Yves Smith — Mortgage Document Fabrication is Alive and Well…

Yves explains how the scam works.

Naked Capitalism
Mortgage Document Fabrication is Alive and Well…
Yves Smith

Nate Raymond — Exclusive: Citigroup executives avoid U.S. charges over mortgage bonds -document

U.S. authorities have decided not to pursue criminal charges against any Citigroup Inc (C.N) executives or employees involved in packaging and selling mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, a government report shows.

 The report, by the Federal Housing Finance Agency's Office of Inspector General, one of the agencies in the Citigroup probe, said following the settlement, prosecutors reviewed the evidence to see if any individuals could be charged and determined "there was not enough compelling evidence.…

Crime pays?

Reuters
Exclusive: Citigroup executives avoid U.S. charges over mortgage bonds - document
Nate Raymond

David Dayan — Officials Cover Up Housing Bubble’s Scummy Residue: Fraudulent Foreclosure Documents

Every day, mortgage companies attempt to foreclose on homeowners using false documents.

It’s a byproduct of the mortgage securitization craze during the housing bubble, when loans were sliced and diced so haphazardly that the actual ownership was confused.

When the bubble burst, lenders foreclosing on properties needed paperwork to prove their standing, but didn’t have it — leading mortgage industry employees to forge, fabricate and backdate millions of mortgage documents. This foreclosure fraud scandal was exposed in 2010, and acquired a name: “robo-signing.”

But while some of the offenders paid fines over the past few years, nobody cleaned up the documents. This rot still exists inside the property records system all over the country, and those in a position of authority appear determined to pretend it doesn’t exist.…

Clouded titles?

The Intercept
Officials Cover Up Housing Bubble’s Scummy Residue: Fraudulent Foreclosure Documents

David Dayan

Matt Taibbi — The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare

Maybe Matt's best yet. The smoking gun.

Rolling Stone
The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare
Matt Taibbi

Att. Gen. Holder Talks As Though All Criminals Are Equally Bad ... Some Are Just More Equal In Impunity Than Others

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Is this who we are? WWGW think?



Dear Att. Gen. Eric Holder,

How about leaving some WHITE COLLAR CRIME backdoors open for regulators?

For Pete's sake! Get a clue.

This guy can't see context for the mirror?

In what follows, the semantics have been blatantly translated to more relevant analogies, in an attempt to redirect the topic to protecting the innocent.

What about all the forms of BS which are locking law enforcement regulators out of understanding increasingly popular Control Fraud methods?

Surely it is fully possible to permit private enterprise to provide personal incentives while still adequately protecting aggregate options?

When a Middle Class is in danger, law enforcement and Public Policy needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect Main Street and to stop those that abuse both the Middle Class and democracy. It is worrisome to see both Control Frauds AND public officials thwarting our ability to do so.

In his recent comments, Holder became just the latest government official to willingly be a hypocrite ... for financial gain, no matter how indirect.

Though Holder didn’t mention Goldman-Sachs or any other TBTJ banks by name, his remarks systematically avoided mentioning the documentation repeatedly offered by Bill Black since the resolution of the S&L Crisis 20+ years ago.

National, state and local citizen and law enforcement officials have complained loudly that the TBTJ banks are undermining efforts to fight White Collar Crime, including money-laundering and financial terrorism. The TBTJ's newest lobbying system, BS-8, has Congress so thoroughly bought that the lobbyists brazenly say that White Collar Crime is itself no longer illegal. Citibank's & JP Morgan's lobbying and "revolving door" system automatically began using direct and indirect incentives and re-election pressures decades ago, on all regulators and Congresspeople, unless they specifically opt into the bankster protection racket, described in unwritten agreements never intended to be released to honest citizens. (It will take months or years for reality to filter out and reach most people currently attempting to honestly participate in democracy.)

TBTJ financial industry executives have consistently said that less regulation better protects the privacy of Control Frauds by reducing the security of the Middle Class against a wide range of intrusions, by co-opted governments, White Collar criminals and Innocent Frauds on the bankster's payroll. American financial companies have been particularly eager to demonstrate their commitment to reduced citizen rights in the aftermath of the revelations by former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Bill Black, detailing the extensive overreach of TBTJ financial lobbies.

