Tag Archives: Wells Fargo

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.

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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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Michael Snyder ~ 11 Economic Crashes That Are Happening Right Now

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Economic Collapse blog April 12 2013

The stock market is not crashing yet, but there are lots of other market crashes happening in the financial world right now.  Just like we saw back in 2008, it is taking stocks a little bit of extra time to catch up with economic reality.  But almost everywhere else you look, there are signs that a financial avalanche has begun.  Bitcoins are crashing, gold and silver are plunging, the price of oil and the overall demand for energy continue to decline, markets all over Europe are collapsing and consumer confidence in the United States just had the biggest miss relative to expectations that has ever been recorded.  In many ways, all of this is extremely reminiscent of 2008.  Other than the Bitcoin collapse, almost everything else that is happening now also happened back then.   So does that mean that a horrible stock market crash is coming as well?  Without a doubt, one is coming at some point.  The only question is whether it will be sooner or later.  Meanwhile, there are a whole lot of other economic crashes that deserve out attention at the moment.

The following are 11 economic crashes that are happening RIGHT NOW…

#1 Bitcoins

As I write this, the price of Bitcoins has fallen more than 70 percent from where it was on Wednesday.  This is one of the reasons why I have never recommended Bitcoins to anyone.  Yes, alternative currencies are a good thing, but there are a lot of big problems with Bitcoins.  Why would anyone want to invest in a currency that could lose 70 percent of its purchasing power in just two days?  Why would anyone want to invest in a currency where a single person can arbitrarily decide to suspend trading in that currency at any time?

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Matt Taibbi ~ More Secrets And Lies Of The Bailout

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Reader Supported News | January 9 2013

matt_taibbi3Opinion ~ I have a feature in the new issue of Rolling Stone called “Secrets and Lies of the Bailout,” which focuses in large part on the seemingly intentional policy of deception in the government’s rescue of the financial sector. The government didn’t just bail out Wall Street with money: It also lied on Wall Street’s behalf, calling unhealthy banks healthy, and helping banks cover up just how much aid they were getting in secret.

Proponents of the bailouts will say that whatever the government did, it worked. The economy didn’t collapse as it appeared it might in late 2008, and the stock markets are puffed up all over again, as financial companies in particular are back making huge profits.

But in the course of researching the magazine piece, we discovered definite victims of the myriad deceptions that became a baked-in feature of the bailouts. One of those victims was a southern investment broker who lost lots of his own money, lost money for family members who’d invested with him, and (maybe worst of all) lost plenty of his clients’ money, when he made investment decisions based on what turned out to be incomplete information.

If this particular broker had known exactly how far the bailouts reached, neither he nor his clients would ever have lost so much. But during the crisis it was decided, by people deemed more important than small-town investment advisers and their clients, that the full story of the bailouts didn’t need to be told.

As a result, George Hartzman and his clients got creamed. In recent years we’ve heard a lot about how the bailouts saved the world. This is the other side of the story.

George Hartzman is easy to like. The easygoing North Carolinian has every salesman’s ability to grab you from the first moment with humor and charm, but what makes him a little bit of a different kind of cat – and I suspect some of this change developed after he joined the growing population of financial crisis-era whistleblowers, dismissed from a Wells Fargo brokerage after making complaints about what he felt were bailout-related abuses – is that the humor is often self-directed. He loves to tell stories about all the goofy, sometimes-dicey sales jobs he’s taken over the years, and the hard work he put in to get really good at each and every one of them.

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Richard Clark ~ Are Banksters & The Fed Becoming The Fourth Branch Of Our Government?

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OEN | December 1 2012

Despite its pathetic propaganda encouraging us to practice doublethink, the Federal Reserve freely admits that it is privately owned, is a monopoly empowered by Congress, and that it operates independently from — above? — Congress and the president. Yet it pays its private undisclosed shareholders/owners huge dividends . . that it extracts from U.S. taxpayers!

