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What Do You Call a “Cornhusker Kickback” for California?

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Remember the “Cornhusker Kickback“? That was the $45 million in expanded Medicaid funding Ben Nelson demanded from the Obama Administration before he’d support Health Insurance Reform. The special treatment for Nebraska gave the reform effort a tawdry feel.

And just as importantly, it did nothing to improve Nelson’s popularity in his own state. When he announced he would not run for reelection in December, reporters pointed to the Cornhusker Kickback as one issue that was making his reelection increasingly unlikely.

Nelson obtained a huge controversial provision in that legislation — derisively called the “Cornhusker Kickback” by GOP opponents — that called for the federal government to pay Nebraska’s costs for Medicaid expansion, potentially saving the state tens of millions of dollars annually. The provision was ultimately killed, but Nelson still paid a political price. Nelson adamantly denied that he traded his support for the Democratic health plan in exchange for the special provision, yet his standing back home took a big hit. Nelson proved to be the 60th and deciding vote for the Democratic health-care package.

Yet it seems like Obama’s trying something similar in his effort to get CA’s Kamala Harris to join in his foreclosure settlement, with $10 billion in aid slated for CA’s struggling homeowners.

Banks and government negotiators have cleared a big hurdle in efforts to resolve allegations of widespread mortgage-related misdeeds, agreeing on terms for a settlement that are being circulated to the 50 US states for approval, state officials and a bank representative say.

The proposed pact would potentially reduce mortgage balances and monthly payments by more than $25bn for distressed US homeowners, these five people said.

The tentative agreement still must be approved by all 50 state attorneys-general, and negotiators have previously missed proposed deadlines. Participants described the proposal terms as set, meaning the states will be asked either to agree to them or decline to participate.

The amount of potential aid is contingent on state participation and would decrease significantly if big states do not sign the agreement. New York and California are among several states that have voiced concerns about the terms of the proposed deal with Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. New York and California are particularly concerned with the part of the deal that would absolve the banks of civil liability for allegedly illegal mortgage-related conduct.

California borrowers would be eligible to receive more than $10bn in aid if the state were to agree to the terms, according to several people involved in the talks.

Don’t get me wrong. In this case, there’s good reason to give CA a disproportionate part of the settlement funds. Read more →

Obama’s Housing Campaign

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Let’s connect a few data points.

Last Friday, Jame Dimon demanded that all the players (except the actual homeowners) get locked into a room until some leader solved the housing problem he and his buddies created.

On Sunday, the Administration promised, for what seems the bajillioninth time, to really do something about foreclosures.

On Monday, the Democrats confirmed that Obama will accept his nomination at Bank of America stadium. They did this to have more skyboxes they could sell to the 1%.

Then on Wednesday, Shawn Donovan rolled out the latest incarnation of the foreclosure settlement–one which still helps just a small fraction of families suffering because the housing bubble crashed.

And now the Administration has a meeting planned for January 23–what sounds like just the meeting DImon demanded–to iron out the last bits of such a minimally helpful settlement. There are two details of this meeting that are especially noteworthy.

First, only the Democratic Attorneys General appear to be invited.

Materials about the proposed deal are being sent to all states, and Democratic attorneys general have been asked to meet on Jan. 23 with Miller, Donovan and Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, said Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller.

[snip]

Republican attorneys general will separately discuss the proposed settlement by phone the same day with their Republican counterparts on the negotiating committee in addition to Donovan and Perrelli, Greenwood said.

[my emphasis]

Even better? This meeting is in Chicago!

At the Jan. 23 meeting in Chicago, the federal and state officials will answer questions and discuss details of the potential deal in an effort to win support, Greenwood said.

None of the named principles of this discussion live in Chicago. Thomas Perelli is in DC. Shawn Donovan is in DC. Tom Miller is in IA. Even the banksters are from NY and Charlotte.

The one thing that’s in Chicago, of course, is Obama’s campaign headquarters. (Outgoing Chief of Staff and now campaign Co-Chair and former–future?–JP Morgan exec Bill Daley? He lives in Chicago!)

