Richard Blumenthal Asks Eric Holder Where the Foreclosure Prosecutions Are

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It took until Richard Blumenthal’s turn in Eric Holder’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee today before Holder got asked about foreclosure fraud. Blumenthal generously suggested that, “I know the foreclosure crisis is on your agenda,” and then asked if we’ll ever see a prosecution on robosigning and other fraud.

Holder responded, at first, by pointing to states Attorney Generals, claiming they are conducting investigations. I do hope he’s thinking of Eric Schneiderman, Beau Biden, and Catherine Cortez Masto, because the ones working on the settlement are pointedly avoiding any real investigation. Holder then further dodged, suggesting DOJ might find other ways–like civil suits–to hold these banks accountable.

Finally, and perhaps most interesting, Bluementhal asked why DOJ had not intervened in the Bibby, Donnelly v. Wells Fargo suit, a whistleblower suit against Wells Fargo, BoA, Chase, Ally, and others for the illegal legal fees the banks charged homeowners, including veterans.

Holder hedged in response to that question, promising he’d find out who had made the decision not to intervene and the basis for the decision.

Unfortunately, Blumenthal pointedly avoided asking for a 30 day response to that request. So an explanation for why DOJ isn’t helping to sue banks for the illegal fees they’ve charged will probably come long after DOJ settles for those illegal fees.

Jamie Dimon Owns Obama’s Testicles

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Jamie Dimon owns Barack Obama’s testicles. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why, rather than firing his JP Morgan Exec Chief of Staff for being incompetent, Obama simply shifted him over to serve as the public face of his Administration.

Ten months into his tenure as chief of staff, [Bill] Daley’s core responsibilities are shifting, following White House missteps in the debt-ceiling fight and in its relations with Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

On Monday, Mr. Daley turned over day-to-day management of the West Wing to Pete Rouse, a veteran aide to President Obama, according to several people familiar with the matter. It is unusual for a White House chief of staff to relinquish part of the job.

[snip]

The new set-up effectively makes Mr. Rouse the president’s inside manager and Mr. Daley his ambassador, roles that appear to better suit both men’s talents.

As you recall, Daley was hired as a sop to the banks, who thought endless bailouts weren’t enough bounty from this and the prior Administration and successfully demanded having one of their own in the White House gatekeeper position. And so, after fucking up the debt ceiling, and fucking up the introduction of Obama’s jobs push (and overseeing the passage of three trade agreements that will send jobs overseas), Daley has been moved into a figurehead role.

Here’s a snapshot of the kind of people whom Daley is sucking up to as “Ambassador”: the architect of the housing bubble-and-crash, the embodiment of corruption in the GSEs, and a guy who helped pass a law that will help his wife’s insurance company, only to leave to work for the Chamber of Commerce and a private equity firm.

Lately, Mr. Daley has been trying out his new role, deploying his back-slapping persona in Washington social circles. He recently held a private reception at his Ritz Carlton residence for a small group of D.C. elites, including former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Fanne Mae Chief Executive Jim Johnson and Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the U.S.

Former Sen. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) said an invitation to lunch with Mr. Daley in his West Wing office was the first time he had heard from him.

So at a time when Obama’s campaign wants to pretend he’s taking a tough line with the 1%, he’s refusing to fire 1%er Bill Daley when he proves to be incompetent. Does this mean the banksters will effectively retain their own personal gate-keeper?

And FWIW, I believe Pete Rouse was and will be the best of the three Chiefs of Staff Obama has had, so I approve of that move. Though I question the wisdom of making the move just in time for another government shutdown, which is due up in the next few weeks.

Blind American Concern Troll Finds Nut

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You may not be able to say this every day, but hats off to the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen. In an op-ed for Tuesday’s print edition that first hit the online version late Monday, Cohen analogizes the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street to scummy used car salesmen:

As a mere youth, I bought a used car in New York to drive to California to be with the woman of my dreams. Inexplicably, she decided to rush back to New York, so I promptly took the car back to the dealer. He made a shockingly low offer. The car had been in an accident, he explained. The chassis was bent. I was flabbergasted. I had just bought the car from him. If the chassis was bent, it was bent when I bought it. The salesman offered me a take-it-or-leave-it shrug. He probably now works on Wall Street.

That the morality of the used car lot has been adopted by Wall Street is now abundantly clear. Citigroup recently settled a civil complaint in which it was accused of selling mortgage-related investments that it knew were dogs. It was so certain that the investments were the financial equivalent of my used car that it bet against them — heads I win, tails you lose — and even selected the investments themselves, choosing from a cupboard of depleted and exhausted financial instruments. An investment in the Brooklyn Bridge would have been safer.

