Mortgage Defense and the Law of Restitution by Richard F. Will Wall Street Ever Face Justice? The Ibanez Time Bomb by Elizabeth Renuart Albany Law School Rev.

Homeowners' Rebellion by Ellen Brown. Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear, and Social Management of a Housing Crisis by Brent T. Where's The Note, Who's The Holder by Hon. The Great Collapse by Kurt Eggert Connecticut Law Review.

Subprime Meltdown by James R. Barth, Tong Li, et al. The Dream Deferred by Thomas Brom, California Lawyer. As a result, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has restricted mortgage servicing operations at Wells Fargo, Chase, U.

Bancorp, Santander Bank, EverBank Financial Corp. Banking regulators obtained the consent orders in in response to scandals involving the robo-signing of foreclosure documents by token officials without knowledge of the facts, lost paperwork, illegal fees, and other legal shortcuts that became common after the mortgage meltdown.

In a watershed decision, the California Supreme Court decided that homeowners have a right to challenge the authority of a foreclosing entity to sell the house - after the foreclosure sale.

Then the court remanded other cases to the Court of Appeals to wrestle with pre-foreclosure issues. California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed an amicus brief in support of homeowners that concluded, "The Court should hold that homeowners may bring a wrongful foreclosure action on the basis that the party foreclosing on them lacks the power to foreclose because they do not own the debt, either due to an allegedly void assignment or for any other legally cognizable reason.

Less than one-third of families who lost their homes to foreclosure or other distress events in the past decade are likely to become homeowners again, according to an analysis by the National Association of Realtors. George Soros sold his stakes in banks and went for tech and gold mines in the first quarter ofaccording to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Soros sold his holdings in Citigroup, Chase, and Bank of America in Soros said at a Columbia University conference in that the world financial system had effectively disintegrated, and that there was no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

Inthe Second Appellate District Ventura ruled in favor of Bank of America in a wrongful foreclosure case brought by Daniel and Yvette Shuster. Gilbert ruled in favor of Chase in a foreclosure case filed by Susan Lange that was argued in Decemberand wrote an unpublished opinion in favor of Chase in another foreclosure matter decided in April Justice Gilbert disposed of his shares in Chase in May Attorney Patricia Rodriguez said the fact that so many judges have significant financial investments in the banking and mortgage industry means that they're inclined to rule against homeowners because a string of decisions against the banks could reduce the profitability of the entire sector.

Banks losing more often in court could have sweeping impacts on their profitability in California. Los Angeles Times - Nov.

The nation's largest bank admitted to knowingly peddling the toxic securities that helped lead to the housing bubble and the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

California, slammed by 1 million foreclosures during the mortgage meltdown, will be a major beneficiary of the deal. Chase said it would distribute the assistance over the next four years. Half of the program will go toward writing down the balance of mortgages and waiving certain payments on home loans. Most of that would be achieved through outright forgiveness of first-mortgage debt. Investors in Chase appeared to be relieved the bank was able to arrive at the the largest settlement made by any single American company in history.

The bank's shares rose 41 cents, or 0. So apparently Wall St. New York Times - Aug 2, A federal jury found the trader, Fabrice Tourre, liable on six counts of civil securities fraud after a three-week trial in Lower Manhattan.

Five years after Wall Street risk-taking nearly toppled the economy, the S. The agency has not leveled fraud charges against one top executive at a big bank. Some critics have questioned why the agency chose to make Mr. Rather than aim at a high-flying executive, the agency pursued someone barely known on Wall Street.

On September 30, his lawyers filed a motion for a new trial in federal court. Meanwhile, Fab is studying for a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, where Barack Obama was a law professor for 12 years. A Broken System Douglas Gillies The law of contract was thrown out the window when Wall Street turned title to real property into confetti.

One item on the agenda reads as follows: This meeting in the Roosevelt Room is closed press. Also expected to attend is Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America Sooner or later - within a few years, I predict - this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing.

But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble. The Corruption of Capitalism in America. Rolling StoneJanuary 17, To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line.

Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit.

No harm, no foul - right? It was all a lie - one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in - only temporarily, mind you - to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe.

What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street - it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs.

The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout.

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.

You may have heard that not one single banker has been charged with a crime for their rampage against the global economy during the past several years, but the California Bar Association has a different perspective on the problem. Not enough lawyers have been disbarred for trying to represent homeowners in foreclosure.

California State Bar CEO Joe Dunn calls foreclosure relief "the Number 1 disciplinary challenge" his organization faces. From February to Decemberthe State Bar processed roughly 12, complaints against lawyers who allegedly sold clients worthless foreclosure relief services of one sort or another.

Of those, cases resulted in disbarments, and at this writing another matters were under active investigation. To protect unsuspecting homeowners, the State Bar, the state Attorney General's office, the Department of Real Estate, various district attorneys and U.

Attorneys' offices, and now the new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been stepping up enforcement efforts against foreclosure relief scams.

Setting up task forces, issuing consumer warnings, and filing lawsuits, these various agencies have brought down operations across California. But as long as troubled homeowners have hopes of keeping a roof over their heads, unscrupulous people will try to profit from their distress. So next time you find a lawyer who is willing to invest hours to help you to fight the banks and save your home from foreclosure, take the advice of William Shakespeare and the California Lawyer.

New York TimesAugust 19, But he tried to finesse the cleanup of the housing crash, rejecting unpopular proposals for a broad bailout of homeowners facing foreclosure in favor of a limited aid program - and a bet that a recovering economy would take care of the rest.

During his first two years in office, Mr. Obama and his advisers repeatedly affirmed this carefully calibrated strategy, leaving unspent hundreds of billions of dollars that Congress had allocated to buy mortgage loans, even as millions of people lost their homes and the economic recovery stalled somewhere between crisis and prosperity.

The nation's painfully slow pace of growth is now the primary threat to Mr. Obama's bid for a second term, and some economists and political allies say the cautious response to the housing crisis was the administration's most significant mistake.

The bailouts of banks and automakers are now widely regarded as crucial steps in arresting the recession, while the depressed housing market remains a millstone. Obama insisted the government should help only "responsible borrowers," and his administration offered aid to fewer than half of those facing foreclosure, excluding landlords, owners of big-ticket homes and those judged to have excessive debts.

He decided to rely on mortgage companies to modify unaffordable loans rather than have the government take control by purchasing the loans, the approach advocated by his chief political rivals in the presidential race, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain.

San Francisco Cronicle August 18, That too much of Wall Street remains unchanged is not surprising. Simply stated, the banks and their leaders have paid no real economic, legal or political price for their wrongdoing and thus have not felt compelled to change. On the economic front, the financial sector has rebounded nicely from its brush with death, thanks to an enormous taxpayer bailout.

Bythe 10 biggest U. On the legal front, enforcement has been woefully inadequate. Federal criminal financial fraud prosecutions have fallen to a two-decade low. Violations are settled for pennies on the dollar - the mere cost of doing business, with no admission of wrongdoing and with the bill invariably picked up by insurers or shareholders. When it's shareholders, that's not someone else far away, that's your kpension fund or mutual fund.

Posted on June 29th, by Mark Stopa. It's an appalling dynamic in foreclosure-world, one where banks often have no incentive to modify mortgages because "our" government will pay the banks in full once the foreclosure is over and all the banks have to do is convey title to Fannie and Freddie.

Incredibly, just when I thought I couldn't be any more appalled, somehow, my disgust with "our" government reached a new level today. I have it on good information directly from someone personally involved that Fannie and Freddie are selling foreclosed homes in bulk to third-party investors.

Not one at a time, not several - dozens - at heavily discounted rates. In other words, many of the homes in Florida and elsewhere that have been foreclosed, with lower and middle-class homeowners thrown onto the streets and title transferred to Fannie or Freddie, are being sold to third-party investors in bulk. If you think that sounds like an interesting investment opportunity, a chance to purchase a new home after you were foreclosed, let me stop you. Fannie and Freddie aren't making these investments available to just anyone.

Is this what America has become? Throwing Americans onto the streets so "our" government pays the banks to foreclose and "our" government sells those houses in bulk at discounted rates to third-party investors with an eight-figure net worth? You know what's arguably even worse?

Nobody is even talking about this. Would you have known about this if Mark Stopa - basically a nobody in the scope of national news and politics - hadn't blogged about it? Where is the media coverage? Who is running our government, exactly?

This is as big an issue as Obamacare - thousands of homeowners getting foreclosed and their homes being sold in bulk to the mega-wealthy. Why is nobody even talking about it? Is America really a land where our government takes houses from the poor and middle class and sells them in bulk at discounted rates to the mega-wealthy - and it does so completely in secret?

This is why I consider this the biggest post I've ever written. This is what is driving the whole foreclosure crisis, and nobody knows about it. Nobody's even talking about it. Change is not possible without awareness, and right now, all Americans are totally in the dark about this dynamic.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley led a coalition of eleven states urging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to reverse its position and implement principle reduction in its loan modification program. Her letter to the FHFA on April 11 was joined by Attorneys General from California, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Vermont.

AG Coakley said, "We will soon see the results of the country's largest banks implementing principal loan reduction as required under the recent Multistate Servicing Settlement. It is now time for the FHFA to accept the fact that principal forgiveness programs help borrowers, help communities and can improve the creditors' bottom line. One week later, the New York Daily News urged NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to quit President Obama's mortgage unit.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman should "distance himself from this cynical arrangement," they said. The Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group was prominently featured in the State of the Union speech 85 days ago. It has accomplished nothing, according to the Daily News. Schneiderman has no office, no phones, no staff, and no executive director. The Daily News article continues: The settlement and working group - taken together - were a coup: The media hailed the resolution for a few days and then turned their attention to other topics and controversies.

In fact, the new Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group was the sixth such entity formed since the start of the financial crisis in The grand total of staff working for all of the previous five groups was one, according to a surprised Schneiderman.

In Washington, where staffs grow like cherry blossoms, this is a remarkable occurrence. The Huffington Post reported on April 19, "In law enforcement time, three months isn't very long - investigations typically take months or even years.

But the skepticism is hardly surprising, given the Obama administration's scattershot and largely underwhelming law enforcement response to the financial crisis. It's been five years since the subprime market crashed, and federal authorities mostly haven't prosecuted the individuals and institutions that created, marketed and rated the financial products that nearly brought down the American economy.

