Bill Black On Foreclosuregate
by ilene - October 25th, 2010 10:00 pm
Bill Black On Foreclosuregate: Calls For The Immediate Termination Of Bernanke, Geithner And Holder
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Bill Black, who will soon, together with Neil Barofsky, be a guaranteed shoe-in for the POTUS/VP position (both as independents, of course), was on the Ratigan show today, following on his op-ed from last week (here and here) calling for the long-overdue nationalization of Bank of America, and discussing the rampant fraud at the heart of mortgage gate. And contrary to ongoing lowball estimates from the like of JPM and Goldman, Black provides numbers about the bank liability that are simply stunning: "Credit Suisse says that by 2006 49% of all mortgage originations were liars loans. When independent folks study fraud, it is in the 80-90% fraud range. That means there were millions of acts of fraud. Those loan frauds occurred because the banks created incentive structure for the loan brokers to bring them the absolute worst of the worst loans, and to lie on the application forms… These frauds came from the banks, and they propagated through the system through a series of echo epidemics…This fraud spread through the system and that’s why we have a crisis in foreclosures. This stems from the underlying fraud by the lenders in mortgage loans to the tune of well over a million cases a year by 2005."
Furthermore, Black points out the glaringly obvious, that the Fed should not be in charge of any investigation into mortgage fraud, due to its "massive" conflict of interest, to the tune of $1.5 trillion in MBS/agencies held on the Fed’s books, which would be immediately null and voided if rampant MBS fraud is indeed uncovered. Which is precisely why the entitlement of the Fed as supreme regulator (as inspired by the financial generosity of the Wall Street lobby) as part of Frank-Dodd was the one single most destructive decision ever made, and equivalent in many ways with electing America’s very own tyrannical despot, whose only interest is making the multi billionaires, into trillionaires, and leaving everyone else in the cold through the eliminating of the savings class and the destruction of the reserve currency.
And it goes much further… to the very top of the US ruling oligarchy in fact. Which is why, as we have claimed from day one, nothing less than a complete reset of the entire kleptocratic system…
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Former NY Fed Chair and Goldman Sachs Director Friedman in the Hot Seat Again
by ilene - July 2nd, 2010 2:41 am
Former NY Fed Chair and Goldman Sachs Director Friedman in the Hot Seat Again
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Remember former NY Fed Chairman Stephen Friedman? He may have stepped down after getting busted for buying Goldman Sachs shares when he both sat on their board and their audit committee, not to mention the fact that he was serving as chairman of the NY Fed at the time, but he isn’t out of the frying pan just yet. See the deal was supposed to be kosher because of the waiver filed in September of 2008 that somehow made everything OK but that’d be like letting Tim Geither sign a waiver to cash in our gold reserves for dollars through Cash4Gold. You can’t make illegal activities legal, no matter how many papers you push in an attempt to do so.
Greg Palm, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. general counsel, took a call in his 37th-floor office at One New York Plaza on Dec. 16, 2008. It was his old boss, Stephen Friedman, a former Goldman chairman who was then head of the audit committee of its board of directors. Goldman’s stock was down 65 percent from its 52-week high during an accelerating global financial breakdown.
Friedman, who had become chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that year, told Palm he wanted to buy, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August issue.
Palm says he couldn’t think of a reason why Friedman shouldn’t: Goldman had made the necessary disclosures in that day’s filings, Palm says.
“We’d just reported earnings,” says Palm, whose job includes approving trades by directors. “There was no material information that wasn’t public from Goldman’s standpoint.”
Friedman, 72, who is still a Goldman director, bought 37,300 shares at an average of $80.78 each on Dec. 17. Five weeks later, he picked up 15,300 more at an average of $66.61. By yesterday, the stock had doubled to $133.76, giving Friedman a paper profit of $3 million.
Now, the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is investigating Friedman’s stock purchases. It wants to know why he was permitted to buy stock in a bank he was regulating as chairman of the New York Fed.
One might wonder why Friedman felt compelled to gobble up GS shares when it was deeply immersed in its darkest days but any curiosity could be easily…
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BAIR MUST RESIGN: Conflict Of Interest
by ilene - January 22nd, 2010 10:43 am
BAIR MUST RESIGN: Conflict Of Interest
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
Sheila Bair, one of the chief regulators overseeing Bank of America’s federal rescue, took out two mortgages worth more than $1 million from the banking giant last summer during ongoing negotiations about the bank’s bailout and its repayment.
It gets better…
Mortgage documents for that 14-room home include a provision, known as a second-home rider, stating that Bair and her husband must keep the house for their “exclusive use and enjoyment” and may not use it as a rental or timeshare.
Yet the couple has been renting out part of the house since they left for Washington, with Bair listing income from the “rental property” in Amherst as between $15,000 and $50,000 a year on her most recent financial disclosure form as head of the FDIC.
Oh yeah, there’s no conflict of interest here cough-friends-of-angelo-cough!
Of course the FDIC retroactively gave her a waiver from its conflict of interest rules – AFTER The Huffington Post started snooping around.
And of course the FDIC’s ethics officer says there was nothing wrong with what went on – even though it appears that Bair’s use for the property did not qualify for the loan she got, and that the programs that would qualify would and did carry a higher rate.
If, as the FDIC claims, this was an "innocent mistake" then Bair should immediately demand (and accept) a re-price on that paper to conform with her intended and actual use, retroactive to the issue of the loan, and immediately pay all accrued arrears.
We know that won’t happen though, right?
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Members of U.S. House Financial Services Committee Trading Stocks
by ilene - June 28th, 2009 2:07 pm
For a free subscription to Phil’s Stock World, click here (it’s easy, no credit card required)
The "appearance of a problem" or a problem?
Here’s the definition of insider trading from wikipedia:
"Insider trading is the trading of a corporation’s stock or other securities… by individuals with potential access to non-public information about the company. In most countries, trading by corporate insiders such as officers, key employees, directors, and large shareholders may be legal, if this trading is done in a way that does not take advantage of non-public information." [emphasis mine - Ilene]
…"In May 2007, a bill entitled the "Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act" was introduced that would hold congressional and federal employees liable for stock trades they made using information they gained through their jobs and also regulate analysts or "Political Intelligence" firms that research government activities. The bill has not passed."
Members of U.S. House Financial Services Committee snapped up or dumped bank stocks as bottom fell out of market
Posted by Stephen Koff and Sabrina Eaton/Plain Dealer Reporters
As financial markets tumbled and the government worked to stave off panic by pumping billions of dollars into banks last fall, several members of Congress who oversee the banking industry were grabbing up or dumping bank stocks.
Anticipating bargains or profits or just trying to unload before the bottom fell out, these members of the House Financial Services Committee or brokers on their behalf were buying and selling stocks including Bank of America and Citigroup — some of the very corporations their committee would later rap for greed, a Plain Dealer examination of congressional stock market transactions shows.
Financial disclosure records show that some of these Financial Services Committee members, including Ohio Rep. Charlie Wilson, made bank stock trades on the same day the banks were getting a government bailout from a program Congress approved. The transactions may not have been illegal or against congressional rules, but securities attorneys and congressional watchdog groups say they raise flags about the appearance of conflicts of interest.
"I don’t think that any of these people should be owning these types of financial instruments," said Brian Biggins, a Cleveland securities lawyer and former stock brokerage manager. "I’m not saying they shouldn’t be in the
…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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