Holder never bothers speaking honestly to the Global Alliance Against Financial Abuse of the Middle Class and Democracy in General, regardless of where their diverse chapters try to meet. In fact, to my knowledge he's never raised the issue of preserving civic protections from large-scale Financial Control Fraud.

Sure, recent gutting of diverse Federal regulatory agencies has already greatly emboldened White criminals, as TARP and the aftermath showed, including providing implicit guarantees for abusers to avoid detection. In a snowballing number of cases, perpetrators are using clouded policy to cheaply and easily bypass tens of thousands of lines of former legal protections that had existed for 70 years or more - and to leverage that ability to operate from anywhere in the world. It shouldn't be a surprise that many Control Frauds rush to take advantage of "regulatory encryption" and anonymizing White Collar Crime practices to conceal contraband practices and disguise perpetrator positions.

In response to all this, Holder has essentially called on all citizens to work with him to look the other way while Wall Street guts Main Street, and ensures that law enforcement ignores the ability, with court-authorization, to at least attempt to obtain enough information to even initiate White Collar Crime investigations, such as catching mega Control Frauds.

Even with the new forms of Control Fraud, government officials maintain access to many sources of data related to the execution of Elite Financial Fraud, including the records of calls, texts and other communications kept by lobbyists, Congressional staff and Public Regulators alike. Even worse are the extensive, passive collusion agreements that most regulatory agencies now take for granted, by claiming that they "can't afford to prosecute rampant White Collar Crime," resulting in paltry fines for massive frauds against Jane and Joe Sixpack. Police and District Attorneys rarely even get search warrants on which to use third-party tools to try to unravel the levels of corruption involved in on decisions to not prosecute massive mortgage frauds and other financial schemes. Courts can and often have ordered the entire Middle Class to furnish up the keys that would otherwise preserve the future of entire generations against domination by a few Super Crooks.

Capiche?

CNBC.com staff — Throw away the key! Pols want bad bankers jailed

Some bipartisanship on one thing anyway.

CNBC Net Net
Throw away the key! Pols want bad bankers jailed
CNBC.com staff

Bill Black — Two Sentences that Explain the Crisis and How Easy it Was to Avoid

Everyone should read and understand the implications of these two sentences from the 2011 report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC).

“From 2000 to 2007, [appraisers] ultimately delivered to Washington officials a petition; signed by 11,000 appraisers…it charged that lenders were pressuring appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties. According to the petition, lenders were ‘blacklisting honest appraisers’ and instead assigning business only to appraisers who would hit the desired price targets” (FCIC 2011: 18).

Those two sentences tell us more about the crisis’ cause, and how easy it was to prevent, than all the books published about the crisis – combined. Here are ten key implications....

New Economic Perspectives
Two Sentences that Explain the Crisis and How Easy it Was to Avoid
William K Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City

Forget the economic explanations for the crisis. Study Bill Black if you want to know what really happened. Of course, this is entirely consistent with Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, but Bill documents how it actually went down this Ponzi cycle.

And there was no Pecora commission and none is planned. Instead the AG has promised global finance that no one will be prosecuted.

Another neoliberal dream. No accountability.

Nye Lavalle — You Can't Trust The Mortgage Paper Trail™

paper trail

(h/t Foreclosure Fraud)

Yves Smith — Fed Argues that Mortgage Abuses are Trade Secrets, Meaning Institutionalized Fraud

You can’t have internal knowledge rise to the level of being a trade secret unless their was an institutional decision to keep it secret. That means the Fed is effectively saying that servicer management, and almost certainly bank management (since servicing units don’t have their own corporate counsel) was fully aware of the nature of the practices at issue and chose to keep them secret, supposedly for competitive reasons. This is fact is one of the things lawyers have been eager to establish, namely that bank management knew full well all these servicing tricks were happening, and sought to protect them as important sources of profit. Way to go, Fed! 