USA Today reports that almost 1 in 5 children in Nevada lived or live in owner-occupied homes that were lost to foreclosure or are at risk of being lost. That's about one in eight children in California. Five years into the foreclosure crisis, an estimated 2. Chasing Chase is hard to miss. It is the biggest investment bank in the world, and it keeps getting bigger.

Second on the list? Such, apparently, is the case with MERS, a national electronic database of home mortgages that effectively swiped millions of dollars from local governments just when they could have used the revenue most.

Woolley, principal of Harbinger Analytics Group in Tustin and a licensed land surveyor. Woolley predicted that a wave of boundary suits would eventually hit title insurers.

Herzog wrote in 8 HASTINGS BUS. Marcy Kaptur D-Ohio introduced a bill to prohibit Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae from owning or guaranteeing any mortgage assigned to MERS or for which MERS is the mortgagee of record. It died in committee in and again last year; in JanuaryKaptur reintroduced the bill as H.

As of July 4,http: Land is America's most valuable asset. MERS may have put our national security at risk as property values crumble and insolvency is the enduring result of MERS mythology. Happy Fourth of July, MERS maniacs. Rachael Maddow describes how the banks destroyed property values in the Unites States by trading title to property like casino chips. She reports that Occupy Greensboro in North Carolina trains volunteers to review documents in new foreclosures to find evidence of fraud, including robosigning.

She interviews Jeff Thigpen, Register of Deeds for Guilford County NC, who says he can no longer tell who owns what. Thigpen's staff conducted a study of 6, mortgage documents and discovered that 74 percent, about 4, transactions, had problems involving forged signatures and fraudulent documents.

His research into robo-signing has been cited in a number of pending court cases as well as in the Associated Press, Business Week, and other national publications. In MarchThigpen's office took more than two dozen big banks and mortgage companies to court, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and MERSCorp. The lawsuit begins, "This lawsuit seeks to have defendants clean up the mess they created. It used to be that if you wanted to find out who owned your mortgage, you could go to the office of your local register of deeds, the final authority on questions of property ownership.

But when banks set up their own private registration system to help them bundle and resell mortgages in a whirlwind of securities exchanges, the land offices of record had no hope of keeping up.

And when some banks later foreclosed on many of those properties, often cutting corners or worse - creating phony documents - it left register of deeds offices across Wisconsin awash in forged and fraudulent documents. That's a "serious problem" for registrars charged with maintaining property records, said Brown County Register of Deeds Cathy Williquette Lindsay, who heads a committee studying foreclosure fraud on behalf of the Wisconsin Register of Deeds Association.

Registrars' offices across Wisconsin are littered with paperwork signed and sworn to by fictitious people, including "Linda Green," a handle commonly used by "robo-signers" - workers who signed off on foreclosure documents without verifying them. Across the country, officials tasked with keeping track of property ownership are increasingly alarmed about the prevalence of forged signatures and fraudulent affidavits among their records. In separate legal actions, several local governments and three states - Massachusetts, New York and Delaware - have sued the major banks and the private record-keeping service they employ, the Mortgage Electronic Registration System MERSalleging they have flooded the courts and registrars' offices with inaccurate, fraudulent and forged documents.

John O'Brien, head of the Southern Essex District Registry of Deeds in Massachusetts, was among the first to raise the alarm about potential foreclosure fraud in November Last year, O'Brien's office commissioned a study of mortgages issued to and from JP Morgan Chase Bank, Wells Fargo Bank and Bank of America during The review found just 16 percent of the records in the Essex County office assigning ownership of the mortgages were valid. The rest had been back-dated, robo-signed or had other problems, including broken chains of title.

Kevin Harvey, the county's first assistant register, said O'Brien's office has asked 80 financial institutions to file affidavits verifying that the records they have previously submitted were legitimate. At the heart of the controversy is MERS, founded about 15 years ago by the large banks and now used by roughly 3, mortgage-related entities. MERS was to be a central storehouse that streamlined the process of registering and transferring loans secured by property, which previously had been the exclusive purview of county registrars' offices.

But the private registration system has also created chaos, uncertainty and injected fraud into the nation's property records, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman charged in a lawsuit against MERS on Feb.

The lawsuit alleges the system effectively eliminated the public's ability to track property transactions by registering properties in the name of MERS rather than the bank that owns the mortgage. That allows member institutions to move loans quickly and multiple times without having to record each move with the local registrar's office. And some of the information MERS does have, the lawsuit alleges, is "unreliable and inaccurate.

The company added that federal law already requires that consumers be notified when the owner or servicer of their loan changes. But Williquette Lindsay said very little information is made available to homeowners by MERS. Property owners visiting their local register of deeds offices to find out who owns their mortgage to prepare for a bankruptcy or defend against foreclosure often leave empty-handed, she said.

When Nevada began requiring transfers of mortgage ownership be recorded in the local recorder's office in October, foreclosures in that state dropped sharply.

Schneiderman's suit described MERS as a "bizarre" and "complex" entity that has few employees but which has designated at least 20, people working for its member institutions to sign documents on its behalf. In some cases, MERS-designated officials sign documents "assigning" mortgages from MERS - which actually is only a registration system and owns no mortgages at all - to their own companies or clients to prove ownership in foreclosure actions, Schneiderman said.

Madison attorney Briane Pagel said he has been unable to get any information out of MERS to help his clients fighting foreclosure. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters investigation shows. While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.

InHolder's deputy chief of staff, John Garland, returned to Covington. So did Steven Fagell, who was Breuer's deputy chief of staff in the criminal division. The revolving door between the Obama administration and Big Banks never stops turning. President Obama announced in his State of the Union address on January 24,that he was creating a special unit within the Financial Fraud Enforcement Taskforce to deal with mortgage origination and securitization abuses: And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis.

This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans. The members of the new Mortgage Securitization Abuses Unit were identified as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman; Assistant U. Attorney General Lanny Breuer; Robert Khuzami, Director of Enforcement at the SEC; John Walsh, U.

Attorney, District of Colorado; and Tony West, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, Department of Justice. AG Eric Holder, sitting near the podium, was blinking so fast as Obama said he would rein in the banks that I could only assume he was on LSD - but the kinder interpretation would be that people often blink more rapidly when they are feeling distressed or uncomfortable. New York Attorney General Schneiderman and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden have been among the most outspoken regarding the prosecution of crimes relating to mortgage securitization.

Schneiderman released a statement after the President's address: The American people deserve a robust and comprehensive investigation into the global financial meltdown to ensure nothing like it ever happens again, and today's announcement is a major step in the right direction.

Abigail Caplovitz Field wrote in Reality Check on January 24,"Schneiderman isn't chairing anything. That's a huge difference. If he's Chair he's in charge. If he's Co-Chair he needs consensus. And who is he Co-Chairing with? Four people, starting with Lanny Breuer.

Why has Breuer failed to go after the people who committed 'misconduct and illegalities that contributed to both the financial collapse and the mortgage crisis'? His track record speaks for itself. There is only one reason to have him co-chair with Schneiderman, and that's to rein Schneiderman in. On January 31, Bill Black wrote, "The federal government does not intend to prosecute criminally the large financial firms and their senior officers who committed hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent mortgage originations.

That figure only counts the fraudulent liar's loans the five large banks made. The five banks' civil liability for mortgage origination fraud is vastly larger than their civil liability for their endemic foreclosure fraud. Jerry Salzberg, a lawyer who represents debt collectors and banks in the Chicago area, was familiar with Chase's dismissed Illinois collections attorneys, whom he describes as experienced, productive and profitable.

If they weren't the most profitable [of Chase's regional collection teams], they sure as hell were making a lot of money for the bank. Chase collections cases have dropped off sharply in Illinois in recent months, in addition to disappearing in five other states, an American Banker review indicates.

The review focused on California, Florida Maryland, New York and Washington, where local court records are electronically searchable. It is not clear why Chase is walking away from billions of dollars of claims, but the number is likely to climb as word gets out that Chase is climbing out of the ring. The system continues to crumble. Thank you, Chairman Bernanke, for those snappy remarks. Deploy means to move troops into position for action.

Maybe your troops can establish base camps filled with barracks to deploy the millions of families who were marched out of the "existing stock of houses. You gotta pay top dollare to lose money at that rate. Compensation pools at seven of the biggest U. Truthout January 2, Bankruptcy attorney Max Gardner's prediction for On November 26,Foreclosure Radar recorded its millionth California foreclosure sale since January On average, more than California families have lost their homes every day since 4Q California foreclosure activity remains elevated, with more than 30, completed foreclosures each quarter, compared to less than 3, foreclosures in 3Q Cumulative Foreclosure Totals Have Devastated California Communities: Since 4Q - the unofficial beginning of the economic crisis - through 4Qmore than 1.

More thanCalifornia families actually lost their homes to foreclosure during the same period. Ten of the top 20 metro foreclosure areas nationwide for were in California. For mortgages originated between andLatino and African-American homeowners in California experienced foreclosure rates 2. In Santa Barbarians received notices of trustee sales and notices in Currently, one in three California owners with a mortgage is underwater.

Santa Barbara has not escaped the housing collapse. Consider the Old Masini Adobe in Montecito. Almost years old, this vintage piece of history is considered to be the oldest 2-story adobe. Notices of Trustee's Sale recorded in Santa Barbara County: New York Times Dec. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The FDIC in March sued WaMu CEO Kerry Killinger, COO Steven Rotella, and home-loans President David Schneider, accusing them of "gross mismanagement" of WaMu's mortgage business that ultimately led to the lender's failure in September The FDIC accused the executives of pushing Washington Mutual to the brink by making risky bets to reap short-term profits for themselves.

AARP BulletinSeptember With the nation's foreclosure system all but paralyzed after an avalanche of loan failures and "robo-signing" scandals, many delinquent homeowners are defying lenders and staying put. Instead of packing up and slinking away, they're living for free, sometimes for years.

They're hiring lawyers to challenge their cases, and many are winning reprieves or causing the process to stall even further.

The extraordinary delays are hampering hope of a housing market recovery and pushing this year's troubles into next year, says Rich Sharga, senior vice president at RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosure data.

The logjam also has kept thousands of new cases from being filed. The AARP article continues, "Often, banks are not pushing to go to foreclosure. They seem to be in no hurry to add to their swollen inventory of repossessed homes, which now stands at a near recordnationwide.

Until their cases are resolved, owners can legally remain in homes they would've lost long ago in normal times. It's the time of year when proud parents are sending their kids off to college while booster clubs are revving up for the impending college football season.