So to “solve” the foreclosure problem, we’re going to invite a bunch of people–but only the Democrats–to Obama’s campaign headquarter city to hammer out something that really only helps a fraction of those affected.

Yes we can.

Why Blame the Failure of the 50-State Settlement Solely on Tom Miller?

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Yesterday, CA Attorney General Kamala Harris announced she was withdrawing from the 50-state foreclosure fraud settlement.

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris will no longer take part in a national foreclosure probe of some of the nation’s biggest banks, which are accused of pervasive misconduct in dealing with troubled homeowners.

Harris removed herself from talks by a coalition of state attorneys general and federal agencies investigating abusive foreclosure practices because the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers were not offering California homeowners relief commensurate to what people in the state had suffered, a person familiar with the matter said.

The big banks were also demanding to be granted overly broad immunity from legal claims that could potentially derail further investigations into Wall Street’s role in the mortgage meltdown, the person said.

With CA–the largest state and the one with the greatest foreclosure exposure–this effectively kills the settlement. See DDay for more on why Harris made this decision and what it means going forward.

But Harris’ letter announcing her decision makes something else (which had become increasingly obvious in recent weeks) clear.

Harris gives US Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, not IA Attorney General Tom Miller, top billing on her letter.

This failure has become Perrelli’s baby as much as it is Miller’s.

When they held their last ditch attempt to save this meeting last week, they met in DC, not in IA or some other central location. And the settlement reportedly discussed at that meeting was heavily skewed towards giving the same people who fucked up HAMP another shot at trying to solve the housing situation.

About 80 per cent of the settlement figure, earmarked for the federal government, could be used to fund another round of debt and payment reductions for struggling US homeowners, people with knowledge of the Illinois document said. That would be split between principal reductions on first-lien mortgages and junior liens; payment forbearance for unemployed borrowers; and short sales, blight remediation and transition assistance for homeowners to move into rentals.

The remainder, about $4bn-$4.4bn in cash, could be designated for the states, which then would divide the proceeds to fund a variety of programmes, including assistance to borrowers. About half that amount could be used to pay up to $2,000 to an estimated 1.1m aggrieved borrowers who allege they were harmed by improper practices. [my emphasis]

So when Harris wrote…

California is hurting. We have the most homes and most home borrowers in default. During the period we have been negotiating, more than 560,000 additional homes in California have fallen into the foreclosure process. When we began this process 11 months ago, five of the ten cities hardest hit nationally by foreclosures were in California. Today, eight of those ten hardest-hit cities are here. And, recently, at the same time that we have been negotiating in good faith, foreclosures in California have surged again.

[snip]

Last week, I went to Washington, D.C. in hopes of moving our discussions forward. But it became clear to me that California was being asked for a broader release of claims than we can accept and to excuse conduct that has not been adequately investigated. In return for this broad release of claims, the relief contemplated would allow far too few California homeowners to stay in their homes.

What she was saying, politely but nevertheless saying, is that giving a state like CA that has been devastated by foreclosures perhaps $500 million to deal with the aftermath, and in the process let the banks off the legal hook for abuses beyond just robo-signing just won’t fly.

The Obama Administration may have been offering Harris less than $1,000 per each new homeowner who has fallen into default (to say nothing of all the previous foreclosures), whereas in a state settlement, NV Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto was able to get about $57,000 per affected homeowner in a Morgan Stanley settlement.

That tells you two things. First, the Obama Administration still doesn’t understand the extent of the damage the banksters they are trying to protect have done. They don’t understand the scale of the challenges facing states and towns and homeowners affected by the banks’ crimes. And second, the “Department of Justice” was ready to sign away justice for scraps with which to fund another ineffectual Treasury-run program without, first, having forced the banks to face the full consequences of what will happen if they don’t offer principal write-downs.

