William K. Black — Bank Whistleblowers United Told DOJ to use 4506-T as Kryptonite v Banksters

Sheriff Bill at his best. Long and detailed analysis of liar's loans.

New Economic Perspectives
Bank Whistleblowers United Told DOJ to use 4506-T as Kryptonite v Banksters
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Subprime Auto Loan Defaults on the Rise — Sharmini Peries interviews Bill Black

SHARMINI PERIES: Bill, just how serious is this problem with the subprime auto loans? Bloomberg makes it look like it could be a real problem. We're dealing with about a trillion dollars' worth here.

BILL BLACK: It's a very severe problem for consumers who are going to lose not only their cars, but their credit ratings. It's a moderate problem for some of the banks. It's not a systemic problem on the order of the Great Recession and the financial crisis that drove it. For one reason, it simply doesn't create the same kind of bubble dynamics in the housing context by allowing large numbers of people to buy homes -- that can't afford to repay the homes. Effectively, you create much more demand. All other factors held constant, that means price goes up. You don't really get the same kind of effect, except in the very modest proportions in the auto market. So A, it's a much smaller market. B, it doesn't have this bubble, so it's not going to cause a systemic crisis....

Predatory lending continues.

TRNN
Subprime Auto Loan Defaults on the Rise

Sharmini Peries interviews Bill Black

Bad Lenders Make Bad Loans — Sharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson

There is no way in which the lenders did expect Greece to grow. In fact, the IMF was the main lender. It said that Greece cannot grow, under the circumstances that it has now.

What do you do in a case where you make a loan to a country, and the entire staff says that there is no way this country can repay the loan? That is what the IMF staff said in 2015. It made the loan anyway – not to Greece, but to pay French banks, German banks and a few other bondholders – not a penny actually went to Greece. The junk economics they used claimed to have a program to make sure the IMF would help manage the Greek economy to enable it to repay. Unfortunately, their secret ingredient was austerity....

So, the question is, why does this junk economics continue, decade after decade? The reason is that the loans are made to Greece precisely because Greece couldn’t pay. When a country can’t pay, the rules at the IMF and EU and the German bankers behind it say, don’t worry, we will simply insist that you sell off your public domain. Sell off your land, your transportation, your ports, your electric utilities. This is by now a program that has gone on and on, decade after decade....

So they’re making an example of Greece. They’re going to show that finance rules, and in fact that is why both Trump and Ted Malloch have come up in support of the separatist movement in France. They’re supporting Marine Le Pen, just as Putin is supporting Marine Le Pen. There’s a perception throughout the world that finance really is a mode of warfare.

If they can convince countries somehow to adopt junk economics and pursue policies that will destroy themselves, then they’ll be easy pickings for foreign investors, and for the globalists to take over other economies. So, it’s a form of war....

One of Michael Hudson's better ones.

Michael Hudson
Bad Lenders Make Bad Loans
Sharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson, President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

Ellen Brown — The Stone that Brings Down Goliath? Richmond and Eminent Domain

Gayle McLaughlin, the bold mayor of Richmond, California, has gone where no woman dared go before, threatening to take underwater mortgages by eminent domain from Wall Street banks and renegotiate them on behalf of beleaguered homeowners. A member of the Green Party, which takes no corporate campaign money, she proved her mettle standing up to Chevron, which dominates the Richmond landscape. But the banks have signaled that if Richmond or another city tries the eminent domain gambit, they will rush to court seeking an injunction. Their grounds: an unconstitutional taking of private property and breach of contract.

How to refute those charges? There is a way; but to understand it, you first need to grasp the massive fraud perpetrated on homeowners. It is how you were duped into paying more than your house was worth; why you should not just turn in your keys or short-sell your underwater property away; why you should urge Congress not to legalize the MERS scheme; and why you should insist that your local government help you acquire title to your home at a fair price if the banks won’t. That is exactly what Richmond and other city councils are attempting to do through the tool of eminent domain.

Web Of Debt Blog
The Stone that Brings Down Goliath? Richmond and Eminent Domain
Ellen Brown

Michael Hudson — Too Big To Jail?

Video and transcript of Paul Jay interviewing Michael.

The idea by the Progressive Era in the early 20th century was that instead of banking being predatory as it had been for thousands of years, instead lending against real estate or to governments for war loans – or for petty consumer usury, foreclosing and putting people in debtors’ prisons – for the first time in history banks were going to make loans to finance direct investment in new means of production. The aim was to mobilize banking and savings to expand industry, to build factories and equipment that weren’t already there.

This is how Germany rose rapidly to industrial power with the Reichsbank, along with the rest of central Europe. Leading up to World War I, German banks worked with the German government almost as semi public entities – along with the military-industrial complex, to be sure. But at least you had banking taking industrial form.

World War I changed everything. You had a reversion to the English-Dutch-American kind of banking that was called merchant banking. Banks would make loans to ship goods that are already produced, or they’d make loans against real estate. So today you have 80 percent of bank loans in America and England and Scandinavia are all loans for real estate. So, essentially the function of the financial sector has been simply to load down the economy with debt without helping the economy grow.

What you really want is for banks, instead of loading the economy down with debt, to be able to finance economic growth instead of just eating into growth as an overhead.

Michael Hudson
Too Big To Jail?

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