Go read the whole piece. Seriously.

Cohen punches Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, outrageously crooked and belligerent New York cops, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and the SEC. It is a once in a lifetime thing of Cohen beauty.

Next thing you know America’s Concern Troll will be slinging hash down at Zuccotti Park with the #OWS denizens.

A Rancid Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Trial Balloon, Herbert Obamavilles, What Digby Said & The Import of the Occupy Movement

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I do not usually just post simply to repeat what another somewhat similarly situated blogger has said. But late this afternoon/early this evening, I was struck by two things almost simultaneously. Right as I read Gretchen Morgenson’s latest article in the NYT on the latest and most refined parameters of the foreclosure fraud settlement, I also saw a post by Digby. The intersection of the two was crushing, but probably oh so true.

First, the latest Foreclosure Fraud Settlement trial balloon being floated by the “State Attorney Generals”. There have been several such trial balloons floated on this before; all sunk like lead weights. This is absolutely a similar sack of shit; from Morgenson at the NYT:

Cutting to the chase: if you thought this was the deal that would hold banks accountable for filing phony documents in courts, foreclosing without showing they had the legal right to do so and generally running roughshod over anyone who opposed them, you are likely to be disappointed.

This may not qualify as a shock. Accountability has been mostly A.W.O.L. in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. A handful of state attorneys general became so troubled by the direction this deal was taking that they dropped out of the talks. Officials from Delaware, New York, Massachusetts and Nevada feared that the settlement would preclude further investigations, and would wind up being a gift to the banks.

It looks as if they were right to worry. As things stand, the settlement, said to total about $25 billion, would cost banks very little in actual cash — $3.5 billion to $5 billion. A dozen or so financial companies would contribute that money.

The rest — an estimated $20 billion — would consist of credits to banks that agree to reduce a predetermined dollar amount of principal owed on mortgages that they own or service for private investors. How many credits would accrue to a bank is unclear, but the amount would be based on a formula agreed to by the negotiators. A bank that writes down a second lien, for example, would receive a different amount from one that writes down a first lien.

Sure, $5 billion in cash isn’t nada. But government officials have held out this deal as the penalty for years of what they saw as unlawful foreclosure practices. A few billion spread among a dozen or so institutions wouldn’t seem a heavy burden, especially when considering the harm that was done.

The banks contend that they have seen no evidence that they evicted homeowners who were paying their mortgages. Then again, state and federal officials conducted few, if any, in-depth investigations before sitting down to cut a deal.

Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said the settlement, which is still being worked out, would hold banks accountable. “We continue to make progress toward the key goals of the settlement, which are to establish strong protections for homeowners in the way their loans are serviced across every type of loan and to ensure real relief for homeowners, including the most substantial principal writedown that has occurred throughout this crisis.”

Read the full piece, there is much more there.

Yes, this is certainly just a trial balloon, and just the latest one at that. But it is infuriating, because Read more →

America’s Privatized Repression

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Corey Robin has an important post on America’s privatized repression. He starts by describing how, after watching a panel on Occupy Wall Street in which she appeared, the freelancer who got arrested while she was covering the Brooklyn Bridge arrests lost her relationship with the NYT.

Two Fridays ago, I attended an excellent panel discussion on Occupy Wall Street sponsored by Jacobin magazine. It featured Doug Henwood and Jodi Dean—representing a more state-centered, socialist-style left—and Malcolm Harris and Natasha Lennard, representing a more anarchist-inflected left.

Lennard is a freelance writer who’s been covering the OWS story for the New York Times. After a video of the panel was brought to the Times‘s attention, the paper reviewed it as well as Lennard’s reporting and decided to take her off the OWS beat.  Despite the fact, according to a spokeswoman for the Times, that “we have reviewed the past stories to which she contributed and have not found any reasons for concern over that reporting.”

Even more troubling, Lennard may not be hired by the Times again at all. Says the spokeswoman: “This freelancer, Natasha Lennard, has not been involved in our coverage of Occupy Wall Street in recent days, and we have no plans to use her for future coverage.”

Robin goes on to note that this kind of repression–and not outright government repression–is really the core of social control in this country.

Such political motivated firings fit into a much broader pattern in American history that— in my first book Fear: The History of a Political Idea—I call “Fear, American Style.” While people on the left and the right often focus on state repression—coercion and intimidation that comes from and is wielded by the government (politically driven prosecution and punishment, police violence, and the like)—the fact is that a great deal of political repression happens in civil society, outside the state.  More specifically, in the workplace.