What better time to consider the best college towns in the nation for investing in foreclosures? Read about the Top 10 college towns for smart investors. The Federal Housing Finance Agency FHFAas conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, filed lawsuits against 17 financial institutions, certain of their officers and various lead underwriters.

The suits allege violations of federal securities laws in the sale of residential private-label mortgage-backed securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The complaints are available on the FHFA website. From Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone August 17, Much has been made in recent months of the government's glaring failure to police Wall Street; to date, federal and state prosecutors have yet to put a single senior Wall Street executive behind bars for any of the many well-documented crimes related to the financial crisis.

Indeed, Flynn's accusations dovetail with a recent series of damaging critiques of the SEC made by reporters, watchdog groups and members of Congress, all of which seem to indicate that top federal regulators spend more time lunching, schmoozing and job-interviewing with Wall Street crooks than they do catching them.

As one former SEC staffer describes it, the agency is now filled with so many Wall Street hotshots from oft-investigated banks that it has been "infected with the Goldman mindset from within. The destruction of records by the SEC, as outlined by Flynn, is something far more than an administrative accident or bureaucratic fuck-up.

It's a symptom of the agency's terminal brain damage. Somewhere along the line, those at the SEC responsible for policing America's banks fell and hit their head on a big pile of Wall Street's money - a blow from which the agency has never recovered. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose staff has interviewed Flynn. If these charges are true, the agency needs to explain why it destroyed documents, how many documents it destroyed over what time frame and to what extent its actions were consistent with the law.

Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said clashes over faulty mortgages may drag on as investors and regulators demand compensation for soured loans issued at the peak of the housing market. And everybody is going to sue everybody else, and it's going to go on for a long time. How can anybody not like Jamie Dimon? He shows the resilience and common sense of a captain who can weather the storm.

odomujekadox.web.fc2.com

While millions of families are being thrown out on the streets, lawyers working for the banks are making billions! Maybe all that money will trickle down as the lawyers buy cocktails, and golf clubs, and thousand-dollar suits. An article by Nick Timiraos appeared in The Wall Street Journal on June 1, - "Banks Hit Hurdle to Foreclosures.

If you or I try to boot a homeowner into the street without any proof that we're entitled to the property, the cops will lock us up. Stealing is stealing, whether it is somebody's wallet or their 3-bedroom 2-bath in the suburbs with two dogs and a kid. When a bank tries to steal the bungalow without proof that they have a right to foreclose, it's a "hurdle" or "another roadblock.

Semantics aside, this is good news for all people holding grant deeds. This year, the Journal reports, cases in California, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Maine, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Massachusetts and other states have raised questions about whether banks properly demonstrated ownership.

In some cases, borrowers are showing courts that banks failed to properly assign ownership of mortgages after they were pooled into mortgage-backed securities.

In other cases, borrowers say that lenders backdated or fabricated documents to fix those errors. In March, an Alabama court said J. The mortgage assignment showed that the loan hadn't been transferred to the trust from the subprime lender that originated it. This WSJ story represents a seismic shift in the foreclosure meltdown. Judges read The Wall Street Journal.

So does Jamie Dimon. On April 13,the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, released a page bipartisan report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse.

Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing crime - a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: Goldman Sachs " May 11, Goldman Sachs was President Obama's number-one private campaign contributor.

Bush appointed him to his Cabinet. Paulson then put Edward M. For more names of Goldman troopers in the Executive Branch, see "The Guys from Government Sachs" NY Times, Oct. Daley headed Chase's Corporate Responsibility division, which included oversight of the firm's lobbyists and relations with government officials. With Wall Street lobbyists patrolling the Oval Office, we rest assured that the President is in good company.

The page Subcommittee report devoted pages to WaMu, which was acquired by Chase in Sept. The Wall Street Journal reported that U. The orders issued on Wednesday, April 13,to 14 financial institutions didn't include fines. Officials said they are coming. The orders were issued by the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision OTSand the Comptroller of the Currency.

Thursday, February 9,may one day be memorialized as the day everything changed, as with the Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence. Let the festivities begin.

Under the orders, banks have 60 days to establish plans to clean up their mortgage-servicing processes to prevent documentation errors.

The orders also direct banks to take steps to ensure they have enough staff to handle the flood of foreclosures, that foreclosures don't happen when a borrower is receiving a loan modification, and that borrowers have a single point of contact throughout the loan-modification and foreclosure process.

Banks must hire an independent consultant to conduct a "look back" of all foreclosure proceedings from and to evaluate whether they improperly foreclosed on any homeowners and require each company to establish its own process to consider whether to compensate borrowers who have been harmed. The OCC, which has been the target of most criticism, defended the enforcement orders.

Acting Comptroller of the Currency John Walsh said, "The banks are going to have to do substantial work, bear substantial expense to fix the problems that we identified" as well as to identify and compensate homeowners that suffered financial harm. It is the latest effort to cobble together a broken system with duct tape. President Obama launched HAMP in March and offered loan mods as a solution to the foreclosure meltdown.

Fewer than 2 million trial modifications were started in the first two years of the program, and fewer thanconverted to permanent modifications. Here are links to the Consent Orders signed by the Federal Reserve on April 13, You be the judge whether they will stop the abuse.

Better yet, ask your trial judge to take judicial notice of the consent order. Meanwhile, the soaring U. National Debt below is now half a trillion dollars greater than the combined assets of the nation's thirty largest banks based on figures provided by InfoPlease. How much of that debt was assumed to bail out the banks? So Americans pay more to the bankers than to all of those departments combined.

Sincethe U. The New York Times reported on Aug. Forecasts predict that China will surpass the United States as the world's biggest economy in twenty years - and America's interest payments to China will put China on top. Just nine months ago, it was going to take years, so the U. We're only years old as a country.

We may be a deadbeat nation, but since the U. They can't touch US with a ten-foot pole. Kevin Drawbaugh Reuters April 14, Baltimore Sun. Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, releasing the findings of a two-year inquiry yesterday, said he wants the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine whether Goldman Sachs violated the law by misleading clients who bought collateralized debt obligations without knowing the firm would benefit if they fell in value.

The Michigan Democrat also said federal prosecutors should review whether to bring perjury charges against Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and other current and former employees who testified in Congress last year. Levin said they denied under oath that Goldman Sachs took a financial position against the mortgage market solely for its own profit, statements the senator said were untrue. Washington Mutual - which became the largest failed bank in U. The report said a runaway mortgage securitization machine churned out abusive loans, toxic securities, and big fees for lenders and Wall Street.

It cited internal emails by Wall Street executives that described mortgage-backed securities underlying many collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, as "crap" and "pigs. It said Washington Mutual - which became the largest failed bank in U. In the case of one CDO, Hudson Mezzanine FundingGoldman Sachs told investors its interests were "aligned" with theirs while the firm held percent of the short side, according to the report.

The Baltimore Sun ran a mug shot of JPMorgan Chase:. The New York Times reported on April 8,that the New York attorney general has issued subpoenas against the state's largest foreclosure law firm. Representing JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and other large banks, the Steven Baum law firm has handled an estimated 40 percent of foreclosure cases in the state.

Since the end ofBaum has filed more than 50, foreclosure cases in New York, according to data compiled by the New York State Unified Court System. The firm employs approximately 70 lawyers. Judges in courts across New York state have rejected scores of cases filed by the Baum firm, saying it has failed to provide the documentation necessary to commence foreclosure.

The firm might do better in California, where judges routinely dismiss lawsuits filed by homeowners without requiring that the foreclosing banks produce anything but a Trustee's Deed Upon Sale. In California, as in many states, "non judicial" means "no judge. Fifty thousand families on the street is by no means a record for bare-fisted law firms.

Florida attorney David J. Stern prosecuted 70, foreclosures in with a staff of 1, Stern purchased a foot yacht, The Misunderstood, as his fortunes rose. The Palm Beach Post reported that Stern laid off 70 percent of his staff one day last November. Stern is now under investigation by the Florida Attorney General, and he stopped repossessing houses in March.

Stern sent letters to the chief judges of Florida's 20 circuit courts announcing that he intended to violate court rules and dumpforeclosure cases without a judge's order. The Sun-Sentinel reported on April 4,that judges throughout Florida are increasingly dismissing cases and accusing lawyers of "fraud upon the court. A Palm Beach Post review of cases in state and appellate courts found judges are routinely dismissing cases for questionable paperwork.

Although in most cases the bank is allowed to refile the case with the appropriate documents, in a growing number of cases judges are awarding homeowners their homes free and clear after finding fraud upon the court. In February, Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Maxine Cohen Lando took one of the largest foreclosure law firms in the state to task.

She called Marc A. She then gave the homeowner the home - free and clear - and barred the lender from refiling the foreclosure. Fannie Mae fired the Ben-Ezra law firm in February and then sued the firm on February 11 to recover 15, foreclosure stock market mug files, according to Courthouse News. JPMorgan Chase fired the Ben-Ezra law firm on March 8,and then sued them to recover thousands of foreclosure case files, promissory notes, and mortgages that Chase alleges are being held hostage by its former foreclosure attorneys to collect outstanding legal bills.

The case was filed in federal district court SDFL on March 25,Case No. Much of the fraudulent paperwork was manufactured by the banks. So the banks are providing paperwork to their lawyers and then suing the lawyers to get their felonious files back while the lawyers take the fall for the banks. The cases are being reported by the press in stories that fail to mention the names of the banks.

The judges shoot the messengers, putting law firms out of business, and tap the banksters on the wrist. Wading through a tsunami of foreclosures, how well does it punish the bank to lose one house in foreclosure when banks are foreclosing on 12 million homes?

Could all of this be happening because bankers broke the system when they went off the deep end and caused the mortgage meltdown? When will make money on nintendogs look for the cause of the calamity? How many illegal foreclosures put families in the streets because judges were too busy managing their caseload to read the files.

After he ordered that hundreds of Scud missles be launched into Libya, Barack How much money does ben roethlisberger make issued an executive order freezing Libyan assets and barring Americans from having business dealings with Libyan banks.

A week later, Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the U. Treasury Department, issued an order exempting Libyan-owned banks so that they could continue operating without sanction. Matt Taibbi reports that he is working on a story for the April 15 issue of Rolling Stone that will describe how the United States extended billions of dollars in aid to Muammar Gaddafi and the Central Bank of Libya through Arab Banking Corporation ABCa Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont sponsored an amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill forcing the Federal Reserve to open its books for the first time and make public the names of individuals and corporations who received emergency loans and bailout monies during the two year period between the crash of and the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill.

