Please watch the entire clip and listen to all the current events captured. I wish I had a tip earlier on this episode to post up but this is the best I could do.

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I’ve always said if walls could talk in these secretive rooms, look no further than Gretchen to shut it down with a story.

NYT-

A FRESH account emerged last week about the magnitude of financial aid that the Federal Reserve bestowed on big banks during the 2008-09 credit crisis. The report came from Bloomberg News, which had to mount a lengthy legal fight to wrest documents from the Fed that detailed its rescue efforts.

It is dispiriting, of course, that we are still learning about the billions provided to various financial firms during the crisis. Another sad element to this mess is that getting the truth requires the legal firepower of an organization as rich as Bloomberg.

[NEW YORK TIMES]

Judge Rakoff just keeps wowing us, day after day!

Sure he will do all in his power to squirm out of this one.

REUTERS-

Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein may be asked to testify in a market regulator’s insider-trading case against a former director of the Wall Street bank, a judge ruled.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Rajat Gupta, a former board member at Goldman and Procter & Gamble, of giving inside tips about the two companies to his friend Raj Rajaratnam in 2008 and 2009.

[REUTERS]

I’m sure this is only a “tip” of this iceberg!

Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge- fund managers and other Wall Street executives — at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006. In addition to Eton Park founder Eric Mindich, they included such boldface names as Lone Pine Capital LLC founder Stephen Mandel, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.

Business Week-

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Now, amid tumbling home prices and near-record foreclosures, attention was focused on a new source of contagion: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and other debt outstanding.

[BUSINESS WEEK]

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

U.S. SECURITIES COMMISSION,
AND
EXCHANGE
Plaintiff,

v-

CITIGROUP GLOBAL MARKETS INC.,
Defendant.
————-

Scribd

Get all these cases away from the regulators reach and into the hands of the people.

One by one they all will go down.

Seek the Truth.

 AP-

A federal judge in New York has struck down a $285 million settlement that Citigroup reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission, citing a need for truth about the financial markets.

Judge Jed Rakoff rejected the settlement Monday. The deal would have imposed penalties on Citigroup even as it allowed the company to deny allegations that it misled investors on a complex mortgage investment. The SEC has accused the bank of betting against the investment in 2007 and making $160 million, while investors lost millions.

The judge wrote that there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth about the financial markets. He set a July 16 trial date for the case.

[ASSOCIATED PRESS]

Rolling Stone-

Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.

  [ROLLING STONE]

Something strange is going on here and it looks like a complete set up… Don’t ask me why it just seems like risky business.

Wanna Bet?

The M Report-

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has a buyer for $15 billion in mortgage servicing rights from the financial institution, with the announcement that Ocwen Financial Corp. would purchase the bank’s MSRs for a rumored $950 million. Ocwen’s acquisition follows the company’s decision to raise $375 million in new equity through offering 25 million shares of public common stock.

The equity transaction is set to close on November 16, prior to the finalization of the MSR deal with JPMorgan, and Ocwen’s public common stock will be priced at $13 per unit. The company has previously stated that it intended to use proceeds from the sale to purchase JPMorgan’s MSRs, and that acquisition will close on January 1, 2012.

[THE M REPORT]

Absolutely do not miss this piece from Abigail Field – So head over and please absorb the information.

Abigail C. Field-

If you want to cut through some of the nonsense the banks have managed to sell as information about the housing situation, robosigning, mortgage modifications, check out this very accessible interview of attorney Talcott Franklin by Martin Andelman.

Tal represents the majority of investors hosed once by Wall Streeers selling AAA-rated mortgage backed junk, and constantly being hosed again by the big bank servicers of those mortgages. Interestingly, his perspective sounds very much like homeowners’. Yes, a couple of times it gets a little too legalistic, but only for about 5 minutes of the slightly longer than the hour chat—when you hit the overview of the contracts structuring securitization, or any other topic that is more in the weeds than you want to go, take a deep breath and keep going. Most of the interview is in a rhythm and a language that creates clarity I’ve not seen or heard elsewhere.

[REALITY CHECK]

Please find some time today or over the weekend to listen to this excellent podcast of Martin Andelman’s interview with Attorney Talcott Franklin, who represents more than half of all the investors in mortgage-backed securities on the planet.  Tal’s the co-author of the “Mortgage and Asset-backed Securities Litigation Handbook,” and he’s a very experienced and highly sophisticated litigator. You will learn a whole lot and many thanks to Martin for this super interview.

Please head over to Mandelman Matters for the full article.

The podcast is available in two versions… MP4 and MP3.  The MP4 version includes a couple of slides that show diagrams of the basic securitization process, but the MP4 format may not play on some computers.  The MP3 version is audio only, and should play on most any computer.  Most listeners will have no trouble following along either way.

So, turn up the volume on your speakers, and click the MP4 or MP3 version.  I loved recoding this podcast.  If you want to know more about the foreclosure crisis, you’re about to learn from an expert on the other side of the foreclosures, the investor side… it doesn’t get any better than this!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE ENHANCED MP4 VERSION

… INCLUDES SLIDES ON SECURITIZATION

 OR

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE MP3 VERSION

Mandelman out.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION,

Plaintiff

-against-

RAJAT K. GUPTA and
RAJ RAJARATNAM,

Defendants.

Scribd

Hackers today released personal information of release data of Former Treasury Secretary and Senior Advisor at Citigroup Robert Rubin.

The document titled “DOX OF THE RUBIN FAMILY”, posted to the Pastebin Web site, includes the Rubin’s recent addresses, contributions, details of Goldman Sachs he has been involved in, as well as registration information for businesses etc.

Almost a week ago, “Quelle Surprise! “J.P. Morgan Chase “donates” $4.6 Million to NYPD” was posted up and went madly viral, as it turns out they aren’t alone.

Salon has just reported that

As it turns out, JPMorgan is not the only financial institution that has been generous to the police foundation. In the 2009-10 year, Goldman Sachs, Barclays Capital, investment bank Jeffries and Co., investor Carl Icahn, and investment firm The Renco Group each gave over $100,000 to the foundation, putting them in the top-tier of donors, according to the foundation’s website. Bank of America also gave over $75,000 that year. (Another $100,000+ donor was Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)

Keep in mind that’s just a single year’s worth of donations. As a private non-profit, the New York City Police Foundation does not have to release detailed donor information, so we don’t know of the the full scope of Wall Street money flowing into the NYPD.

Sound Off!

Congratulations.

I can only hear the whispers down in halls of wall street. If he continues as he has… Wall Street better worry. The shell games are moving closer and closer to shutting down permanently.

WSJ-

Two weeks after moving into a skyscraper near Wall Street to start assembling a muscular new agency overseeing banks and insurers in New York, Benjamin M. Lawsky got a surprise during an introductory meeting with a midlevel manager: His power was even broader than he thought.

The 41-year-old former federal prosecutor, who spent the last four years as Andrew Cuomo’s confidant and adviser in the New York attorney general’s office, learned that he had greater latitude to pursue criminal fraud cases than he initially knew.

As the head of the New York State Department of Financial Services …

[WALL STREET JOURNAL]