In other words, if you didn’t already know it, DOJ was (and presumably still is) actively looking for ways not just to ignore the banksters’ crimes, but to help them avoid the non-legal consequences of those crimes, too. Which sort of explains the vitriol directed at Eric Schneiderman of late. Two prosecutors, after all, can conduct a national investigation of the banksters’ crimes, DOJ, and the NY Attorney General. And by refusing to go along with the criminally stupid deal Perrelli was negotiating, Schneiderman has made it a lot harder for for DOJ to sponsor yet more injustice.

Just in Time To Undercut Eric Schneiderman, the (Ongoing) HUD Investigation!

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American Banker has an article suggesting that Tom Miller will be able to use the results of HUD’s investigations into servicing problems to craft a settlement with the banks.

The state attorneys general have a secret weapon in their negotiations with the largest mortgage servicers: the results of a HUD investigation into the banks’ robo-signing practices.

But by all appearances, this is an attempt on the part of IA Attorney General Tom Miller to undercut claims that the Attorneys General need to do more investigation. The article–which relies almost entirely on Miller’s own staff–concludes that this report will “fill in a major gap” in what the Attorneys General know (that is, real data about how bad the robo-signing problem is).

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has completed an investigation begun last year of foreclosure robo-signing and given state officials the results, a spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller says.

A full government investigation would fill in a major gap in state officials’ information as they negotiate with the servicers: the attorneys general have not known the full scope of the banks’ robo-signing practices, or how many homeowners have been affected by their paperwork lapses.

[snip]

“One of our federal partners, HUD, has conducted a thorough investigation of robo-signing,” says Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for Miller. “HUD has shared that investigation with our executive committee.”

The states and their “federal partners,” including HUD, “have the information we need concerning the banks’ robo-signing activities, and this is key to the strength of our understanding and our negotiating position,” he says. [my emphasis]

There’s something funny about Tom Miller’s flack’s claims that the HUD investigation fills in what the Attorneys General didn’t already have: the one thing that HUD would say about it is that it wasn’t finished.

A HUD spokesman would not discuss any investigation, except to say its probes into robo-signing are ongoing. [my emphasis]

Maybe the claim HUD’s probe is complete is just a mis-paraphrase of Greenwood’s comments; such a claim doesn’t show up in his direct quotes. But if the investigation is not done–and HUD says it’s ongoing–then how does the incomplete study give the AGs what they need?

In any case, I find it particularly neat that the AGs’ Executive Committee got this incomplete complete study after Eric Schneiderman got booted from it.

IA AG’s Office Whining That They’re Not Getting Credit for Settlement Bank of America Violated

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The folks desperately working to give the banks a Get Out of Jail Free card for their servicing abuses are trying hard to deny they’re not doing so.

Take this anonymous accusation from someone involved in the settlement talks claiming that opponents of the settlement are using innuendo to smear those participating in it.

Another person close to the talks, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the situation more freely, said many in the group are “just exasperated. . . . This smear campaign of lies and innuendo, it’s uncalled for, it’s unprecedented, and it threatens substantial consumer harm.”

Aside from the fact that even if there were such a campaign it would not be unprecedented, since folks have tried to suggest Eric Schneiderman committed an impropriety by paying himself back for a campaign loan he made to his campaign.

But unless the WaPo left the material describing the substance of the “smear campaign of lies and innuendo” on the cutting room floor, then what we have here is a person anonymously making vague innuendos about a smear campaign of innuendos.

And then there’s the whining from IA Assistant Attorney General Patrick Madigan, who says it’s unfair to say he and Attorney General Tom Miller are in bed with the banks (in spite of Miller’s fundraising outreach to the banks) because of the great work they’ve done holding banks to account in the past.

“We’ve been accused of being in bed with the banks. To say that to a group of people who have spent the last seven to 10 years fighting mortgage abuses day in and day out is an insult of the highest order,” said Iowa Assistant Attorney General Patrick Madigan, a longtime Miller deputy, who has worked on major settlements with subprime lenders such as Countrywide and Ameriquest. “It’s just unreal.

You know, their work “fighting mortgage abuses”? As in the settlement they signed onto with Countrywide in 2008? The one that–according to NV Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto–Bank of America has basically blown off?

