Tag Archives: Bank of America

Pam Martens ~ Schneiderman To Sue Big Banks

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Wall Street On Parade May 7 2013

Monitor Has Known For Months That Banks Are Flagrantly Violating Mortgage Settlement

Yesterday, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office would bring suit against Bank of America and Wells Fargo for “flagrant” violations of last year’s National Mortgage Settlement – a deal signed onto by 49 state attorneys general which promised to reform the shady mortgage servicing practices of five of the largest mortgage lenders in the U.S.

The question that arises is why the Monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement had not already brought a lawsuit in Federal Court to stop the violations.

During his press conference yesterday announcing the lawsuit, Schneiderman said his office has logged 210 complaints against Wells Fargo for violations of the settlement and 129 involving Bank of America. Those figures, however, are dwarfed by the findings of Joseph A. Smith, Jr., the man put in charge of monitoring the settlement and bringing enforcement actions to the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. when serial violations occur. In his February 13, 2013 report, Smith reported receiving 5,763 complaints from consumers from May 2012 through February 1, 2013 and 600 complaints from advocates such as legal aid attorneys.

Even more troubling, the pace of complaints had skyrocketed by 34 percent, rising from an average of 550 per month to 830 complaints per month more recently.

Continue reading @ Wall Street On Parade

Matt Taibbi ~ While Wronged Homeowners Got $300 Apiece In Foreclosure Settlement, Consultants Who Helped Protect Banks Got $2 Billion

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Rolling Stone April 26 2013

The obscene greed-and-arrogance stories emanating from Wall Street are piling up so fast, it’s getting hard to keep up. This one is from last week, but I missed it – it’s about the foreclosure/robo-signing settlement that was concluded earlier this year.

The upshot of this story is that in advance of that notorious settlement, the government ordered banks to hire “independent” consultants to examine their loan files to see just exactly how corrupt they were.

Now it comes out that not only were these consultants not so independent, not only did they very likely skew the numbers seriously in favor of the banks, and not only were these few consultants paid over $2 billion (over 20 percent of the entire settlement amount) while the average homeowner only received $300 in the deal – in addition to all of that, it appears that federal regulators will not turn over the evidence of impropriety they discovered during these reviews to homeowners who may want to sue the banks.

In other words, the government not only ordered the banks to hire consultants who may have gamed the foreclosure settlement in favor of the banks, but the regulators themselves are hiding the information from the public in order to shield the banks from further lawsuits.

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

To recap: in the foreclosure deal, 13 banks agreed to pay a total of $9.3 billion to settle their liability in a number of areas, including robo-signing, which is just a euphemism for mass-perjury – robo-signing is the practice of having low-level bank employees sign documents attesting to full knowledge of case files in court foreclosure actions, when in fact they were signing hundreds of files per day, often having no idea whether the paperwork was correct or not.

It was done across the industry and turned housing cases across America into nightmares of jumbled and/or forged paperwork, in which even people who did not deserve to be thrown out of their homes were uprooted thanks to systematic errors by faceless bureaucrats who cut legal corners purely to save money.

All the major banks were guilty on a mass scale, but they worked with federal regulators like the Fed and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to secure this wide-ranging, industry-saving settlement, which not only covered the robosigning epidemic but a host of other bad or illegal practices, like the wrongful denial of modifications and the improper levying of (often hidden) fees.

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Matt Bewig ~ Bank Of America Has Worst Big Bank Home Loan Customer Service Complaint Record

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IntelliHub April 2 2013

According to the data, banking giant Bank of America(2012 revenue: $83.33 billion) had by far the worst customer service record, with 15,136 complaints since December 2011, about 300 of them still unresolved.

bank of america

Despite having its director filibustered and its very existence threatened by Senate Republicans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) continues to disseminate useful information for consumers while pointing out the failings of the banking and finance industry. Last week, for example, the agency released a new public database of consumer complaints against mortgage servicing companies that bill and collect payments and handle distressed borrowers and foreclosures.