Think about McCarthyism. We all remember the McCarthy hearings in the Senate, the Rosenbergs, HUAC, and so on. All of these incidents involve the state. But guess how many people ever went to prison for their political beliefs during the McCarthy era? Less than 200 people. In the grand scheme of things, not a lot. Guess how many workers were investigated or subjected to surveillance for their beliefs?  One to two out of every five. And while we don’t have exact statistics on how many of those workers were fired, it was somewhere between 10 and 15 thousand.

There’s a reason so much of American repression is executed not by the state but by the private sector: the government is subject to constitutional and legal restraints, however imperfect and patchy they may be. But an employer is not.

Now Robin lays out this argument in the context of frustrations that anarchists and libertarians don’t get this.

In the last few months, I’ve had a fair number of arguments with both libertarians and anarchists about the state. What neither crew seems to get is what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields–and it’s considerable—it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.

It’s an important point, particularly as you distinguish between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The former, because it emphasizes the oppression of government power, will tend to increase oppression in this country as it ultimately helps the Koch brothers accrue more power. Which is undoubtedly why big corporations have funded it. Whereas the latter–to the extent that it focuses on banksters–points to the real source of power in this country.

But Robin’s point is important for another reason.

Private repression–as opposed to force, the actual physical violence Robin describes at the end–depends on integration into the system. Not only does it depend on the plausibility that someone can get a job in this economy–which, for some people, is not plausible. But it increasingly depends on integration in some dominant areas of the economy, banking with Bank of America, for example, as opposed to a local bank that has itself been screwed by the government’s determination to help the big banks at the expense of the local banks.

Because the concentrated centers of power in this country have gotten so removed from any accountability to the people they’re looting, it increases the possibility that people can opt out of the system that is key to enforcing their compliance.

How the Fed Helped Qaddafi Keep His $200B in Loot

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I suggested yesterday that the West will be playing dumb about the extent to which Qaddafi looted the Libyan people becomes known.

But what about how Qaddafi looted us–or, at least, the Fed?

As this article laid out, one of the means by which Qaddafi was looting was the Central Bank of Libya.

Moammar Kadafi secretly salted away more than $200 billion in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world before he was killed, about $30,000 for every Libyan citizen and double the amount that Western governments previously had suspected, according to senior Libyan officials.

The new estimates of the deposed dictator’s hidden cash, gold reserves and investments are “staggering,” one person who has studied detailed records of the asset search said Friday. “No one truly appreciated the scope of it.”

[snip]

Most of the money was under the name of government institutions such as the Central Bank of Libya, the Libyan Investment Authority, the Libyan Foreign Bank, the Libyan National Oil Corp. and the Libya African Investment Portfolio. But investigators said Kadafi and his family members could access any of the money if they chose to. [my emphasis]

Central Bank of Libya was a significant owner (and is now a 59% owner) in the Arab Banking Company, which got $35B of loans during the crisis.

Arab Banking Corp., the lender part- owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed.

The bank, then 29 percent-owned by the Libyan state, had aggregate borrowings in that period of $35 billion — while the largest single loan amount outstanding was $1.2 billion in July 2009, according to Fed data released yesterday. In October 2008, when lending to financial institutions by the central bank’s so- called discount window peaked at $111 billion, Arab Banking took repeated loans totaling more than $2 billion.

Yet all the time the ABC was borrowing $2B chunks of money, Qaddafi was sitting on $200B, which he could have used to provide the bank liquidity.

Mind you, this kind of looting was no doubt going on–and is no doubt going on today, as big banks refuse haircuts in Europe and housing fraud settlements–more generally. Qaddafi is just the very ugly face of how the Fed lending allowed people and corporations who had been looting for some time were able to keep that loot.

Obama’s “Get Out of Jail for Helping 1.36% Card” for Banksters

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Yesterday, I described how the Obama Administration was going to charge the banks just $8 billion for immunity from a whole new swath of crimes. Shahien Nasiripour has more details which make the deal look even shittier. First, the proposed deal does appear to provide states immunity not just from robo-signing and the lies banksters made at origination, but also for their securitization errors.

In return for getting the banks to agree to the refinancing scheme and give up higher interest income, the states would release the banks from civil claims related to loan originations, the stage at which many homeowners say they were duped by unscrupulous lenders.

Last month, state prosecutors proposed to effectively release the five big lenders from legal liability for allegedly wrongful securitisation practices related to the banks’ treatment of loan documents. Taken together, the release from liability over poor origination, securitisation, servicing and foreclosure practices could amount to an effective grant of immunity for the banks from civil claims, people familiar with the matter said.