In her filing, Ms. Masto contends that Bank of America raised interest rates on troubled borrowers when modifying their loans even though the bank had promised in the settlement to lower them. The bank also failed to provide loan modifications to qualified homeowners as required under the deal, improperly proceeded with foreclosures even as borrowers’ modification requests were pending and failed to meet the settlement’s 60-day requirement on granting new loan terms, instead allowing months and in some cases more than a year to go by with no resolution, the filing says.

The complaint says such practices violated an agreement Bank of America reached in the fall of 2008 with several states and later, in 2009, with Nevada, to settle lawsuits that accused its Countrywide unit of predatory lending. As the credit crisis grew, the settlement was heralded as a victory by state offices eager to help keep troubled borrowers in their homes and reduce their costs. Bank of America set aside $8.4 billion in the deal and agreed to help 400,000 troubled borrowers with loan modifications and other financial relief, such as lowering interest rates on mortgages.

(See DDay for more on Masto’s complaint.)

Perhaps Madigan doesn’t understand this. But pointing to a settlement that, in retrospect, appears to have largely been a PR stunt as proof that you’re not in bed with the banks sort of proves the point that you are.

How Would States Divvy Up the Foreclosure Settlement?

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For the record, I still doubt the 50-State-Less-the-Rule-of-Law-AGs Settlement will happen. A year in, they haven’t even agreed on the underlying guidelines for the settlement, like what they do with MERS.

But this line in the LAT’s coverage made me think of another issue that could kill that settlement.

New York and Delaware have more than a dozen attorneys working full time on their effort. They have subpoenaed or requested information from 13 financial firms, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase. [Kamala] Harris would be a key addition to the investigation because California was the location of a vast number of the mortgages and foreclosures that fed into the crisis. She met with Schneiderman in San Francisco last month to discuss participating in the probe.

Harris is weighing whether she would sign on to the 50-state settlement if it gave banks immunity. The main consideration is how much money would go to California homeowners, according to a person familiar with her thinking. [my emphasis]

At least at the moment, the public explanation CA’s Attorney General is giving for her indecisiveness about which side to join is a concern over CA homeowners getting enough out of the settlement.

Now that may just be a convenient excuse to cover political indecision, but it’s a significant point. CA has a tenth of the country’s population, and it was very hard hit by the foreclosure crisis … two years ago.

As the Calculated Risk chart above shows, while California at its worst had the sixth highest percentage of homes in default, it is now 22nd (out of 42 states plus DC) on the list of current percentage of homes in default. So while CA has had the most number of residents go through this shitty process, going forward it might appear to be in much better shape than a lot of other states that weren’t as hard hit by the foreclosure crisis.

But that’s not the entire story. Note, first of all, the reason CA no longer has so many delinquencies:

Some states have made progress: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and California. Other states, like New Jersey and New York, have made little or no progress in reducing serious delinquencies.

Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and California are all non-judicial foreclosure states. States with little progress like New Jersey, New York, Illinois and Florida are all judicial states.

That is, CA has worked through its delinquencies because its residents (like those of AZ, MI, and NV), have been subjected to the full brunt of the servicer abuses that this settlement is supposed to address, without the opportunity to challenge a foreclosure in court. So if we could measure this quantitatively (precisely what Tom Miller is trying to avoid) CA’s residents would like be even more screwed by the servicer abuses, because no one had an easy way to push back against obvious abuses.

Now look at who–at least as of the first quarter of this year–remains underwater on their house (from this Calculated Risk post). Those states most affected by foreclosures, including CA, still lead the list of states with the highest number of houses underwater, a key indicator for future defaults. The map from the New Bottom Line shows this even more graphically; put FL and CA’s population combined with their high negative equity rate, and they’ve got the largest number of potential foreclosures, over 2 million homes in each (compare that to worst hit on a percentage basis, NV, with 358,241 houses underwater, or IA, with 31,077). Finally, add in the much higher median home price in CA, and it’s clear that Harris ought to be demanding a significant chunk of the settlement funds perhaps in the 15-20% range (nevermind that even that–optimistically $4B–would do proportionately very little in CA).

