First of all, the problems we found were extensive. Our reviews found significant weaknesses in foreclosure governance and document preparation: improper affidavits were submitted and documents were notarized improperly. Servicers devoted insufficient financial, staffing and managerial resources to foreclosure processing. Third party providers of foreclosure-related services, including outside law firms, were not adequately supervised, and, in a limited number of cases, servicers failed to ensure proper endorsement of promissory notes or mortgage documents.
Holder told the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing today that the department is reviewing the April report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat. Holder didn’t say which aspects of the report, which probed the causes of 2008 financial crisis, are under review
The White House isn’t saying much about whether Harvard law professor and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren will be named to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
But the head of a key banking industry group believes it will happen soon.
Camden Fine, president and chief executive of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said Monday that he sees a “better than even chance” that President Barack Obama will nominate Ms. Warren to lead the new bureau.
“We’re not happy” with the time it takes to give borrowers an answer, said Christine Larsen, head of operations for retail financial services at J.P. Morgan, who is responsible for implementing the consent orders. The bank is trying to speed response times by setting new customer-communication deadlines.
Regulatory agencies exist to protect the public, not the corporations they regulate. The head of the Office of Comptroller of the Currency doesn’t seem to understand that. But that’s not why John Walsh needs to resign.
The OCC was created to stabilize the economy, make it easier to conduct trade, and protect people’s savings. It didn’t do that. In fact, it ignored the warnings raised by others. But that’s not why John Walsh needs to resign.
In 2007, the report says, Deutsche Bank rushed to sell off mortgage-backed investments amid worries that the market for subprime loans was deteriorating.
“Keep your fingers crossed but I think we will price this just before the market falls off a cliff,” a Deutsche Bank manager wrote in February 2007 about a deal stocked with securities created from raw material produced by Ameriquest and other subprime lenders.
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.
Judging by last week’s performance, it sure looks as though the country’s top bank regulator is back to its old tricks.
Though, to be honest, calling the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency a “regulator” is almost laughable. The Environmental Protection Agency is a regulator. The O.C.C. is a coddler, a protector, an outright enabler of the institutions it oversees.
It may take at least two months to reach a final agreement, said the person, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. An accord remains out of reach because states want principal reductions for borrowers, which is more than banks agreed to in deals reached with U.S. regulators last week, said Allison Schoenthal, a lawyer at Hogan Lovells in New York.
“Principal reductions I don’t think are going to be agreed to by banks, and I don’t think the banks see a need for a penalty when, in their view, they haven’t done anything wrong,” said Schoenthal, who represents lenders and servicers and isn’t involved in the talks.
Take this home for example. It was originally sold for $289,000.
Prior to Final Judgment, property had two (2) assignments of mortgage for two entities same robo-signer for both via MERS.
At auction it was sold for a MAJOR discount at approx. 75% off. to Indymac via LPS Minnesota address in 2010. We know Indymac has been shut down way before this time.
Why couldn’t they work a deal like this when this person whom I personally know tried over and over to get a modification AT THE TIME?
They had a good job then and still have a good job today.
So why do they not want to work with the borrowers and reduce the principal to reflect today’s REAL and TRUE appraisal of the property?
Make sure you follow the transactions to understand what happened and why it makes no sense where this goes.
Now Here comes more funny business:
Still following?
Property was Quit Claimed/Transferred To Freddie Mac for $100.00 (prepared by David Stern) but consideration shows only $10.00.
Property then sold for $3900.00 more 13 days later $78,000
SAME day flipped for $150,000
Previous records are all gone [compare both images]
Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and former Goldman Sachs Mortgages Department head Daniel Sparks, Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations hearing, April 27, 2010
Dylan Ratigan with special guest New York Times’ Louise Story, discussing the 600+ page report uncovering Goldman Sachs scheme to defraud investors. According to Bloomberg, The U.S. Justice Department and regulators will have to determine whether employees and executives of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. violated any laws when they traded securities tied to the housing market and testified to Congress about the transactions, Senator Carl Levin said.
While the attorneys general proposed many similar terms last month, banking regulators didn’t include any requirements for lowering mortgage debt. That may hinder Iowa Attorney General Thomas J. Miller as he leads a group of state officials working with the administration to require lenders to evaluate loan cuts for some borrowers whose homes are worth less than their mortgages.
“I have always been pretty skeptical about the ability of principal reductions to get you much,” said Mark A. Calabria, director of financial-regulation studies at the Cato Institute, a public-policy research group in Washington. “I think we will look back and say this was the death knell.”
