HUFFPO-

WASHINGTON — Two of the nation’s largest mortgage firms illegally foreclosed on the homes of “almost 50″ active-duty military service members, according to a Thursday report by the Government Accountability Office.

The report does not identify the two mortgage companies. GAO investigators attributed the finding to federal bank regulators, who recently completed a three-month probe into allegations of improper foreclosures carried out by the nation’s 14 largest home loan servicers.

We have to question if this has anything to do with the  White House Considering Sarah Raskin or Jennifer Granholm To Head Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

From NY Times DealBook

Jamie Dimon, it turns out, has a soft spot for the government’s new consumer financial bureau.

“We need to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that is effective for both consumers and banks,” Mr. Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in his April 4 letter to shareholders.

Yes, this is the same Mr. Dimon who last month complained that various new rules facing Wall Street “would damage America.” And it is the same JPMorgan that (unsuccessfully) lobbied lawmakers to kill plans for an independent consumer financial agency.

(Reuters) – The White House is considering Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Raskin and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to head a new agency charged with protecting consumers of financial products, a source aware of the process said on Tuesday.

The consumer protection body will have broad powers to rein in abuses in the financial industry and was created in response to the aggressive and sometimes predatory lending practices that contributed to one of the worst financial crises in U.S. history in 2007-2009.

However its creation has been tarnished by a months-old logjam over who should head the agency. Law professor Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken consumer advocate and harsh critic of industry practices who had championed the bureau’s establishment, had been a leading candidate to run it but was seen as too confrontational to industry to overcome objections from Senate Republicans.

From New York Times

That Aug. 20, Commerzbank of Germany borrowed $350 million at the Fed’s discount window. Two days later, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and the Wachovia Corporation each received $500 million. As collateral for all these loans, the banks put up a total of $213 billion in asset-backed securities, commercial loans and residential mortgages, including second liens.

Thus began the bank run that set off the financial crisis of 2008. But unlike other bank runs, this one was invisible to most Americans.

[...]

Federal Reserve Lent To Gaddafi-Owned Bank, European Firms After Fighting Disclosure For 3 Years

From HuffPost’s Shahien Nasiripour

At a time when credit markets shunned even the most worthy borrowers, foreign banks, including one partly-owned by Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, fled to the Federal Reserve and borrowed at rock-bottom interest rates, Fed documents released Thursday show.

During the height of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, as investors and firms hoarded cash, the Fed reduced its rates to kickstart lending in the broader economy. Arab Banking Corp., a $28 billion lender now 59 percent-owned by Libya’s central bank, borrowed at least $3.2 billion during this time. The Fed charged it an interest rate ranging from 2.25 percent to as low as 1.25 percent on those borrowings, regular Fed data show.

From HuffingtonPost:

For the 12 months ended Dec. 31, Stumpf was awarded a salary of $3.24 million, a performance-based stock bonus of $11 million, and a cash bonus of $3.3 million, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. That compares to a salary of $5.6 million, a stock award of $13.08 million, and zero cash bonus in 2009.

Stumpf’s total compensation of $18.7 million in 2009 made him among the nation’s highest-paid bank CEOs.

Stumpf’s perks totaled $28,531 and included matching contributions to his retirement plan, home security system expenses, a car and a driver.

[Make sure you catch the audio below]

WASHINGTON — A Wall Street Journal editorial writer who has been closely involved with the paper’s recent attacks on Elizabeth Warren is a former Goldman Sachs banker. The same editorial writer, Mary Kissel, is readying another piece critical of Warren and the new consumer agency, according to a source familiar with the coming article.

Like most major newspapers, the Journal does not disclose the authors of its editorials. Kissel recently appeared on the John Batchelor radio show as a representative of the Journal‘s editorial board do discuss Warren, and repeated the main arguments used in the editorials.

Listen to the Audio:

HSBC North America Holdings, the nation’s ninth-largest bank by assets, warned investors Monday of impending fines after receiving notice from federal bank regulators admonishing the lender for improper foreclosure practices.