I originally thought the banks would get to decide how to divvy up the settlement money (which would be prone to abuse in any case). But if the 40-45 AGs who might participate in this settlement plan to decide how the paltry $20B gets split up, then one of the only fair solutions would be for most of those states to give up the right to sue while giving CA and FL the great bulk of the settlement money. That is, a fair solution would have about 20 AGs grant immunity in exchange for little for their own residents.

Is Tom Miller willing to boast of a great settlement only to tell his own constituents (well, his nominal constituents, anyway) they will get nothing?

The Timing of the Schneiderman Attack

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I find this article odd for the way it mentions nothing of Bank of America’s attempts to game the legal system to stay in business, much less Tom Miller, Shaun Donovan, and Kathryn Wylde’s increasing attacks on Eric Schneiderman. Because his conclusion: that BoA may go under and if it does it may take the economy with it, explains why everyone just intensified their attacks on Schneiderman.

The article, by Tom Leonard, purports to weigh the prospect of economic chaos. On the plus side, Leonard looks at prospects China might not be as bad as some people have been thinking, the promise of QE3, and news that small banks may be returning to health. On the negative, he notes that manufacturing and housing continue to decline.

But none of that matters, Leonard suggests, as much as the fate of Bank of America.

But the most perplexing economic risk factor of all may be the case of the embattled Bank of America, which found itself at the center of a swirl of rumors on Tuesday. How Bank of America fares in the days to come could tell us more about the future of the U.S. economy than any other single factor.

And on that count, Leonard writes, we have reason to worry. He looks at Bank of America’s desperate attempts yesterday to refute the analysis of Henry Blodget, who said BoA is probably worth $100 to $200 billion less than it claims to be–potentially, that is, insolvent.

A big part of Blodget’s analysis rests on this Zero Hedge argument (though I saw the graphic at Ritholtz’s site first), which in turn notes that the key analyst–who happens to be a former Merrill Lynch employee–who thinks BoA can get away with just $8-11 billion to clean up what it will owe investors for the shitpile it (and Countrywide) sold them basically just took BoA’s estimates about the quality of the shitpile rather than looking at the underlying files. Zero Hedge quotes from a filing the Federal Home Loan Banks filed last month in NY (the bold is ZH’s; the screaming red highlighting is mine):

To get from $61.3 billion to a “reasonable” settlement range of $8.8 to $11 billion, Mr. Lin made two more assumptions. He assumed that only 36% of loans that go into default will have breached Countrywide’s representations and warranties about the quality of its underwriting. That assumption is difficult to understand. Mr. Lin did not do any independent analysis of this assumption. Instead, he simply adopted Bank of America’s estimates of this percentage, which in turn appear to have been based on a completely different portfolio of loans that were subject to the underwriting standards imposed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Moreover, Mr. Lin’s assumption is inconsistent with widely publicized reports by professional loan auditors that even Countrywide loans that are merely delinquent (that is, behind on payments but not yet in default) have a “breach rate” of well over 60% and often as high as 90%.

So to recap: Leonard says we should be worried because if this analysis is correct–if BoA is actually insolvent–it’ll take the economy down.

Now, I’ll set aside for the moment the underlying analysis Leonard does–his take that BoA’s continued existence is more important than the manufacturing decline and continued housing depression. And I recognize that he posted this last night before the news that Eric Schneiderman got kicked out of Tom Miller’s tree house broke widely.

But even without last night’s news, you can’t separate the ongoing pressure on Schneiderman from the underlying issue–whether the analysis which BoA used, which depended on their own internal review of completely incomparable files, to declare themselves solvent is valid.

Because what Schneiderman is insisting on doing, both in the $8.5 billion proposed securitization settlement and the $20 billion proposed servicing settlement, is to try to look at the files.

Schneiderman is insisting on doing the analysis that BoA’s handpicked analyst didn’t do.