According to the data, banking giant Bank of America (2012 revenue: $83.33 billion) had by far the worst customer service record, with 15,136 complaints since December 2011, about 300 of them still unresolved. BoA’s record is far out of proportion to the share of mortgage servicing it handles: while the bank services only about 15% of U.S. home loans, it earned 30% of the 50,457 complaints logged.

Two-thirds of the complaints were against BoA’s handling of loan modifications, debt collection and foreclosures, and 20% arose from poor customer service generally.

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The Coming Derivatives Panic That Will Destroy Global Financial Markets

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The Economic Collapse Blog | November 5 2012

When financial markets in the United States crash, so does the U.S. economy.  Just remember what happened back in 2008.  The financial markets crashed, the credit markets froze up, and suddenly the economy went into cardiac arrest.  Well, there are very few things that could cause the financial markets to crash harder or farther than a derivatives panic.  Sadly, most Americans don’t even understand what derivatives are.  Unlike stocks and bonds, a derivative is not an investment in anything real.  Rather, a derivative is a legal bet on the future value or performance of something else.  Just like you can go to Las Vegas and bet on who will win the football games this weekend, bankers on Wall Street make trillions of dollars of bets about how interest rates will perform in the future and about what credit instruments are likely to default.  Wall Street has been transformed into a gigantic casino where people are betting on just about anything that you can imagine.  This works fine as long as there are not any wild swings in the economy and risk is managed with strict discipline, but as we have seen, there have been times when derivatives have caused massive problems in recent years.  For example, do you know why the largest insurance company in the world, AIG, crashed back in 2008 and required a government bailout?  It was because of derivatives.  Bad derivatives trades also caused the failure of MF Global, and the 6 billion dollar loss that JPMorgan Chase recently suffered because of derivatives made headlines all over the globe.  But all of those incidents were just warm up acts for the coming derivatives panic that will destroy global financial markets.  The largest casino in the history of the world is going to go “bust” and the economic fallout from the financial crash that will happen as a result will be absolutely horrific.

There is a reason why Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”.  Nobody really knows the total value of all the derivatives that are floating around out there, but estimates place the notional value of the global derivatives market anywhere from 600 trillion dollars all the way up to 1.5 quadrillion dollars.

Keep in mind that global GDP is somewhere around 70 trillion dollars for an entire year.  So we are talking about an amount of money that is absolutely mind blowing.

So who is buying and selling all of these derivatives?

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Matt Taibbi ~ B of A CEO Apparently Can’t Remember Anything

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Reader Supported News | November 28 2012

Thank God for Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. If you’re a court junkie, or have the misfortune (as some of us poor reporters do) of being forced professionally to spend a lot of time reading legal documents, the just-released Moynihan deposition in MBIA v. Bank of America, Countrywide, and a Buttload of Other Shameless Mortgage Fraudsters will go down as one of the great Nixonian-stonewalling efforts ever, and one of the more entertaining reads of the year.

In this long-awaited interrogation – Bank of America has been fighting to keep Moynihan from being deposed in this case for some time - Moynihan does a full Star Trek special, boldly going where no deponent has ever gone before, breaking out the “I don’t recall” line more often and perhaps more ridiculously than was previously thought possible. Moynihan seems to remember his own name, and perhaps his current job title, but beyond that, he’ll have to get back to you.

The MBIA v. Bank of America case is one of the bigger and weightier lawsuits hovering over the financial world. Prior to the crash, MBIA was, along with a company called Ambac, one of the two largest and most reputable names in what’s called the “monoline” insurance business.

The monolines sell a kind of investment insurance – if you invest in a municipal bond or in mortgage-backed securities backed or “wrapped” by a monoline, you have backing in case the investment goes south. If a municipality defaults on its bond payments, or homeowners in a mortgage-backed security default on their mortgage payments, the investors in those instruments can collect from the monoline insurer.

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Bob Adelmann ~ Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Set to Explode

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The New American | September 19 2012

When the Federal Reserve announced last week its plan to buy more treasury securities, only a few read the fine print. Instead, the stock market jumped for joy at the news, leaping nearly 300 points on Friday.

What most market observers saw was the headline: “the [Federal Open Market] Committee agreed today to increase policy accommodation by purchasing additional … securities at a pace of $40 billion per month.” The press release added: “These actions … should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.”