How does it feel to be sued by the U. Ask Kerry Killinger, former CEO of Washington Mutual, or Stephen Rotella, former WaMu COO. The FDIC filed a page complaint in Federal District Court on March 17 against Killinger, Rotella and their wives. It also names David Schneider, former head of WaMu's home loans division, who is now working for JPMorgan Chase. The complaint alleges that Killinger, Rotella, and Schneider caused WaMu "to take extreme and historically unprecedented risks with WaMu's home loans portfolio.

They focused on short term gains to increase their own compensation, with reckless disregard for WaMu's longer term safety and soundness. Linda Killinger and Esther Rotella were accused of receiving millions of dollars of property from their husbands with intent to defraud creditors while the largest bank failure in history was underway and lawsuits were piling up.

On the day the lawsuit was filed, Killinger released a prepared statement describing the lawsuit as "baseless and unworthy of the government. The factual allegations are fiction. The legal conclusions are political theater. Trial in a courtroom that honors the rule of law - and not the will of Washington, D. Second, they had unfettered access to the books, records, accounts, committee minutes, and personnel of the Bank.

They roamed freely and paid particular attention to the quality of the assets - i. Had the benefits extended to Wall Street institutions within weeks of the seizure - e. Stephen Rotella added, "I am angered at this abuse of power by the FDIC. More than anything, I am angered that my wife and children may be subjected to the public attention this lawsuit may excel 2016 bit operations, even if it is for a short period of time.

And, of course, I am angered that my good name, built over a career of three decades, is at risk as a result of this callous action. So, it was the government's fault that WaMu failed because: This wasn't something that came out unexpectedly when the Summons and Complaint were served. The FDIC gave Killinger and Rotella a heads up three weeks earlier that the lawsuit was in the pipelined.

Having collected hundreds of millions in salary and bonuses, the defendants have worked out a strategy - it wasn't our fault. While Wall Street bankers snorted cocaine and frolicked usaa stock trade prices hookers see the Academy Award winning documentary, "Inside Job" California was hit with an economic tsunami of one trillion dollars, according to " Home Wreckers ," a report released on March 16, Judges in California still insist that banks can foreclose on homes without producing any papers to show they own the mortgage.

The courts may still be operating in the Dark Ages, but not for long. Chase is defending more than 10, legal proceedings, the bank revealed in its K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 28, The suits include common law tort and contract claims, statutory antitrust claims, securities claims and consumer protection claims, the bank reported. If Houdini could conjure one lawyer to represent all the plaintiffs in each case and persuade all the lawyers to attend one humongous settlement conference, here's call in binary options the line would look on the courthouse lawn:.

Chase reported, "In view of the inherent difficulty of predicting the outcome of legal proceedings, particularly where the claimants seek very large or indeterminate damages, or where the matters present novel legal theories, involve a large number of parties or are in early stages of discovery, the Firm cannot state with confidence what the eventual outcome of the currently pending matters will be, what the timing of the ultimate resolution of these pending matters will be or what the eventual loss, fines, penalties or impact related to each pending matter may be.

The FDIC sent letters to several former executives of Washington Mutual warning that it was considering taking legal action tied to their role in the collapse of WaMu. News of the letters was reported Monday by the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. Former president and chief operating officer Steve Rotella and David Schneider, former president of the failed bank's home-loan division, also received the letters.

The FDIC has filed civil lawsuits against former directors and officers at hundreds of banks that were closed during the financial crisis.

Deleware Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath refused to confirm WaMu's reorganization plan in January, finding that the protections from future legal liabilities the plan granted to the company's directors, officers and professionals were either unwarranted or too broad. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom - an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities - has ever been convicted.

Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. The shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature forex cbm gov mm index php fx rate our society: The SEC and the Justice Department have evolved into a bizarre species of social surgeon serving this nonjailable class, expert not at administering punishment and justice, but at finding and removing criminal responsibility from the bodies of the accused.

The systematic lack of regulation has left even the country's top regulators frustrated. Lynn Forex strategy calculator currency exchange rates converter, a former chief accountant for the SEC, laughs darkly at the idea that the criminal justice system is broken when it comes to Wall Street.

Over and over, even the most obvious cases of fraud and insider dealing got gummed up in the works, and high-ranking executives were almost never prosecuted for their crimes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. In a similar case, a sales executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC.

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't eprofits work from home real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes.

But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property - which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally.

When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional - when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice - this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality. Some employees of Florida's largest "foreclosure mill" were given jewelry, cars and houses in exchange for altering and forging key documents used to obtain foreclosures, according to a statement released in October by the Florida Attorney General's Office and reported in the Tampa Tribune.

The office released transcripts of interviews it conducted for its investigation into the law offices of David J. They painted a picture of a secret system designed to speed up the foreclosure process. Attorneys and staff members forged signatures, changed dates, passed around notary stamps. The office would move forward with cases even if they forex trading sistema the homeowner had not been properly notified of the lawsuit.

Two former Sterns employees described long tables where employees would sign as a witness and notarize documents without actually witnessing the signing. Twice a day, the company's chief operating officer, Cheryl Samons, would go into the office and sign documents at a time - without reading them.

As a perk of Samons' job, Stern's office would routinely pay her personal mortgage, a car payment, her electric bills and her cell phone bill, according to Samons' legal assistant, who told investigators Stern also bought Samons a new BMW sport utility vehicle every year and gave her and other employees jewelry.

Additionally, Stern purchased employee David Vargas a house, a car fxcm stock trading review a cell phone. After the economy crashed in the fall ofFlorida, along with Nevada, Arizona and Genuine work from home jobs in visakhapatnam, became foreclosure central.

Stern's caseload rose from 15, foreclosures in to 70, in His staff tripled to more than 1, To keep up with demand, Stern set up offices in the Philippines. The firm moved into a plush, marble-floored headquarters near Miami that was all glass and fountains.

In October, the megabanks started to withdraw their cases from Stern's firm. Fannie fired Stern on Oct. Stern's staff of 1, has dwindled to The firm's fall has spawned more chaos in Florida's circus-like foreclosure courts.

Recently, even the most infamous "rocket docket," in Lee County, where judges were reported to have signed off on a foreclosure every 30 seconds, ground to a virtual standstill as the Stern firm withdrew from case after case.

Some of Stern's remaining ai stock trader show up court with greasy hair, fleece jackets and food-stained clothing. As for Stern, if federal and state prosecutors file criminal charges, he could end up in prison. So is the rent on his headquarters. He's now in default. The explosion is almost deafening. Bank of America, the nation's largest bank, put foreclosures in 23 states on hold in order to review whether "certain affidavits have followed the correct procedures," the company said.

The bank was the third major lender to freeze foreclosures in those states due to flawed paperwork. Morgan and Ally Financial had announced similar measures. A Bank of America official acknowledged in a legal proceeding that she signed up to 8, foreclosure documents a month and typically didn't read them.

The Bank of America executive said in a February deposition in a Massachusetts bankruptcy case that she signed 7, to 8, foreclosure documents a month.

The official admitted to these acts of perjury in testimony under oath in February. Chase admitted the same thing in May. GMAC confessed in June. Why did the big banks wait until October to take action? What high biggest emerging market stocks executives were aware of the perjury and conspired to keep it under wraps?

Millions of felonies committed by banks went unreported for five to ten months. Apparently alarmed about such a possibility, one of the major title insurance companies, Old Republic National Title, has sent a bulletin to agents saying that "until further notice" it would not insure title to properties foreclosed upon by GMAC Mortgage, the country's fourth-largest home lender and one of the two big lenders at the center of the current controversy.

Other lenders said Thursday, September 30, that their foreclosure filings, including the crucial affidavits, had been properly done. A Citigroup spokesman said the lender required "annual training for our foreclosure employees on the proper execution of affidavits, including having personal knowledge of the information in the affidavit.

A Wells Fargo spokeswoman said "the affidavits we sign are accurate. It can't be done that way. The plaintiff in the case is Fannie Mae, the mortgage holding company that failed during the financial crisis and is now under government conservatorship. GMAC serviced the loan for Fannie Mae. The judge in the case set aside his summary judgment in favor of Fannie when he read Mr. Cox's deposition of a GMAC executive, Jeffrey Stephan, who said he never reviewed the file he had signed.

The case will go to trial. Rep Alan Grayson D-FL explains the foreclosure crisis in a coherent summary on YouTube. Law enforcement officials in several states, including Texas, Maryland and Connecticut, are demanding a suspension of foreclosures until lenders can prove they are using legal methods.

While homeowners in those states and elsewhere must usually show damages to win a lawsuit, "attorneys general can just sue over deceptive sales practices and get penalties," said Christopher Peterson, a University of Utah law professor who specializes in commercial and contract law, reported by Bloomberg.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley asked GMAC, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo to suspend foreclosures and evictions in that state. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said today he was expanding his investigation into questionable foreclosure tactics to include 14 mudahnya belajar forex pdf lenders.

Cooper, who announced earlier he was looking into allegations about GMAC, also asked lenders to stop foreclosures in his state until they can confirm they are complying with laws. In addition to the investigation of Ally which began last month, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on Oct. Abbott also asked lenders and servicers to halt "all sales of properties previously foreclosed upon" and stop all options butterfly strategy. Lenders took possession of a record 95, U.

Lenders, loan servicers and even title insurance companies are facing litigation on multiple fronts, said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and a former federal prosecutor who worked on cases involving bank fraud. You don't even know the parameters of this yet.

Reviews of affidavits and other loan muddy waters stock market that may have been signed without personal examination by the signers should be completed in a few weeks, JPMorgan and Bank of America said last week. So perjury is okay so long as the facts turn out to be true.

That's a new twist to an old legal concept. Homeowners in multiple lawsuits claim lenders have been using falsified documents to foreclose on homes, at times when they don't even hold titles to the properties. Individuals who signed false affidavits or falsely claimed clear titles to properties can be subject to criminal prosecution, including perjury charges, Peterson said. Any action of any employee can be looked at, but what they're looking at is the volume of transactions and the involvement of senior level management.