Now what do you suppose it means that BoA’s surrogates have gotten so angry and panicked and, well, dickish, as Schneiderman continues to insist on actually looking at BoA’s books before making a settlement with them? And do you really think it’s a coinkydink that increasing numbers of Wall Street vultures are raising doubts about what’s in those books at precisely the time Obama’s surrogates are increasing pressure on Schneiderman to drop the legal efforts to do so?

I think the timing tells us everything we need to know about the quality of BoA’s analysis. The only question, really, is whether they’ll be able to abuse the legal system so as to continue to hide that reality.

Update: Schneiderman just sent out email vowing to continue:

You might have been following the latest developments related to the national settlement of the mortgage probe, including this story in today’s Huffington Post about our tough fight for a comprehensive resolution to this crisis.

Let me tell you directly: I am deeply committed to pursuing a full investigation into the misconduct that led to the collapse of America’s housing market, and to seeking a resolution that gives homeowners meaningful relief, allows the housing market to begin to recover, and gets our economy moving again.

Our ongoing investigation into the housing crisis cannot be shut down to accommodate efforts to settle quickly and give banks and others broad immunity from further legal action. If you have any thoughts or concerns about this critical issue, please contact me at 1-800-771-7755, or send a message via Facebook or Twitter.

Thank you for your support,

Eric T. Schneiderman

IA AG Tom Miller: Playing “Survivor” with Homeowners’ Futures

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You may have heard that the Obama Administration and IA Attorney General are playing a giant game of Survivor with the homes of struggling Americans as the grand prize: they’ve kicked NY AG Eric Schneiderman off the island.

The New York Attorney General’s office was removed from a group of state attorneys general that is working on a nationwide foreclosure settlement with U.S. banks, according to a state official.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has raised concern about terms of a possible deal, was removed from the executive committee of state attorneys general, according to an e-mail today from Iowa Assistant Attorney General Patrick Madigan.

Only they made a key mistake in their little game of Survivor.

Update: I obviously misread IA Asst AG Patrick Madigan and IL AG Lisa Madigan. Meaning Miller’s the one making this public, not AG Madigan.

Well then I guess he’s just being a dick.

Update: Wow, in the longer version of the Bloomberg story, Miller gets even more dickish:

“New York has actively worked to undermine the very same multistate group that it had spent the previous nine months working very closely with,” Miller said. For a member of the executive committee, that “simply doesn’t make sense, is unprecedented and is unacceptable,” Miller said.

[And I removed my earlier screwup.]

The Charismatic Blonde Women and the Consent Decree

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DDay reported on OCC’s attempt to preempt a foreclosure settlement on Monday. Today, Yves Smith has a long post giving the consent decrees the banks are trying to roll out in lieu of a real foreclosure settlement the disdain they deserve.

Wow, the Obama administration has openly negotiated against itself on behalf of the banks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so craven heretofore.

[snip]

The part I am puzzled by is who is behind this rearguard action. It clearly guts the Federal part of the settlement negotiations. If you pull out your supposed big gun (ex having done a real exam to find real problems, and it’s weaker than your negotiating demands, you’ve just demonstrated you have no threat. Now obviously, a much more aggressive cease and desist order could have been presented; it’s blindingly obvious that the only reason for putting this one forward was not to pressure the banks, as American Banker incorrectly argued, but to undermine the AGs and whatever banking/housing regulators stood with them (HUD and the DoJ were parties to the first face to face talks).

So the only part that I’d still love to know was who exactly is behind the C&D order? Is it just the OCC?

But what I’d like to know is why, coincident with the roll-out of this Potemkin resolution to the foreclosure problem, someone told Reuters that the Administration was considering Jennifer Granholm and/or Sarah Raskin to head the Consumer Finance Protection Board.

The White House is considering Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Raskin and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to head a new agency charged with protecting consumers of financial products, a source aware of the process said Tuesday.

You see, as Yves reminds us, one part of the whole AG settlement that this consent decree seems intended to replace was that Tom Miller, Iowa’s Attorney General, would get the CFPB position as his reward for shepherding through such a crappy settlement.