Those observers envisioned sugar plums dancing in their heads as the Fed’s plan would lead, no doubt, to more economic growth, more jobs, more profits, and more stocks to sell on Wall Street.

Catherine Mann, professor of finance at Brandeis University, expressed her doubts that the new plan would do any such thing:

The Fed continues to want the economy to grow faster and specifically, to grow more jobs, but the ability of QE to do that is extraordinarily limited.

We know that QE reduced interest rates, but we also know that has not led to more construction, more mortgages, more business investment, or more lending. Since it hasn’t done any of that, it probably hasn’t created jobs either.

In fact, unemployment not only hasn’t fallen significantly since the start of the Fed’s rollouts of Quantitative Easings, but it has remained higher longer than any time since the early 1980s. Mark Gertler, an economist at New York University, estimated that if the monthly purchases continued long enough, whereby the Fed would purchase another $500 to $600 billion of securities, it might lower long-term interest rates by one-tenth of one percent — maybe. Stated Gertler, “We’re not talking about a major form of stimulus, but given [that] the job market is still unsettled, it could be useful. Everything else being equal, credit will be cheaper.

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Bob Adelmann ~ Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Set to Explode

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The New American | September 19 2012

When the Federal Reserve announced last week its plan to buy more treasury securities, only a few read the fine print. Instead, the stock market jumped for joy at the news, leaping nearly 300 points on Friday.

What most market observers saw was the headline: “the [Federal Open Market] Committee agreed today to increase policy accommodation by purchasing additional … securities at a pace of $40 billion per month.” The press release added: “These actions … should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.”

Those observers envisioned sugar plums dancing in their heads as the Fed’s plan would lead, no doubt, to more economic growth, more jobs, more profits, and more stocks to sell on Wall Street.

Catherine Mann, professor of finance at Brandeis University, expressed her doubts that the new plan would do any such thing:

The Fed continues to want the economy to grow faster and specifically, to grow more jobs, but the ability of QE to do that is extraordinarily limited.

We know that QE reduced interest rates, but we also know that has not led to more construction, more mortgages, more business investment, or more lending. Since it hasn’t done any of that, it probably hasn’t created jobs either.

In fact, unemployment not only hasn’t fallen significantly since the start of the Fed’s rollouts of Quantitative Easings, but it has remained higher longer than any time since the early 1980s. Mark Gertler, an economist at New York University, estimated that if the monthly purchases continued long enough, whereby the Fed would purchase another $500 to $600 billion of securities, it might lower long-term interest rates by one-tenth of one percent — maybe. Stated Gertler, “We’re not talking about a major form of stimulus, but given [that] the job market is still unsettled, it could be useful. Everything else being equal, credit will be cheaper.

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Ellen Brown ~ Titanic Banks Hit LIBOR Iceberg: Will Lawsuits Sink the Ship?

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Nation of Change | July 22 2012

At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist.   Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.  Charges includeracketeering (organized crime under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing.  Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed.  Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

In an article in the July 3rd Guardian titled “Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution”, Seumas Milne writes of the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:

It’s already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. 

. . . It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.

. . . A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City. . . . Finance has usurped democracy. 

Bid-rigging and Rate-rigging

Bid-rigging was the subject of U.S. v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a ten-year suit in which the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a judgment on May 11 against three GE Capital employees.  Billions of dollars were skimmed from cities all across America by colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion.  Other banks involved in the bidding scheme included Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and UBS.  These banks have already paid a total of $673 million in restitution after agreeing to cooperate in the government’s case.

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“George Washington” ~ U.S. Gave Tens of Billions to Libor-Manipulating Banks … Even AFTER Learning about the Manipulation George Washington’s picture

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Zerohedge | July 11 2012 | Thanks, Thomas

You know that Libor is the largest economic scam in world history and the largest insider trading scandal ever.

You know that the Federal Reserve knew about the manipulation by August 2007. And see this.

But did you realize that the Fed and Treasury threw billions of dollars of taxpayer money at Barclays and the other Libor-manipulating banks after they knew about the manipulation … and did nothing to stop it?