The Center for Responsible Lending reports that California and the United States are in the midst of the worst foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression. Across the country, foreclosures have hit an all-time high, with nearly one in ten homes with a mortgage currently in some stage of foreclosure. The Center posted a report in August" Dreams Deferred ," that paints a picture of the foreclosure crisis in California, examines the who, the where and the why of foreclosures in the Golden State and discusses what we should do to prevent as many avoidable foreclosures as possible.

The median size of a foreclosed home in California is 1, square feet, with two-thirds 67 percent of these homes having three or fewer bedrooms. The Center proposes the following steps be taken to prevent foreclosures: Require servicers to complete the review of any loan modification application before beginning the foreclosure process or referring the loan file to a foreclosure attorney.

Incorporate principal reduction into loan modification programs, especially where housing prices have contributed to lack of affordability. Lift the ban on the modification of principal residence mortgages by bankruptcy judges.

Expand funding and capacity of housing counseling stock market crash effect and legal aid providers. On September 30, California Attorney Jerry Brown sent a letter demanding that JP Morgan Chase halt foreclosures in California.

Then two advocacy groups - the Los Angeles-based Alliance of Californians for Community Islamic share trading india and the Greenlining Institute of Berkeley - called for a foreclosure moratorium. Both groups called on Brown to support a moratorium. On Friday, October 8, Bank of America announced that it was placing a moratorium on all foreclosures across the U.

Too good stock brokerage interview questions be true? A week later, on the Santa Barbara Courthouse steps, Bank of America was especially active in foreclosure sales.

Meanwhile, Jerry Brown joined a coalition of state attorneys general from all 50 states and dozens of state banking regulators in a multi-state effort to demand that lenders find solutions to serious and potentially work at home chennai without investment problems in the foreclosure process across the country. In a unprecedented show of force, the states moved in to fill a void caused by years of inaction at the federal level.

The bottom-up response to an economic crisis caused by federally regulated banks doesn't seem to embarrass the Obama administration as it continues to urge banks to foreclose as quickly as possible. The Federal Secretos de forex pdf Finance Agency stressed that foreclosures on delinquent homeowners "should proceed without delay.

Delays in foreclosures add cost and other burdens for communities, investors and taxpayers," said the agency, which regulates seized mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Los Angeles Times opening penny stock trading account on October 14, "As all 50 states escalate efforts to quell a rising runescape money maker hack free download 2016 no survey no password of foreclosures, one prominent figure is resisting calls for the federal government to do more: Banks seizedhomes in September, a record for any month, RealtyTrac reported Wednesday.

California led the nation with 17, the Irvine company said. Even so, top White House officials worry that imposing a national moratorium on foreclosures would backfire by driving down prices even more. The unraveling of the foreclosure spectacle continued as JPMorgan Chase announced on September 29 that it was halting 56, foreclosures. Following the footsteps of Ally Financial aka GMACChase acknowledged that employees had signed foreclosure documents without reviewing them and without personal knowledge that the facts recited were true.

The New York Times reported the story. In May, a Chase employee testified in a deposition that her team had signed affidavits in 18, foreclosures a month without checking to see if the facts they swore to under oath were true.

Now that the all-time record for perjury has been reported in Bloombergafter Chase kept it under wraps for four months, Beth Ann Cottrell has taken the place of Jeffrey Stephan, a document processor for Ally Financial, as the worst bankster in the world. Stephan made headlines last week when it was reported that he had signed off on 10, foreclosures per month without reading them.

He was known by consumer advocates as the "super robot signer. The Washington Post reported on October 1 that a top federal bank regulator has directed seven of the nation's largest lenders to review their foreclosure processes after learning about the widespread mishandling of homeowner evictions by the industry. The banks contacted by regulators include J. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC, PNC Bank, U. Bank, and Wells Fargo. John Walsh, acting director of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told lawmakers during a hearing on Thursday, September 30,"We both want to see that they fix the processing problems but also to look to see whether there is specific harm in individual cases.

OCC spokesman Kevin Murki said that in J. Morgan's case, the bank "determined that its affidavit procedures were non-compliant with foreclosure processing requirements in some states. Referring to a front-page article in the Washington Post, Dodd called the news about lenders initiating improper foreclosures "very troubling. Bair and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke - to comment on the matter. Bair, whose agency insures deposits at thousands of U.

Review your foreclosure papers carefully if the bank is trying to steal your home. How many forex strategist jen to launches hedge fund affidavits or declarations did that company representative sign without personal knowledge?

The purpose of such documents is to commit the signator to swear under penalty of perjury that the facts recited are true. We've all heard about perjury. It's how they impeached Bill Clinton. It's how they locked up Alger Hiss.

In nonjudicial states like California, judges tend to look the other way. They're much too busy playing golf or granting probation to snorting movie stars to concern themselves with people losing their homes. So on September 24,California Attorney General Jerry Brown ordered that Ally Financial halt all foreclosure activity in California.

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Brown's letter to Ally and press release left no doubt that California statutes cannot be trampled by hyperactive banks frothing at the mouth with unbridled greed. Chase will be next on Brown's list. The tide is turning. A Florida lawyer, Matthew Weidner, said, "The GMAC announcement was the mushroom cloud. The fallout will burn through the entire mortgage servicing industry.

Driving up the through Oakland inI was listening to "The Mortgage Crisis," a seminar presented at the California State Bar Convention. The speakers were experts in mortgage and foreclosure law.

The speakers were not offering strategies or solutions. They didn't even sound like lawyers. Then it hit me. The banks must have broken the system! The speakers sounded like shell-shocked casualties wandering through the smoldering ruins of the World Banking System searching for clues. This is a collection of stories and news reports about how the biggest banks committed systemic fraud on the American people, robbed them of their savings, and collected a trillion dollars from the U.

Treasury under the disguise of insurance payments. Fifteen million American families face losing stock market scholarship homes to banks while the banksters pay themselves billions in bonuses and post record profits. Dick Fuld took home over half a billion dollars while he steered Lehman Bros.

44 Important Parts of History You're Picturing Wrong

Kerry Killinger walked out of the smoldering ruins of Washington Mutual with over a hundred million. Will they retreat behind their walls to tally their latest plunder, or will they trade their mansions and hideaways for a different set of walls, giving new meaning to Wall Street?

Why did President Obama invite Chase CEO Jamie Dimon over for dinner on the eve of the President's speech introducing his financial reform package? Why have none of the finance czars been fired or imprisoned for demolishing the global economy? In Santa Barbara County, 12, Notices of Trustee's Sale were recorded from January 1, to December 31, By contrast, in the previous 6-year period, from January 1, to December 31,there were 1, Notices of Trustee's Sale. So Santa Barbara has suffered a twelve-fold increase in trustee's sales.

Meanwhile, California has 30, homes in foreclosure. Fifty thousand people have lost best pivot point indicator mt4 homes in Santa Barbara in the past six years.

Why isn't any local newspaper reporting this story? Not one story in the News-Press, the Independent, Santa Maria Times, KEYT, KSBY, KCOY, or any of the local radio stations has described this tragedy, while the illusion of prosperity persists. That's over 6 million people who expect to be escorted from their homes by armed people in uniforms. The only thing that's missing from this picture is the goose-step.

Banks shouldn't mess with Margaret Carswell. She borrowed money from WaMu, made all her payments on time. Then Chase started sending her letters that said, "Give me the money. WaMu is becoming Chase. Margaret Carswell sent Chase a Qualified Written Request.

Chase said, "Give me all your money. Chase said, "Give me your house. Does Chase have a single document to show who owns the loan, who is entitled to the money, or even who holds the promissory note?

Then they were bundled and sent somewhere else to be notarized. We're talking jail time, and a lot of people can look forward to big damages in addition to getting their homes back. Here is a copy of the article by Ariana Eunjung Cha: Ally Financial Legal Issue With Foreclosures Florida's Streamlined Foreclosure Process.

Bma trading signals NY Times reports on Florida's new judicial bullet train that speeds up the foreclosure process by establishing a special court system staffed by retired judges. Twenty percent of Florida's mortgages are delinquent or in foreclosure. The article features the elusive David Stern, whose law firm in Plantation, Florida, employs more than people. The firm filed 70, foreclosure cases last year.

The Alameda County Public Health Department has posted a new report, " Rebuilding Neighborhoods, Restoring Health. Here are some of the findings:. An estimated 40, homeowners across a seven-county region spanning the South Bay, East Bay and the San Francisco metro area were at least three months behind on their mortgages but not yet in foreclosure as of Aprilaccording to CoreLogic, which tracks mortgage performance data.

It could take years," said Sam Khater, an economist with CoreLogic, which tracks mortgage performance. Kenneth Rosen, chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley, said banks and the government "are being quite rational" how much does a notary signing agent make stretching out the foreclosure process to avoid displacing homeowners and depressing prices.

He estimated that fewer than 15 percent of Bay Area mortgage-holders who are 90 days overdue will get foreclosed on. Foreclosure is certainly taking longer than it used to.

According to figures from ForeclosureRadar, for the California homes that were foreclosed on in June, it took an average of spread forex iwbank from the notice of default to the time the property was using support and resistance in forex trading. That's nearly eight months on average - meaning some homeowners stay in their homes much longer.

In Januarythe average time to foreclose was a little more than four months. In June, mortgage financing company Fannie Mae said, "But we basic rules investing stock market punish those strategic defaulters by prohibiting them from getting a Fannie-backed loan for seven years after their foreclosure, instead of the typical five.

A mortgage is a non-recourse loan, Fannie, you floozy. The borrower has a contractual right to walk away under the written agreement with the lender. How to promote forex brokerage firms where does Fannie Maea private corporation, find the audacity to threaten homeowners who choose to exercise their contractual rights? It behooves each of us, as we wander through the wasteland of a broken system, to set our sights on the abolition of tyranny and the restoration of honor in America.

In fact, why not call Fannie right now at and give 'em a holler and a royal hoot in the but! The Center for Responsible Lending reports that 6. Federal and state judges keep shoveling homeowners into the streets. Have they volunteered as firemen on the runaway trains that are hurtling the United Indicator to download binary options bully towards an abyss?

The engineers are the bankers who report record profits while the nation sinks. The LA Times reported on July 22 that banks stepped up their repossession of California homes in the second quarter.

The number of trustee's deeds - the last stage of foreclosure - increased 4. A total of 47, California houses were sold on the courthouse steps April - June, and almost all those sales were to the banks.

Federal Reserve Chariman Ben Bernanke said option market making ebook economic outlook was "unusually uncertain This is the worst labor market since the Great Depression. Record profits for banks. Record foreclosures and unemployment.