The bank is the latest in a string of large financial companies that have used recent securities filings to prep investors for fines and a significant increase in costs associated with processing mortgages and repossessing homes, after being cited by regulators for deficient and sometimes illegal operations. On Friday, Ally Financial, Wells Fargo & Co., and SunTrust Banks — three of the nation’s 10 largest handlers of home mortgages — said in regulatory documents that they expect to be sanctioned by the U.S. government for their foreclosure practices.

The penalties follow months-long criminal and civil probes by federal and state regulators into lenders’ mortgage practices. Officials said they found significant shortcomings and violations of various state laws. A “small number” of foreclosures should not have occurred, John Walsh, the interim head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal regulator of national banks, told a Senate committee earlier this month after his agency surveyed less than 3,000 out of millions of loan files.

Continue reading… HuffingtonPost

Mark Madoff Suicide: Bernie Madoff’s Son Found Hanged In NYC Apartment

NEW YORK — One of Bernard Madoff’s sons was found dead of an apparent suicide Saturday on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, according to a law enforcement official.

Mark Madoff, 46, was found hanged in his apartment in Manhattan’s fashionable SoHo section, according to the official. A family member notified police around 7:30 a.m.

The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Mark Madoff and his brother, Andrew, were under investigation but hadn’t faced any criminal charges in the massive Ponzi scheme that led to their father’s jailing.

William K. Black and L. Randall Wray

Posted: November 5, 2010 01:23 PM

This is the second installment of a two-part series. Read the first here.

We have explained in prior posts and interviews that there are two foreclosure-related crises. Our first two-part post called on the U.S. to begin “foreclosing on the foreclosure fraudsters.” We concentrated on how the underlying epidemic of mortgage fraud by lenders inevitably produced endemic foreclosure fraud. We wrote to urge government policymakers to get Bank of America and other lenders and servicers to clean up the massive fraud. We obviously cannot on rely solely on Bank of America assessing its own culpability.

Note also that while we have supported a moratorium on foreclosures, this is only to stop the foreclosure frauds — the illegal seizure of homes by fraudulent means. We do not suppose that financial institutions can afford to maintain toxic assets on their books. The experience of the thrift crisis of the 1980s demonstrates the inherent problems created by forbearance in the case of institutions that are run as control frauds. All of the incentives of a control fraud bank are worsened with forbearance. Our posts on the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law (which mandates that the regulators place insolvent banks in receivership) have focused on the banks’ failure to foreclose as a deliberate strategy to avoid recognizing their massive losses in order to escape receivership and to allow their managers to further loot the banks through huge bonuses based on fictional income (which ignores real losses). We have previously noted the massive rise in the “shadow inventory” of loans that have received no payments for years, yet have not led to foreclosure:

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists
- to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”
- BARACK OBAMA, speech, Aug. 28, 2006

Zach Carter

Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Posted: September 12, 2010 02:52 PM

The Washington Post has published a very silly op-ed by Chrystia Freeland accusing President Barack Obama of unfairly “demonizing” Wall Street. Freeland wants to see Obama tone down his rhetoric and play nice with executives in pursuit of a harmonious economic recovery. The trouble is, Obama hasn’t actually deployed harsh words against Wall Street. What’s more, in order to avoid being characterized as “anti-business,” the Obama administration has refused to mete out serious punishment for outright financial fraud. Complaining about nouns and adjectives is a little ridiculous when handcuffs and prison sentences are in order.

Freeland is a long-time business editor at Reuters and the Financial Times, and the story she spins about the financial crisis comes across as very reasonable. It’s also completely inaccurate. Here’s the key line:

“Stricter regulation of financial services is necessary not because American bankers were bad, but because the rules governing them were.”

Bank regulations were lousy, of course. But Wall Street spent decades lobbying hard for those rules, and screamed bloody murder when Obama had the audacity to tweak them. More importantly, the financial crisis was not only the result of bad rules. It was the result of bad rules and rampant, straightforward fraud, something a seasoned business editor like Freeland ought to know. Seeking economic harmony with criminals seems like a pretty poor foundation for an economic recovery.