As Richard Eskow notes:

Thanks to the GAO audit of the Fed — an audit which it vigorously resisted — we know that Barclays was the fifth largest recipient of emergency loans. Bailout loans for Barclays came to $868 billion. That means that Barclays probably made billions off the reduced interest rate alone, courtesy of the American people.

Those loans were granted between December 2007 and July 2010. That means the Fed was doling out billions to Barclays after it learned that the bank was lying about its LIBOR rates.

Indeed, all of the probable Libor manipulators – including Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, RBS and Deutsche – were huge recipients of bailout money courtesy of the American taxpayer:

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Nathaniel Popper ~ LIBOR Rate Scandal Stirs Scramble For Damages

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Dealbook The NY Times | July 11 2012 | Thanks, Thomas

As unemployment climbed and tax revenue fell, the city of Baltimore laid off employees and cut services in the midst of the financial crisis. Its leaders now say the city’s troubles were aggravated by bankers’ manipulation of a key interest rate linked to hundreds of millions of dollars the city had borrowed.

Baltimore has been leading a battle in Manhattan federal court against the banks that determine the interest rate, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which serves as a benchmark for global borrowing and stands at the center of the latest banking scandal. Now cities, states and municipal agencies nationwide, including Massachusetts, Nassau County on Long Island, and California’s public pension system, are looking at whether they suffered similar losses and are weighing legal action.

Dozens of lawsuits filed by municipalities, pension funds and hedge funds have been consolidated into a few related cases against more than a dozen banks that are involved in setting Libor each day, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Barclays. Last month, Barclays admitted to regulators that it tried to manipulate Libor before and during the financial crisis in 2008, and paid $450 million to settle the charges. It said other banks were doing the same, but none of them have been accused of wrongdoing.

Continue reading @ The New York Times

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Greg Hunter ~ Weekly News Wrap Up June 22 2012

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USA Watchdog | June 22 2012

Moody’s dropped a bomb on global banks this week. It handed out credit rating cuts to 15 of the biggest banks in the western world. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citi were all cut two notches and Credit Suisse three notches. Since the 2008 financial crisis, it’s really been all about propping up the banks and nothing else. That’s why there has been growing talk of a world-wide money printing drop for weeks now, and one is coming soon.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti says there is “only a week to save the Eurozone.” Remember, Mr. Monti is an un-elected technocrat banker, and this is all about saving the banks and not the people. Congress wants documents in the failed “Fast and Furious” gun sting operation where a border patrol agent was killed with guns given to a Mexican drug cartel by undercover federal agents. The White House is invoking “Executive privilege” in order to not comply with Congress. This is turning ugly and may set off a Constitutional battle. Congress and the Executive Branch are supposed to be equal. There was another meeting this week concerning Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S., Russia, China, Germany, UK, France and, of course, Iran were all present. The only thing agreed upon was they would meet again. How long will Israel wait is the only question to me. Greg Hunter gives his analysis of these stories and more in the Weekly News wrap-Up.

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Jim Hightower ~ Coddling The 10 Percent

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Nation Of Change | May 14 2012

Another way that the rich are different from you and me is that their bankers serve them freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

The über-rich, of course, are used to such coddling, but now a class of customers that bankers have dubbed the “mass affluent” get cookies, too. Think you might qualify? You do… if you have a minimum of $500,000 to open one of these mass-affluent accounts. Otherwise, you fall into a category called “lower-margin” customers — so go get in the ATM line, Bucko.

This half-million-dollar-and-up bunch are not the 1-percenters. Instead they are the 10-percenters, and they’ve suddenly become hotly coveted by JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and other big chain banks. To reel in these mid-level richies, bankers are offering to pamper them lavishly.

For example, rather than having to breathe the same air as the riff-raff, they get to bank in cushy, private lounges. The carpets are plush, the cookies fresh, and a nice touch of wine and cheese might be available. There are no lines and no tellers to deal with – instead, these affluent swells get “relationship managers” who cater to their banking needs, including being available after hours. And here’s something completely astonishing: one bank president says of her advantaged clients, “We’ll come to you. If you want us to meet you in your home on a Sunday, we’ll do that.”

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