Things are heating up in the American Dream. The suit Coakley brought against Morgan Stanley alleges that the company provided money for retail loan outlets to target low-income borrowers and lure them into accepting loans they could not afford. The bundling of the riskiest type of mortgages into securities turned marketing of livestock products in kenya U.

The New York Times reported, "the Goldman settlement - both its size and its legal implications - brought a palpable sense of relief on Wall Street. After two months of strident claims and equally strident denials, the matter was finally settled, and for a price Goldman could easily afford.

The penalty amounted to about 15 days of profits. You might feel the pinch, but it wouldn't slow you down. But wait - the Goldman will pay the U. He pro stock hockey sticks difference afford to go straight. California Attorney General Edmund G.

Brown, issued a press release cautioning homeowners to avoid forensic loan audits, branding them phony foreclosure-relief. Responding to those letters is your best bet for saving your house. Maybe Jerry Brown could take a hint from Robert Lewis, AIG's chief risk officer, who said in prepared remarks submitted to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission FCIC"We were wrong about how bad things could get. What ended up happening was so extreme that it was beyond anything we had planned for. Angelides, former California treasurer, said to Goldman President Gary Cohn on July 1, "It's pretty clear that you helped build stockbroker suicides 1929 bomb.

The New York Times reported on June 27,that Dylan Ratigan, a financial news reporter, had transformed himself into an outspoken opponent of too-big-to-fail banks and the politicians whom he calls their servants.

In the recent fight over financial reform, he lent a megaphone to people who wanted an end to "too big to fail," and he called on viewers to lobby the Senators in his imaginary Bankster Party. All this from a man who, until recently, hosted a stock-picking show on CNBC, the cable personification of Wall Street.

Ratigan, who labels himself a taxpayer advocate, rails against the "vampire" banks who "have assumed control of our government. Ratigan said in an interview last week. The American people are being held hostage by a banking system that acts like a government subsidized casino. There are early signs that viewers are responding favorably to Mr. His show, which is on MSNBC at 4 p. Basis Capital paints a picture of a deliberate scheme by Goldman Sachs since early to offload toxic securities linked to US subprime mortgages.

It also alleges moves by the investment bank to make large bets against the securities at the same time it was reassuring clients the securities were sound. The same week Basis and Goldman were closing a deal to buy two slices of the billion dollar security called Timberwolf, a senior sales executive at the Goldman sent an email to a colleague describing the instrument as "one shitty deal".

Senator Carl Levin quoted the email repeatedly in the Senate Investigations Subcommittee's hearing on April Timberwolf was a collateralised debt obligation holding pieces of other CDOs that were ultimately backed by US subprime mortgage bonds.

Within five months of its debut, Timberwolf had lost 80 per cent of its value and was liquidated in Their lawsuit was filed on June 8 in Manhattan federal court. Meanwhile, the London Times reported on June 11 that John Napier, the chairman of the British insurer RSA, formerly Royal and Sun Alliance, was circulating a letter to President Obama.

There is a sense here that these attacks are being made because BP is British. If you compare the damage inflicted on the economies of the Western world by polluted securities from the irresponsible, unchecked greed and avarice of leading USA 2 hour binary options successfully banks, there has not been the same personalised response westfield bondi australia day opening hours or from countries beyond the US.

Perhaps a case of double standards? Napier was referring to a remark the President made after an interviewer asked him whether this wasn't a time to "kick some butt" rather than be calm and collected. A month ago, I was meeting with fishermen down there, do you make money sports betting in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be.

And I don't sit around just talking to experts sifma stock market game prizes this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially had the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick. So, you know, this is not theater. Great Britain and Australia are two of America's closest allies. With friends like that, who needs enemies? Obama said he would have fired BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward if Hayward worked for him, but he has not suggested that any of the CEOs on Wall Street step down.

His administration remains populated by Wall Street insiders. We need to know the facts to solve a problem, and they're deliberately leaving in place the people who caused the problem. We hear about companies that promise to bring class action lawsuits against the banks.

Once they're in a class action, the banks cannot foreclose against you. I wouldn't place too much faith in class action lawsuits against banks.

The courts have been throwing out class actions in this arena. See page 27 of the California Court of Appeals decision in Mabry v. Aurora published June 2, It would be rare for a court to stop multiple foreclosures based on a class action complaint, and the order would probably be reversed within days, if not hours. If an advocacy group hired one of the top law firms in the country and it was prepared to assign several dozen lawyers to the case, then you might take it seriously.

Otherwise, it would be a futile effort. Almost thirty years ago, seventy insurance companies were sued by Johns Manville in The Coordinated Asbestos Litigation. Early in the case, JM announced that it was producing 10 million relevant documents at a warehouse in Colorado. There were 72 corporations in that case, and each of them produced a mountain of documents in the same month.

A lawyer couldn't just throw up his hands and say, "No way, Dude! That was the good old days. Congress created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in and gave it the mission to examine the causes of the financial meltdown. The Commission sent many requests for documents to Goldman Sachs, and complained when The Goldman delayed providing documents. On May 18, it produced five terabytes of records - which the commission estimates to be the equivalent of about three billion pages.

What would a couple of lawyers in a small firm do with three billion documents in a class action lawsuit? Goldman is just one bank. A grassroots approach with many simultaneous lawsuits stands a better chance of changing the corrupt practices that broke the financial system in the past decade.

The banks can't be in ten thousand courtrooms at once. We hope you find the information on ChaseChase to be helpful. The above house in Montecito was scheduled to be sold on the Santa Barbara courthouse steps on June 3,according to a Notice of Trustee's Sale published by California Reconveyance Co. What are the chances that Chase could actually prove that it has any legitimate right to sell the property? This house in Santa Barbara was scheduled to be sold on the Santa Barbara courthouse steps on June 3,according to a Notice of Trustee's Sale published by California Reconveyance Co.

What are the odds that WaMu followed any conventional underwriting practices when it made the loan? An estimated total of 15, houses will have been sold in foreclosure sales in the United States by the end of as the result of the insatiable greed that infected Wall Street during the past decade.

It is up to the people to stop the domicide. Securitization received a significant stress test, and not only failed miserably, but also helped drag down much of the world's economy with its failure. The current recession is, to a surprising extent, caused by the effects of securitization itself.

While other factors also played a role in the meltdown, subprime securitization may represent one of the greatest structurally-caused financial implosions of the modern world. In essence, subprime securitization acted like a virus that infected the entire American financial industry and affected much of the world. How Securitization Caused the Subprime Meltdown " Connecticut Law Review May DOT Office of Inspector General released its Evaluation of Federal Regulatory Ovesight of Washington Mutual Bank on April This is more ammunition for trial judges to take judicial notice of the fact that WaMu went crazy and broke the bank.

When WaMu made a mortgage loan, they didn't expect that the borrower would be able to pay it back. Here is one section of the DOT Department of Treasury Report: WaMu underwriting policies and practices made what were already inherently high-risk products even riskier.

For example, WaMu originated a significant number of loans as "stated income" loans. Stated income loans, sometimes referred to as "low-doc" loans, allow borrowers to simply write in their income on the loan application without providing any supporting documentation. Approximately 90 percent of all of WaMu's home equity loans, 73 percent of Option ARMs, and 50 percent of subprime loans were "stated income" loans. WaMu also originated loans with high loan-to-value ratios.

Specifically, WaMu held a significant percentage of loans where the loan amount exceeded 80 percent of the underlying property. For example, WaMu's financial statements showed that 44 percent of subprime loans, 35 percent of home equity loans, and 6 percent of Option ARMs were originated for total loan amounts in excess of 80 percent of the value of the underlying property. Further, WaMu did not require borrowers to purchase private mortgage insurance PMI. PMI protects lenders against the loss on default when the loan amount exceeds 80 percent of the home's value.

WaMu's review of appraisals establishing the value of single family homes did not always follow standard residential appraisal methods because WaMu allowed a homeowner's estimate of the value of the home to be included on the form sent from WaMu to third-party appraisers, thereby biasing the appraiser's evaluation.

Finally, WaMu did not provide adequate oversight of third-party brokers who were compensated for originating most of WaMu's mortgages but were not WaMu employees. InWaMu had only 14 WaMu employees overseeing more than 34, third-party brokers.

Although WaMu used scorecards to evaluate its third-party brokers, the scorecards did not measure the rate of significant underwriting and documentation deficiencies attributable to individual brokers. These matters are under further review by law enforcement agencies.

So WaMu dispensed with underwriting, discarded traditional principles of debt to equity ratios, and disposed of any oversight function to keep track of its 34, independent loan brokers. The Office of Thrift Supervision looked the other way. And now our leaders in Washington and on Wall Street are coaxing trial judges across the country to pass the buck to the 15 million households who are being thrown out into the street. I had lunch with Scott the other day.

Scott is a broker who helped me buy my house 18 years ago. We're all feeling the pinch. Scott suggested why so few homeowners in default are hearing from the junior lien holders.

Everett Sloane - Wikipedia

Let's say you took out an equity line of credit secured by a second mortgage or deed of trust, and it was not purchase money to buy the home. If the first forecloses and pays the second nothing, or only a fraction of what is owed, the second can collect the unpaid balance from the borrower.

Let's say they have four years to sue under state law. If the second puts pressure on the debtor Who's falling behind on the first, the debtor is more likely to file for bankruptcy to discharge What's on second, but if the second bides their time while the debtor works things out with Who's on first and resumes making payments, there may be a knock at the door as the four-year limit approaches.

A debtor who is getting back on their feet will be less likely to file for bankruptcy and tarnish their credit, and most homeowners expect that things will get better in four years.

Few have any idea Why they haven't been pestered with calls from What's on second. I just read through the whole site. I am in awe. You are amassing a serious amount of excellent and relevant information. Your writing and description of this information is outstanding. If the bank is trying to take your house, the bills are piling up, your friends are shaking their heads, and the neighbors never invite you over for drinks anymore, just remember, it could be a lot worse.

You could be Yitzchak Tessler. Bloomberg reported on April 29,that Lehman Brothers sued the Israeli developer to foreclose on his vacant story building at Broadway and 5th Avenue in New York City. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in September Somebody must have forgotten to tell the lawyers.

So when you're feeling a little down, just repeat after me: Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, testified on April 27,before the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations. It was the fourth hearing chaired by Sen. Carl Levin into the financial crisis, and the role of investment banks was the focus.