Now, of course, this argument is revealing in a lot of other ways. The Fed has also just admitted it thinks it is more important to protect bank knowledge of how to break the law than expose the information. So the Fed has also made explicit that it wants to preserve banks’ ability to rip off people. So the Fed’s official policy is bank profits trump the law. Not that we didn’t know that, but it has now been stated in a baldfaced manner.

Naked Capitalism
Fed Argues that Mortgage Abuses are Trade Secrets, Meaning Institutionalized Fraud
Yves Smith

Fed admits that the game is rigged.

Randy Wray — More on the Bankster License to Steal (Homes)

Fraud on Fraud is where you commit a second fraud to try to cover up the first. What this latest settlement tries to do is cover up the flaws of the first settlement. So what we essentially have here is settlement on settlement.

Better for them to throw money at us than face the harsh light of day. The banks recognized it was going to be too expensive and too unwieldy for them to go through with these reviews.

Economonitor | Great Leap Forward
More on the Bankster License to Steal (Homes)
L. Randall Wray

Pity the Poor Banksters

The innocent banks were unwittingly duped by these petty crooks.

As a consequence, they're stuck with a bridge in Arizona which the MUST sell to you, in order to "rescue" their essential bank.

Brother, can you spare a $10Billion? They just must unload that bridge, or the whole country will theoretically collapse.

Los Gatos developer, two others indicted on charges related to mortgage fraud

All together now! "THIS WILL NOT STAND!"

We must act quickly to save our White Collar Criminals from the depredations of smug, petty beginners ... trying to exceed their licenses & move into the big leagues.

Yessir. Go, I say, go get 'em boy!

Sheesh! Just how dumb do these people think the US electorate is?

Randy Wray — The $7 Trillion Dollar Question That Haunts Banks

Read it at Economonitor | Great Lead Forward

The $7 Trillion Dollar Question That Haunts Banks: When Will The Obama Administration Recognize That Mers Destroyed The Chain Of Title Making All Foreclosures Suspect?
by L. Randall Wray

Randy Wray — The Financial Crisis and Shrek’s Onion of Fraud

Wow! Randy rails against mortgage fraud.

This is a must-read. Yikes!

Read it at Economonitor | Great Leap Forward
The Financial Crisis and Shrek’s Onion of Fraud
by L. Randall Wray

A legacy of clouded titles?

In the absence of state and federal research about how the nation's largest mortgage companies are forging mortgage documents and wrongfully foreclosing on borrowers, local officials are stepping up. Earlier this week, San Francisco assessor-recorder Phil Ting released a report concluding that 85 percent of nearly 400 audited foreclosures had serious problems or were outright illegal, providing a rare glimpse into the specifics of foreclosure fraud in America. 

"We really wanted to take a look at what the documents would tell us and whether or not it was something systemic," Ting said. "We had a lot of anecdotal information but never knew if the problems represented 5 percent or 20 percent or 80 percent of the cases. What we have for the first time is hard data about the level of systematic problems going on in the mortgage industry."

Read it at The Huffington Post
Mortgage Fraud: Local Officials Step Up To Uncover Document Fraud

by Loren Berlin

Confirms what Bill Black has been saying for a long time.

Randy Wray rips the mortgage settlement by state AGs

Read it at Economonitor | Great Leap Forward
State AGs Cave to Banksters
Author: L. Randall Wray

Fraud joins torture and indefinite detention as legal in the US — if you are among the elite, that is. If you are not, you can be indefinitely detained on fraudulent information, held incognito and tortured, with no legal recourse. You thought private property was sacred? Not any more. You can now be fraudulently foreclosed upon with no recourse or remedy.

But it's OK. It's "American exceptionalism" — that is the privileged are excepted from the law.

Spitzer and Ratigan — Mitt Romney's State of the Union Challenge on the Mortgage Crisis

What Americans should be taking from this episode is that finance, while complex, is not conceptually hard. If it's a lie on the balance sheet, it's going to be destructive to ordinary people. If you stop the balance sheet lying, the economy will do better. But while Mitt Romney might have said this out loud, they all know it behind closed doors. Our question is, who will be the first to make this a policy reality?