Question: Wonder what the regulators thought of when they watched 60 Minutes broadcast of LPS, DOCX and Servicer fraud on national tv with over 12 million viewers?
Just see what the number one popular post has been on this site since the airing of it or do a simple google search like 60 Minutes Docx or 60 Minutes LPS and you’ll see SFF is the first site that comes up. We’re no fools and believe me the entire globe has tuned in, including the regulators.
The nation’s 14 largest mortgage firms must compensate wronged homeowners after federal bank regulators determined the companies broke federal and state laws by improperly foreclosing on an incalculable number of distressed borrowers. The agencies announced such penalties Wednesday, the first in what is likely to be a series of enforcement actions targeting the country’s biggest banks and costing them billions.
Lenders like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial systematically broke rules and took shortcuts when foreclosing on homeowners last year, the regulators said. Their three-month review launched after documents and videos of so-called robo-signers — people who signed thousands of foreclosure documents a day without reading them or knowing what was in them — surfaced, leading the biggest banks to halt home seizures.
Bank examiners found the firms employed practices that “failed to conform to state legal requirements.” In other words, they broke the law.
The 14 largest U.S. mortgage servicers must pay back homeowners for losses from foreclosures or loans that were mishandled in the wake of the housing collapse, according to a consent decree released today.
The agreement between the servicers and U.S. regulators imposes more substantial penalties than early reports of the deal indicated. It could also help the U.S. Justice Department determine the size and scope of any future fines for the flawed practices, regulators said.
The banks didn’t admit or deny regulators’ findings, according to the orders.
From Fed Press Release:
The Federal Reserve will closely monitor progress at the firms in addressing these matters and will take additional enforcement actions as needed.
In addition to the actions against the banking organizations, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced formal enforcement actions against Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS), a domestic provider of default-management services and other services related to foreclosures, and against MERSCORP, Inc. (MERS), which provides services related to tracking and registering residential mortgage ownership and servicing, acts as mortgagee of record on behalf of lenders and servicers, and initiates foreclosure actions. These actions address significant compliance failures and unsafe and unsound practices at LPS and its subsidiaries, and at MERS and its subsidiary. The action requires LPS to address deficient practices related primarily to the document execution services that LPS, through its subsidiaries DocX, LLC, and LPS Default Solutions, Inc., provided to servicers in connection with foreclosures. MERS is required to address significant weaknesses in, among other things, oversight, management supervision, and corporate governance. The LPS action is being taken jointly with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, while the MERS action is being taken jointly with those agencies and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
The Federal Reserve Board based its enforcement actions on the findings of the interagency reviews of the major mortgage servicers, LPS, and MERS. A summary of the findings from the reviews of the mortgage servicers is available in the Interagency Review of Foreclosure Policies and Practices,which is simultaneously being released by the Federal Reserve Board and the other agencies.
The rule of law is not even worth 20 basis points. That’s the ultimate message in a recent paper by Charles Calomiris, Eric Higgins, and Joseph Mason evaluating the proposed AG mortgage servicing settlement. Calomiris et al. estimate that the settlement will raise mortgage costs at least 20bps, and they think that’s too much.
Recognize what they’re really saying: that 20-45bps is too high a price to pay for the rule of law. They value the rule of law at less than 20bps. At present conversion rates, that’s about 30 shekels of silver.
The whole Calomiris et al. document is rather strange, as it’s hard to do any serious evaluation of the settlement without knowing the terms. We’ve seen a proposed servicing standards term sheet from the AGs and we’ve seen a CFPB analysis of disgorgement of wrongful profits and the costs of potential principal reductions, but it’s way premature to attempt any sort of real evaluation of a settlement. Unless, of course, the goal is not a serious evaluation of a settlement, but an attempt to forestall a settlement. Which is what this paper is.
(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.
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.
The inter-regulator fight over the proper parameters of a foreclosure fraud settlement are really highlighting the changes in the financial regulatory world. What we’re told is that the OCC and Fed are urging a weak settlement, while FDIC, the state AGs, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are pushing for a serious settlement.
Parts of this line up look quite familiar, but parts are new and exciting.
There’s nothing new or surprising about the OCC protecting (rather than regulating) the banks. Similarly, it’s not surprising to see the Fed back the banks, although, the Fed tends to be less gung-ho than OCC in these matters (and I would note that there isn’t necessarily unanimity within any agency on these issues). It’s also no surprise to see the state AGs on the other side, pushing for regulation. Gosh, this just sounds like a Wachovia v. Watters redeux (one of OCC’s most shameful moments in recent years—putting its preemption agenda ahead of consumer protection in the mortgage space. Now where did that get us?)
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