And in exchange, the banks would pay 80% of their $25 billion penalty into a fund that the same people who botched HAMP would use to help just 1.36% of homeowners who are underwater on their homes.

About 150,000 borrowers could benefit from the refinancings, as the vast majority of US home loans are owned by investors and government-controlled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By comparison, nearly 11m US borrowers are underwater, according to CoreLogic, a data provider. The average underwater homeowner owes $258,000 on his mortgage.

In other words, all the settlement would do is help those who crashed our economy stay in business. The vast majority of their victims–and the US economy–would continue to pay the price for their crimes.

Ben Bernanke Prepares to Rob My Mom

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My mom’s pretty stubborn (I come by it naturally). So in spite of the fact that I have been warning her to move her primary banking out of Bank of America into a solvent bank for over a year, she has yet to do so.

Which is why I’m so troubled that Bank of America is about to use my mom’s savings to back its derivatives counterparties.

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

Money’s fungible, right? That’s what the anti-choice people say, anyway. So what’s the big deal that BoA has taken Merrill Lynch’s exposure to the European mess and put that risk where mom keeps her retirement? Yves Smith explains. First, this will make it all-but-impossible to unwind Bank of America when it goes under without disrupting the personal accounts of people like my mom. Significantly, if those derivatives pay off (for example, if Greece defaults) or require more collateral (because BoA gets downgraded again), then counterparties would get their money before mom does.

The reason that commentators like Chris Whalen were relatively sanguine about Bank of America likely becoming insolvent as a result of eventual mortgage and other litigation losses is that it would be a holding company bankruptcy. The operating units, most importantly, the banks, would not be affected and could be spun out to a new entity or sold. Shareholders would be wiped out and holding company creditors (most important, bondholders) would take a hit by having their debt haircut and partly converted to equity.

This changes the picture completely. This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail. Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. So this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral. It’s well nigh impossible to have an orderly wind down in this scenario. You have a derivatives counterparty land grab and an abrupt insolvency. Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral. [Yves’ emphasis]

As Yves points out, this will quickly result in the depletion of FDIC’s deposit insurance to pay my mom back for the money the banksters snatched. She suggests that Congress will quickly vote to fund the Treasury so it can pay my mom–and millions of other Americans–to replace their insured funds.

But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough in deposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil.

She’s probably right that even the most Do-Nothing Congress in American history will eventually fund Treasury. I’m just not convinced it’ll happen quickly, or without some really big hostages demanded, first.

Now, mom’s in pretty decent shape for a retiree–between some pensions and other retirement funds, she could wait out the Do-Nothing Congress. And heck, I’m even willing to lend mom a few bob, even if she is so stubborn.

But most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and millions of them depend on what they’ve got deposited in Bank of America. It seems to me that Ben Bernanke has just unilaterally decided to make those BoA depositers lend banksters their life savings until such time as the Do-Nothing Congress gets around to fixing what are, as we speak, foreseeable and unacceptable consequences of this move.

Update: Jeebus I had a lot of typos in this. I hope I’ve gotten them all.

Obama Administration’s Price Tag for Bank Lying, Predation, and (Probably) Securitization Fail: $8 Billion

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Back when the foreclosure fraud settlement was purportedly only going to cover robo-signing abuses, the price tag was going to be $17 billion.

Now that the Obama Administration is desperately trying to craft a settlement deal to include origination problems, the price tag has grown to $25 billion.

Under the proposed terms of the settlement — which could total $25 billion — banks would get broad legal immunity from state lawsuits in exchange for refinancing underwater loans, those mortgages where borrowers owe more than their homes are worth, the sources said.

The deal could provide some relief to the battered U.S. housing market and clear up some uncertainty about banks’ legal exposure that has been a drag on their shares.

Banks have been holding out on a multi-billion-dollar settlement because they wanted broader legal immunity than state attorneys general were prepared to offer.

Originally, the states were only considering immunity for shortcuts taken during mortgage servicing and foreclosures, including the so-called “robo-signing” of documents to evict people behind on their mortgages.

In recent days, the state attorneys general agreed to release major banks from claims that they made legal errors when first originating the loans, such as approving loans for borrowers without verifying any income, according to two people familiar with the talks.

That means for all the additional things the banks would get immunity for–at the very least, the liars loans and the predatory lending, all the things they’re getting hammered for in reps and warrants suits, though the language might well immunize securitization failures–banks would pay just an additional $8 billion.

That, in spite of the fact that FHFA filed lawsuits against the banks that might be worth $40 billion, with $11.5 billion from Bank of America alone.