The committee focused on a deal that sounded like a Wall St. Within five months, the CDO lost 80 percent of its value, the Bear Stearns hedge fund collapsed, and the AAA-rated securities were downgraded to junk status. A Goldman trader who managed the deal accurately predicted that the day Timberwolf was issued would be "a day that will live in infamy.

Levin immediately preceeding Blankfein's testimony. Blankfein answered questions for three hours. John McCain R Ariz said to Blankfein, "I don't know if Goldman Sachs has done anything illegal. From the reading of these emails Although a tone of indignation filled the room, this hearing was not good news for homeowners in distress. Other than fleeting references to the plight of people losing their homes, little was said about the wholesale fraud perpetrated on the American people, who were tricked into signing over their homes in exchange for "liar's loans" and "crap loans" which were bundled into "junk," toxic synthetic collateralized debt obligations CDOs sold to investment funds in "shitty deals" in which Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street syndicates bet against their clients - the quotes are all from emails in Goldman files.

You don't kick 15 million families out on the street and fix it with a little twist here and a little turn there in the regulations for bankers while they pay themselves billions of dollars in bonuses as a reward for their crime orgy at the same time they accept billions in taxpayer bailouts. That's too many people on the street. That's too much money lining the pockets of the crooks. Banks are stealing millions of homes after risking no money of their own.

Maybe the walls on Wall Street need to come tumbling down so that crooked politicians who are bankrolled by the bankers can finally see that they must answer to the people, not to America's Most Wanted:. After scolding Blankfein, Levin read his closing statement haltingly, promising amendments to Senator Dodd's financial reform bill that would limit two bank practices: Levin has said the panel will decide after the hearings whether to make a formal referral to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.

No help for homeowners was explored at the hearing, and it seemed that nothing was learned. Levin's closing statement had been written before the hearing began. It was political theater, a moment in the pillory for banksters who wreaked havoc and still hold their jobs. Levin sounded disappointed with his encore. Systems resist change - that's their job - but they also respond to external forces. To bring the walls down, people will sue the basterds with thousands of lawsuits, stand in front of the banksters' limousines to serve summons, TROs, subpoenas, and indictments, post maps to their exclusive clubs and hideouts, visit their tropical islands on rubber rafts and dugout canoes.

The pressure is rapidly mounting from outside the beltway, and Washington will change. That's how systems work. With political pressure mounting, Senate Republicans relented on Wednesday and agreed to let Democrats open debate on legislation that would impose the most far-reaching overhaul of the nation's financial regulatory system since the aftermath of the Depression. If Washington continues with business as usual, Obama will have Jamie Dimon over for dinner at the White House while homeowners grapple with predatory loan modification programs, waiving their rights to prosecute the fraud perpetrated against them when NINJA loans were consumated.

Waxman, the California Democrat who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Fuld will do fine," Waxman said. At another, he said he had not sold the "vast majority" of them.

Fuld said he was a victim, not an architect, of the collapse, blaming a "crisis of confidence" in the markets for dooming his firm. Reckless management had nothing to do with it. In other words, Fuld harvested over half a billion dollars while he destroyed Lehman Bros. The Yale Journal on Regulation Vol. Executive Compensation at Bear Stearns and Lehman, Why have there been no convictions since this collapse began three years ago?

Obama might well be remembered for making Herbert Hoover look good. Bill Black, former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Board, testified on April 20 before the House Financial Services Committee on the failure of Lehman Brothers. Dick Fuld, former CEO of Lehman right sat at the table with Black during his testimony before the committee.

Lehman was the leading purveyer of liars loans in the world throughout the decade, Black said. Liars loans will cause a failure.

The only way to make money is to deceive others by selling bad paper, and that will eventually lead to liability and failure as well. SEC decided to have only 24 people in their comprehensive program when it should have assigned hundreds. Secretary Geithner testified that Lehman's insolvency pushed the financial system to brink of collapse, but Chairman Bernanke said he only dispatched two people to Lehman Brothers. The Fed has had authority since to regulate all mortgage lenders under HOEPA.

We have known for a decade how to stop them. All of the major regulatory agencies were complicit. We have a self-fulfilling policy of regulatory failure because of the leadership in this era. Bill Moyers interviewed Black three days later on April 23, In addition to Lehman Brothers, they discussed the civil lawsuit filed in April against Goldman Sachs.

The complaint names only one person, Fabrice Tourre, who was 27 at the time. Would he have been acting without supervision on a deal of that enormity? And this was part of a package of about 18 deals as well. So as big as this package was, and it was huge, the overall package was absolutely the type of thing that received personal attention of the leaders, the absolute top leaders at Goldman Sachs.

So it's very curious to me that the SEC has failed to name the higher-ups. Why did it take so long for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, to kick into gear on this? I mean, have they kicked into gear? Well, they haven't kicked into gear fully, or they'd be naming Blankfein and other senior leaders of Goldman.

And they've, as you just mentioned, they've only gone after a junior person. And there would be, if they were really in gear, there would be criminal charges here. And if they were really in gear, there'd be a broad investigation, not just of Goldman, but of all of these major entities. In the last three weeks, we have finally done a half-baked investigation, mind you. And we have found strong evidence of fraud at all four places.

And we have looked previously at Fannie and Freddie and found the same thing. So the only six places we've looked, at really elite institutions, we've found strong evidence of fraud.

So where are the other investigations? Why are there no arrests? Why are there no convictions? Well, Bill, where are the other investigations? Why have there been no arrests? Why have there been no convictions?

Because we have still Bush's wrecking crew in charge of the key regulatory agencies. Why are they still in place? They have abysmal records as major causes of this crisis. You talk about the Bush appointees still being there, but Goldman's former lobbyist, his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner's chief of staff, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, who may soon have new power over derivatives, worked for Goldman.

So did the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, the under Secretary of State is a former Goldman employee. Goldman's hired Barack Obama's recent chief counsel from the White House on his defense team. So is this administration, which still has some Bush holdovers in it, and now has a lot of Goldman people in it, is this administration going to be able to pass judgment on Goldman Sachs?

Well, so far, they haven't been able to do it. They can't even get themselves to use the word fraud. Ten days later, Bill Black appeared in a Huffington Post video interview, 'The Perfect Crime. This time, there have been no indictments. They got away with it and they made more money than anybody in history. Currency, not long after Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and demolished the wall erected in between Wall Street brothels and Main Street banks:.

This advisory is to alert you to abusive lending practices that may involve violations of fair lending and other consumer protection laws and regulations. Objective, fairly-applied subprime and risk-based lending have been important tools in expanding access to credit.

However, certain lending practices -- largely engaged in by non-bank entities -- have come under intense scrutiny recently.

Most of these practices involve the setting of prices, fees, and other terms and conditions in a manner that drastically departs from those used by more traditional and responsible prime and subprime lenders.

These practices may involve violations of fair lending statutes and other consumer protection provisions. They may also lead to increased credit, legal, and reputation risk.

For this reason, national banks and their direct subsidiaries should review their direct and indirect lending practices to determine whether they are involved in activities that may be considered abusive or predatory, and should take corrective action where needed. This advisory does not attempt to define what constitutes abusive or predatory lending, and many of the indicators of such lending may not be readily available to examiners.

However, examiners should be alert for the following indications that an institution may be engaging in abusive lending practices:. Collateral or Equity "Stripping" - loans made in reliance on the liquidation value of the borrower's home or other collateral, rather than the borrower's independent ability to repay, with the possible or even intended result of foreclosure or the need to refinance under duress; Pricing and terms, whether interest rates or fees, that far exceed the true risk and cost of making the loan; Targeting persons, such as the elderly, women, minorities, and persons living in low- or moderate-income areas, who are perceived to be less financially sophisticated or otherwise vulnerable to abusive loan practices; Inadequate disclosure of the true costs and risks of loan transactions; Lending practices that are fraudulent, coercive, unfair, deceptive or otherwise illegal; and the list goes on When examiners identify circumstances that may lead to a conclusion that a bank is engaged in predatory lending, they should inform both the supervisory office deputy comptroller and the deputy comptroller for Compliance Operations, who will determine the appropriate course of action.

Hawke testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on April 8, When banks stopped underwriting, the system stopped working. They didn't look to see if the borrower could pay back the loan because they didn't care.

Default would be somebody else's problem, because the bank was not putting up its own money and did not ever intend to own the loan. So there was no expectation that the borrower would perform. So there was no contract. The promissory note is unenforceable. Foreclosure is not lawful. The bank expected nothing from the homeowner, so now the bank gets nothing.

The grantee on the grant deed keeps the home. RealtyTrac said on April 15,that the number of U. More than a quarter of a million houses, places that people used to call home, were consumed by the same banks that caused the financial meltdown.

Foreclosure filings - default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions - were reported onproperties in the first quarter, a 16 percent increase from the first quarter of One in every U.

California alone accounted for 23 percent of the nation's total foreclosure activity in the first quarter withproperties receiving a foreclosure notice. Florida's total was second highest, withproperties receiving a foreclosure filing during the quarter, and Arizona's total was third with 55, properties. Banks are scooping up homes at a rate unprecedented in human history. Not even Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler succeeded in driving people out of their homes at the rate of a million households per year, dislocating millions of people.

The 21st century wars are economic. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO and Gary Cohn, president, wait for Obama's speech on Wall Street. Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in a press release on April 24, President Obama said in his weekly radio address on Saturday, April 24, "In the absence of common sense rules, Wall Street firms took enormous, irresponsible risks that imperiled our financial system and hurt just about every sector of our economy.

I still remember when banks were considered a safe place to keep your money. The safe was a prominent feature in every bank, and the bank manager was a human being you could trust. These immense salaries rewarded men whose claim to fame is that they literally broke the bank. The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States.

If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time. Shame, Fear and Social Management of the Housing Crisis," by Brent T. White, The University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law Oct. And, as further evidence of the shame and guilt felt by those who experience foreclosure, large damage awards for humiliation are common features of successful suits against lenders for wrongful foreclosure.

David Stevens, HUD Assistant Secretary for Housing, parrots the government line, drawn by President Obama, that anyone who can afford to keep making the payments should stay in their house, even if they will remain underwater for the next 15 years.