So now, with the consent decrees the apparent new plan to appear to address foreclosures without penalizing the banksters, the Administration rolls out the claim that it is considering Granholm and Raskin?

And the report is all the more weird given that Granholm was previously floated for the position in late March, at which point she declined to be considered and–the next day–accepted a position with Pew. This morning, in response to the Reuters story, Granholm tweeted,

This story says I’m under consideration for the CFPB job. I have declined to be considered for this post. I’m happy in my new roles at Pew, Berkeley and Dow. And, by the way, while I don’t know Raskin and she may be great, I think nominating Elizabeth Warren is a fight worth waging.

See, best as I can guess (and this is a guess), by pulling the plug on the AG settlement, the Administration lost its best case for appointing someone not named Elizabeth Warren to assume the CFPB position. Whereas they might have been able to claim (falsely) that Miller had achieved this great progressive settlement for homeowners, now they’ve decided to stick with the status quo rather than even a bad settlement. Which leaves them with the increasingly urgent problem of who heads the CFPB when it goes live in July.

And so they float a report that the one blond woman who is as much of a rock star as Warren is might get the position? Do they think Democrats can’t tell the difference between charismatic blonde women (or that progressives would confuse the down-to-earth but centrist Granholm for Warren)?

It’s like they’ve got a Craigslist posting up somewhere:

Wanted: blonde woman with great people skills and rock star looks to serve as figurehead for a position purported to exercise real power to protect American consumers, but which will instead be asked to serve up Timmeh Geithner coffee and complete deference. Democratic affiliation a plus but not necessary.

Michael Barr–Liaison on Foreclosure Fraud Investigation–Leaves Treasury

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Just one week ago, Iowa’s Attorney General Tom Miller told Chris Dodd that Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions Michael Barr was the key person from Treasury working with the Attorneys General investigation into foreclosure fraud.

Miller: We haven’t had any contact with the [Financial Stability Oversight Council]. We have had repeated contact with the Department of the Treasury, with Assistant Secretary Michael Barr and his staff. We’ve developed a terrific ongoing relationship with them. We talk about these issues and try and help and support each other on these issues. So we’ve had a lot of discussions with Treasury but not with that particular Council.

That’s funny. Because Barr is leaving Treasury. Imminently.

Diana Farrell, deputy director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, and Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr are leaving the administration, adding to the turnover in the ranks of the White House economic team that worked on the government’s response to the worst financial crisis in more than 70 years.

Farrell will leave by the end of the year and Barr’s last day at Treasury will be Dec. 3. Both played key roles in shaping Obama’s financial regulatory overhaul plan, which was signed into law in July.

[snip]

Treasury spokesman Steve Adamske said Barr would continue his academic career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

(Note, Barr is not currently listed as teaching next semester.)

In addition to working with the Attorneys General “investigating” the banksters’ foreclosure fraud, Barr had been considered a leading candidate–after Elizabeth Warren–to lead the Consumer Finance Protection Board and/or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (the agency that regulates the big banks) and (as the Bloomberg piece makes clear) had a key role in Dodd-Frank.

As you recall, the same day that Tom Miller told Dodd he was working closely with Barr, at almost the moment when Miller said the investigation would take months, sources that sounded an awful lot like the banks were suggesting a deal on the “settlement” ending the “investigation” was close. But even that article didn’t seem to suggest it’d be done by December 3.

Also note, the Financial Stability Oversight Council–the entity set up by Dodd-Frank to stave off systemic crises–meets on Tuesday; they promise to address efforts so far on the foreclosure fraud problem.

The group will provide an update on what various agencies are doing to investigate widespread paperwork problems that have called into question millions of foreclosures across the country, as well as how regulators are coordinating with the Justice Department, state attorneys general and other officials scrutinizing the mess.

Mind you, I don’t know what Barr’s departure means. But I find it notable that–after recently being floated for key positions going forward and given his role in efforts to respond to the foreclosure mess–he is leaving now.