So basically Obama wants to fund HAMP 2.0 by letting banks out of at least 80% of what they stand to lose in court.

MOTU Rules: Material Support for Terror Edition

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AmericaBlog’s Chris is right. We should not look at yesterday’s sentencing of Raj Rajaratnam as the first act of justice against the banksters who killed our economy.

As I’ve said many times before, if Rajaratnam is guilty, fine, find him guilty and send him to prison. But let’s not confuse this case with the much larger problem of Wall Street triggering the recession. Rajaratnam was a swindler and used insider information to profit by tens of millions of dollars. That’s a much different story than the trillions of dollars needlessly lost by Wall Street, yet we see no legal action related to those losses.

Not only doesn’t Rajaratnam’s sentence represent a victory for the 99%, a former FBI Agent claims that he was largely convicted because of his material support for the Tamil Tigers. (h/t scribe)

Jay Kanetkar, who was [FBI Tamil Tiger infiltrator] Rudra’s main F.B.I. handler from 1999 until he left the bureau in June 2006, says that Rajaratnam’s alleged involvement with terrorism was a significant factor in why the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice went to such extraordinary lengths to nail him. “It was a conscious decision,” Kanetkar says, “to treat Raj the terrorist the way they treated Al Capone when they got him for tax evasion.”

[snip]

By 2005, Rudra’s penetration of the Tigers’ network was so deep that the F.B.I. had acquired a comprehensive picture of the group’s fund-raising capability. Raj Rajaratnam’s name came up frequently. “On the recordings, he was spoken of in a reverential way, with all the kudos he got as a financial whizz,” says Kanetkar. “At the same time, he wasn’t a commoner, which is why it was hard for Rudra to get close to him. He was reserved for the big stuff.” For example, in September 2005, two Tamil Tiger members were duped by the F.B.I. In an attempt to have the Tigers removed from the government terrorism list, they agreed to pay $1 million to two “corrupt State Department officials” (in reality, F.B.I. agents) whom Rudra had introduced them to. The Tamils went straight from that meeting to Rajaratnam’s house, apparently to arrange to get the money, according to Rudra and Kanetkar.

“Rudra told us that the L.T.T.E. had given Raj a very large sum of money for him to invest in the Galleon fund,” says Kanetkar. “It was clear that the Tigers did have that kind of money. They were raising $1 million every time they held a function, and also going door to door—extorting people to pay thousands of dollars for the next wave of operations.” Kanetkar and his counterterrorist colleagues had been aware of evidence that Rajaratnam was using illegal insider information since 2001, when wiretaps caught an executive from the Intel Corporation offering him insider tips. The F.B.I. saw the two endeavors—terrorism and insider trading—as connected, says Kanetkar: “Money from insider trading was going into his pocket, and money from his pocket was going to the L.T.T.E.”

In other words, if you believe David Rose, the reason FBI prosecuted Rajaratnam as opposed to all the other banksters who engage in insider trading is because the gains from his insider trading went to fund the Tamil Tigers.

But there’s even something funky with that story.

According to Rose’s story, the FBI was aware of Rajaratnam’s insider training starting in 2001, when they got him on tape getting a tip from an Intel. According to Rose, the FBI was collecting evidence tying Rajaratnam to the Tigers as early as November 2002 (and was reviewing money transfers going back to 2000). And while Rose doesn’t mention it, we know the government was already using SWIFT to track terrorist financing by that point. That doesn’t help you track insider trading, but it does mean any suspicion that rajnaratam was financing terrorism would make his money transfers fairly transparent.

And while I’m not surprised in the least that the Bush DOJ chose not to prosecute Rajaratnam for insider trading (indeed, the implication of the Rose story is that the Obama DOJ is still ignoring a lot of insider trading that doesn’t have a terrorism aspect), the entire story suggests that the FBI was tracking a prominent trader’s alleged financing of terrorism for 7 years and not only never pursued him for that, but didn’t indict him for it when they got around to indicting on insider trading, even though at that same point DOJ was sending non-bankster material supporters to jail for 65-year sentences.

Now, maybe the Rose story oversells Rajaratnam’s ties to the Tamils, or at least his awareness that they were terrorists. Clearly, the case against Rajaratnam, unlike (say) that against Chiquita’s top managers during the same time frame, was not so cut and dry. Perhaps DOJ believed they couldn’t convict Rajaratnam.

But the lesson seems not only to be that this is one very small conviction that doesn’t even begin to touch the much larger crimes, but that MOTUs get treated differently even for terrorism-related crimes than ordinary people.