housing to domestic economic woes.   Once upon a time, the US had a housing policy. It was focused on increasing ... Read full article

The New York Times came out with a strong editorial urging state AGs and the Administration not to rush into the proposed multi-state settlement deal. I think it's worthwhile reviewing what we know about the deal and the arguments for and against it. ... Read full article

The NY Times had some details today about the multi-state attorney general mortgage servicing settlement in the works. It looks every bit as awful as one might have feared. Here's the criticial take-away:  this is bupkis. It gives meaningless relief ... Read full article

There is $700 billion in negative equity in the US. That is the critical figure. Any housing plan that doesn’t take a serious bite out of that $700 billion isn’t worth discussing. It’s just window dressing. And that’s exactly what the latest iteration of ... Read full article

A simple google search for "foreclosure file reviewer" turns up a bunch of interesting things, including who is searching, what Level 2 means (as opposed to Level 1 or Level 3) and the involvement of Promontory, a financial services consulting ... Read full article

Do you have what it takes to be a Mortgage Foreclosure File Reviewer Level 2?  An intrepid researcher forwarded to me a job ad for a mortgage foreclosure reviewer  who will be reviewing bank foreclosures per the OCC/Fed servicing fraud consent orders. ... Read full article

I happened to walk by Zuccoti Park in Manhattan yesterday, where the Occupy Wall Street protest is centered. I picked up a few pieces of protester literature. I can't say that I was in any way comprehensive in my collection. Some of the literature ... Read full article