The policy of the Administration is to shift the burden of the housing meltdown from the banks to the homeowners by shaming them into clinging to a sinking ship. It is a corrupt line that has not basis in law. The mortgage contract is based on the premise that the buyer can walk away and hand the keys to the bank. The term commonly used to describe foreclosure by those who face it is "terrifying. Foreclosure is seen as the end of life as one knows it: In short, fear - like shame and guilt - is a powerful motivator in homeowner decisions not to default.

Federal policy proclaims that homeowners are - for the most part - not "ruthless" and won't walk away from their mortgages simply because they have negative equity. Most homeowners walk only when they can no longer afford to stay.

Federal policy can only proceed on the premise that affordability is the prime consideration as long as the moral and social constraints on foreclosure remain strong. The government thus has an incentive, along with certain other economic and social institutions interested in limiting the number of foreclosures, in cultivating guilt and shame in those who would contemplate walking away. Similarly, knowing that guilt and shame alone are not enough to prevent many individuals from defaulting once negative equity is extreme, these same institutions have an interest in increasing the perceived cost of foreclosure by cultivating fear of financial disaster for those who contemplate it.

A homeowner contemplating a strategic default would be hard pressed to avoid the message that doing so would place them among the most despicable members of society. It is thus not surprising that a large number of media stories about individuals who walk on their mortgages indicate that these individuals ask that their "last name not be used" to protect their privacy.

Gail Cunningham of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling declared in an interview on NPR: However desperate a situation might become for a homeowner, that does not relieve us of our responsibilities. Many homes will not recover equity for more than a dozen years.

When can the owner say that enough is enough? A non-recourse loan is a contract with a provision that allows the owner to walk away. That is not a breach of contract. Business owners do it all the time. Why should homeowners bear the burden of the real estate collapse while big banks enjoy taxpayer bailouts and record profits?

But in one sense, I'm with you, Gail. Don't walk away when the bank adjusts your interest rate through the roof and you can no longer afford to pay. Stay and fight for your home. Don't give it to the bank that made a fraudulant loan, knowing full well that you could never pay it back. If you were the owner of this three-story building that disappeared down a sinkhole in Guatamala City on June 1,would you keep paying the mortgage for the next 30 years?

WaMu CEO Kerry Killinger left and President Stephen Rotella testified before Senator Carl Levin's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations for two hours on April 13, Shameless passing of the buck climaxed with an 8-minute exchange between Mr.

Levin and former CEO Killinger on C-Span that left Mr. Don't get me wrong, I'm not passing judgment on Mr. I've worn that expression when I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar and asserted my inalienable right to remain silent. I just never got caught with billion broken cookies on the floor. They didn't give me a bailout. Shelter is one of the essential elements in life, in addition to food, water, and human contact. It is our homes. And because our homes are essential, the banks are able to mess with those of us in loan modification hell to the point that we become physically ill.

I have read about it, and I have experienced it. The gut-wrenching fear is present almost constantly some days. Most of the people I know who are in loan modification hell are on anti-stress meds.

We are smart people, loving people, compassionate people, and the banks are brutally assaulting our very souls. I know that's strong, but its how I feel and what I know. I know people in this nightmare who throw up many mornings because of the stress. I know people whose chronic illnesses have increased, and who are often too tired to drag themselves out of bed. I know that couples fight, that marriages are threatened, and that people are just overcome with disbelief.

And yet it continues. I worry about the people who are at their wits end. How in the world are they ever going to fight the banks if they are so scared - so almost paralyzed with fear that they will lose? Most people have no ONE person at the bank they can talk to. It's the luck of the draw who you will get on the other end of that line when you call that bank, and I know first hand that no matter how prepared you think you are, that person can reduce you to a puddle with their cruelty.

I often fantasize about a class action lawsuit against Wall Street. Not about the loan mods although that is a fantasy at other timesbut one that is due to the personal damages and stress and health care costs that we have all incurred because of this nightmare. Ah, that is something that might happen in another dimension, unfortunately.

The America I now know now does not care about much about anything more than money and power. It is sad, isn't it? The New York Times reported on tax day, April 15,that the number of homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages after getting loan modifications doubled in March to 2, from 1, in February. HUD's loan modification program started last fall. Sixty percent of modifications undertaken by banks in late were in default a year later, according to the latest Mortgage Metrics Report compiled by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the comptroller of the currency.

Many of these private plans either kept the payments the same or increased them. Inevitably, those mortgages suffered the highest failure rate: Loans for which the payments were decreased by at least 20 percent failed at a slower but still significant rate of about 40 percent.

The Treasury said on Wednesday that new elements of the program focus on allowing distressed homeowners to sell their properties for less than they owe and on shaving the principal owed by borrowers. The notion of cutting principal, however, has already run into some resistance from the big banks, which do not want borrowers to get the idea that their mortgage can be chopped on a whim.

These big banks are the same pranksters who made loans to homeowners who could not possibly pay them back, sold the "toxic assets" to unsuspecting pension funds as bundled securities, then took out insurance in the form of credit default swaps so that they, the banks, would be paid the amount of the loan in full which they no longer owned from insurance companies such as AIG when the borrowers defaulted. Taxpayers bailed out AIG because Wall Street told our President that it was too big to fail.

Then the banks seized the homes. To say that banks don't want borrowers to think their mortgages can be chopped on a whim is not simply "the pot calling the kettle black.

How does a bank sell off a toxic loan, pocket the balance of the loan when the homeowner defaults, then seize the home, evict the residents, and sell the house? It's called fraud, malice, stealing, unjust enrichment. Society's civilized remedy for such conduct is restitution, punitive damages, ostracism, and jail. Oh yes, and we replace the guarded mansion behind the wall with a guarded cell. Many years ago it was tar-and-feathers, lynching, the pillory, or burned at the stake.

In the time of Jesus, they got sacked. The thieving money-changer would be tied up, stuffed in a leather sack with a live monkey, a rooster, or a dog, and tossed in the river.

The Sack was considered a preferable method to crucifixion because the unfortunate soul would be dead before he drowned. Goldman Sachs was the largest recipient of federal funds that were dumped on Wall Street to bail out AIG so that it could honor the banks in full for their credit default swaps bets that homeowners would default on mortgages written by the banks.

It was the biggest heist of all time. Goldman Sachs has given new meaning to the term bank robber. Kaptur elicits admissions from Geithner that he was elected to his previous job as President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank during the George W. Bush's presidency by a handful of private banks. Geithner held that powerful position at the pleasure of the Wall Street banks while they wreaked havoc on the global economy.

For example, Jamie Dimon, C. That's about how much Bush said the invasion of Iraq would cost American taxpayers. Bush's Treasury Secretary was Hank Paulsonwho headed Goldman Sachs before taking over the Treasury. Geithner's gatekeeper, Mark Patterson, Treasury Secretary chief of staff, worked for Goldman Sachs before he joined the Obama administration. Geithner bristles as Kaptur grills him.

She points out that during the critical period when the AIG bailout occured, Geither made calls to Treasury Secretary Paulson, about a hundred calls to Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, and calls to Dan Jester at Goldman Sachs.

Goldman received more AIG bailout funds than any other US corporation. It's probably not a coincidence that Paulson put Edward M. Liddy, a Goldman director, in charge of A. In"The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" was the beginning of the end for the mafia. It was probably just a coincidence that the New York Times ran a headline on Feb. Helped to Mask Debt Fueling Europe's Crisis. Is the boss of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn on your right going the way of Al Capone?

Will he share a jail cell with Jamie Dimon dukes on your left Chairman, President, and CEO of JPMorgan Chase? Will they get along okay in an 8x10' cell? The Times is in hot pursuit: Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermined the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street's help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels. Financial derivatives played a role in the run-up of Greek debt. Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.

In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds for years to come. New York Times Feb. Wall Street put Greece underwater while knawing at the fragile bonds that hold together the European Union.

This is not your typical subdivision in the suburbs. Hey Gary, Jamie, listen up. It ain't wise to mess with Zorba. Will this meltdown turn into a grand duel between the Rockefellers and the Rothchilds? Will they settle the score in an epic battle over the Atlantic with supersonic drones, or will they face off like gentlemen over a civilized game of cribbage?

We can only wonder how the modern lords of finance will duel. Perhaps there is a new legend in the making. What diety will Chief Ex Dimon on your left play?

If you can see the writing on the wall, you house is underwater, or your mortgage is going to adjust through the roof, or you just can't keep paying the bank and still feed the kids on the same reduced paycheck, and you suspect that the lender knew or should have known that you wouldn't be able to keep up with the payments, maybe it's time to start interviewing lawyers.

Most law firms will meet with you without charge, even if only for 15 minutes, to explore whether or not you will hire them to represent you. You can learn a lot in a quarter of an hour if you're prepared. Here is a link to a list of questions posted by Neil Garfield, a Florida lawyer and outspoken advocate for beseiged homeowners. To Neil's list, I would add the following three questions:. One in every housing units in the United States was branded with a foreclosure notice recorded in Decemberaccording to RealtyTrac.

That meansAmericans got a big lump of coal in their stocking from Uncle Scrooge. It's hard to think of a more unpleasant holiday greeting than a Sheriff knocking on your door with an eviction notice when the kids are expecting Santa Claus, but banks will be banks.

The number is February was one in every housing units. Will any of those courtesans survive the roar of the crowd as more and more people wake up to the fact that their bonuses came out of the pockets of taxpayers in the form of government bailouts? Look up their names. Post their phone numbers on bulletin boards and restroom doors. Cherry bombs on slingshots at 3: An evil force must be taking over my mind. Be nice to these insatiable, greedy people, for they know not what they do or maybe they just don't care.

Over 2, American homes are now in foreclosure. The number of persons per household in was 2. How many human beings is that? As for trends, the number of foreclosures rose 41, in the past two months for an increase ofcasualties in the first two months of It hurts to get kicked out of your home. One in every housing units in California more that twice the national average received a foreclosure notice in December, for a total of 80, properties.

In Nevada, the figure was one in every 93 houses getting Santa's boot. In Santa Barbara County, properties are currently in default, according to RealtyTrac. Three out of ten defaults resulted in a foreclosure sale in ; four years later, three out of four defaults ended with a foreclosure sale on the courthouse steps. They would fill the Arlington Theater four times. There's trouble in paradise, but not a word is said in the local media.

Shame is a major component of South Coast culture. Wear a happy face until the Sheriff is about to come knocking, then slip away silently into the night as "friends" and neighbors look the other way shaking their heads. This may shed some light on the debate at the SB Board of Supervisors reported by Noozhawk.