Read it at The Huffington Post
Mitt Romney's State of the Union Challenge on the Mortgage Crisis

by Elliot Spitzer and Dylan Ratigan

Alert — Call Your Attorney General Today to Oppose Big Obama Push to Get Mortgage Settlement Deal Done

If you didn't catch this:

Here are some of the reasons to oppose a settlement:1. There have been virtually no investigations, and the Administration has engaged in cover-ups rather than trying to get to the bottom of the mortgage mess

2. The big argument made in favor of the deal, that it will help borrowers, is patently false. Remember, Countrywide entered into a deal with attorney generals just like this, where they agreed to do mods in return for a settlement on abuses. Guess what? They didn’t do the mods.To add insult to injury, they actually abused homeowners who should have gotten mods. Nevada AG is suing Countrywide now over its failure to comply with the terms of its settlement. And even if some mods miraculously did get done, the settlement is designed to have banks hit a dollar amount. That means they will focus on the biggest loans, which means any relief will go to a comparatively small number of people in (originally) big ticket houses.

3. The Administration has only one chance to get this right. Now you might argue that Team Obama has no intention of getting the mortgage mess right, but the tectonic plates suddenly seem to be moving in elite circles. The Fed realizes that housing is a BIG problem and has even started making noise about it. Yet Obama is moving forward with a plan cooked up in late 2010 that is completely out of whack with the urgency and severity of the problem. Note that this settlement will NOT stop private actions, such as borrowers fighting foreclosures. And we will continue to banks refuse to take losses and drag out foreclosures to maximize fees. That will lead to continued pressure on housing prices in many markets as buyers stay on the sidelines, fearful of buying before a large shadow inventory clears.

Read it at Naked Capitalism

Call Your Attorney General Today to Oppose Big Obama Push to Get Mortgage Settlement Deal Done

by Yves Smith

List of phone numbers and emails provided.

See also:

Bending the Rule of Law to Help the Banks: Effort to Draft a National Foreclosure Statute Underway
by Yves Smith

Randy Wray — Smoking guns littering the floor of the Fed FOMC conference room

Read it at Economonitor | Great Leap Forward
MORTGAGE FRAUD REVISITED: Why Did the Fed Pump and Dump US Real Estate Markets?

by L. Randall Wray

This is a knock-your-socks off post. Damning, one one hand, and on the other, it reveals that the current direction is over the cliff.

Bill Black's Handy Guide to Bankster Fraud

The white collar criminologist calls out Bush and Obama for not prosecuting financial fraud and demands an end to the free pass for campaign contributors.

Sixty Minutes' December 11, 2011  interview of President Obama included a claim by Obama that, unfortunately, did not lead the interviewer to ask the obvious, essential follow-up questions.

“I can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal.”

Obama did not explain what Wall Street behavior he found least ethical or what unethical Wall Street actions he believed was not illegal. It would have done the world (and Obama) a great service had he been asked these questions. He would not have given a coherent answer because his thinking on these issues has never been coherent. If he had to explain his position he, and the public, would recognize it was indefensible. I offer the following scale of unethical banker behavior related to fraudulent mortgages and mortgage paper (principally collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)) that is illegal and deserved punishment. I write to prompt the rigorous analytical discussion that is essential to expose and end Obama and Bush’s “Presidential Amnesty for Contributors” (PAC) doctrine. The financial industry is the leading campaign contributor to both parties and those contributions come overwhelmingly from the wealthiest officers – the one-tenth of one percent that thrives by being parasites on the 99 percent.

Read the rest at AlterNet (repost)
Bill Black's Handy Guide to Bankster Fraud, From 'Small Fradulent Fry' to 'Septic Tank Scum'
by William K. Black

Virtual Teach-In with William K. Black

Virtual Teach-In with William K. Black (audio)

with OccupiedMedia

Bill has this at his fingertips. Great summary.