The FBI was warning about an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud as early as 2004. Mortgage fraud is typically perpetrated by lenders, not borrowers — 80 percent of the time, according to the FBI. Banks made a lot of quick bucks over the past decade by illegally conning borrowers. Then bankers who knew these loans were fraudulent still packaged them into securities and sold them to investors without disclosing that fraud. They lied to their own shareholders about how many bad loans were on their books, and lied to them about the bonuses that were derived from the entire scheme. When you do these things, you are stealing lots of money from innocent people, and you are, in fact, behaving badly (to put it mildly).

The fraud allegations that have emerged over the past year are not restricted to a few bad apples at shady companies– they involve some of the largest players in global finance. Washington Mutual executives knew their company was issuing fraudulent loans, and securitized them anyway without stopping the influx of fraud in the lending pipeline. Wachovia is settling charges that it illegally laundered $380 billion in drug money in order to maintain access to liquidity. Barclays is accused of illegally laundering money from Iran, Sudan and other nations, jumping through elaborate technical hoops to conceal the source of their funds. Goldman Sachs set up its own clients to fail and bragged about their “shitty deals.” Citibank executives deceived their shareholders about the extent of their subprime mortgage holdings. Bank of America executives concealed heavy losses from the Merrill Lynch merger, and then lied to their shareholders about the massive bonuses they were paying out. IndyMac Bank and at least five other banks cooked their books by backdating capital injections.

Continue reading…..The  Huffington Post

Lets not act surprise…by now we all know ANYTHING the US GOVERNMENT touches turns to ___________!

Because these lying banksters get away with ________________! We should foreclose on their _____________and kick them to the curb! Get your stress out and fill in the blank!

WE are not fools and we do not believe one thing they say!

Shahien Nasiripour

Potentially “thousands” of troubled homeowners were denied opportunities to lower their monthly mortgage payments under the Obama administration’s signature foreclosure-prevention plan due to servicer errors and inadequate oversight by the Treasury Department, a government audit has found.

Mortgage servicers failed to comply with basic guidelines, used different criteria to evaluate borrowers, recorded error rates up to six times their established thresholds, and couldn’t provide evidence that potentially eligible homeowners had been solicited for the administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program, also known as HAMP.

The errors are partly due to Treasury’s failure to issue specific guidelines for servicers to follow, and the administration’s lack of quality-control standards. Because servicers aren’t required to adhere to the same set of standards, there’s a risk that firms aren’t identifying practices “that may lead to inequitable treatment of borrowers or harm taxpayers through greater potential for fraud or waste,” according to a Thursday report by the Government Accountability Office.

But even if servicers were fraudulently modifying loans or improperly denying modifications to distressed homeowners, Treasury “has yet to establish specific consequences or penalties for noncompliance,” the GAO notes. The department has yet to fine any servicers for noncompliance, according to the report.

Already, “Treasury specifically allows some differences in how servicers evaluate borrowers… that could result in inconsistent outcomes for borrowers,” the report found.

The end result could be the “inequitable treatment” of struggling homeowners who were looking to an administration for help during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. HAMP is the centerpiece of the administration’s $75 billion effort to stem the rising tide of foreclosures.

“I find it saddening and frustrating that none of these problems, which we among other people identified to Treasury over a year ago, have been meaningfully addressed,” said Diane E. Thompson, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center. “And as a result, we lost a major opportunity to stem the foreclosure crisis.”

Continue reading….here

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON The Wall Street Journal

Published: June 25, 2010

OUR nation’s Congressional machinery was humming last week as legislators reconciled the differences between the labyrinthine financial reforms proposed by the Senate and the House and emerged early Friday morning with a voluminous new law in hand. They christened it the Dodd-Frank bill, after the heads of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees who drove the process toward the finish line.