Who receives dividends from owning shares of the private Federal Reserve? Charts created by the House Banking Committee Staff Report of August, 1976 reveal the following people and companies own shares in the Federal Reserve: Rothschilds, J.P. Morgan, the Warburgs banks, Kuhn, Loeb & Company, Jacob Schiff, William Rockefeller, David Rockefeller/Chase Bank, and many others.

Looting America

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Matt Taibbi ~ Another Bailed-Out Bank Accused Of Fraud

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Reader Supported News | October 11 2012

OPINION ~ Earlier this year, Charlie Munger, who is billionaire Warren Buffet’s right hand at Berkshire Hathaway and a sort of self-proclaimed mad oracle of Wall Street, made some interesting comments. He bashed people who buy gold, delivering an all-time amazing quote:

Gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939 but civilized people don’t buy gold – they invest in productive businesses.

Munger, if you might remember, is the same gazillionaire dickhead who two years ago ripped people experiencing post-crash economic hard times, saying they should “suck it in and cope” and that anyone who wants to complain about the Wall Street bailouts should realize they were “absolutely required to save your civilization” (Munger thinks a lot about “civilization”). He added that even if you didn’t like them, “you shouldn’t be bitching about a little bailout. You should have been thinking it should have been bigger.”

Some of those bailouts we shouldn’t have complained about, of course, were directed at one of Munger’s favorite companies – banking giant Wells Fargo, in which Munger and Buffett are heavily invested. Wells Fargo got as much as $36 billion in federal aid after the crash and got a massive push from the government to help it buy up the dying crash-era megabank Wachovia for $12.7 billion, a shotgun wedding that created the second-biggest bank in America. Wells Fargo not only got $25 billion in TARP funds just before it bought Wachovia, it got a special tax break from then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, which some reports say was worth as much as $25 billion to WF at that time.

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Susanne Posel ~ The Fed Now Owns Your Foreclosed Property Under QE3 Purchases Of Toxic Assets

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theintelhub.com | September 18 2012

On ABC’s “This Week”, George Will, columnist for the propaganda news outlet The Washington Post, spoke out against Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and his decision to instill QE3 which is essentially, “the government printing money.”

Will pointed out that this latest move is covert “trickle-down economics” where citizens are forced to invest in equities in order to continue to prop up the economy to perpetuate the false sense of reality that the American public lives under.

Last week, Bernanke announced that the Fed would purchase $40 billion in toxic assets, called mortgage-backed securities, per month. While this scheme will devastate the US dollar’s value by the very act of printing more money, there is a secret bailout of certain financial institutions occurring under the radar.

QE3 serves as a “regressive redistribution program” for the banksters who are enjoying a surge in their wealth under current economic conditions.

The Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA) recently announced that “strategic defaulters”, i.e. those homeowners who have abandoned their mortgage because they could not continue to make the monthly payments, will be jailed for this “crime”.

The FHFA oversees Freddie and Fannie Mac, the mortgage corporation owned by the US government.

The FHFA are focusing their efforts on criminally persecuting all American citizens “who abuses the FHFA programs” by walking away from their foreclosure.

Statistically speaking, according to the FDIC:

• 1 out of 200 homes will be foreclosed upon
• 250,000 new households enter foreclosure every 3 months
• 6 out of 10 homeowners are delinquent on their mortgage

Morgan Stanley is the financial institution that took in the mortgage-backed securities and offered their derivatives across the global market.

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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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Naomi Wolf ~ This Global Financial Fraud And Its Gatekeepers

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UK Guardian | RS_News | July 15 2012

The media’s ‘bad apple’ thesis no longer works. We’re seeing systemic corruption in banking – and systemic collusion.

OPINION ~ Last fall, I argued that the violent reaction to Occupy and other protests around the world had to do with the 1%ers’ fear of the rank and file exposing massive fraud if they ever managed get their hands on the books. At that time, I had no evidence of this motivation beyond the fact that financial system reform and increased transparency were at the top of many protesters’ list of demands.

But this week presents a sick-making trove of new data that abundantly fills in this hypothesis and confirms this picture. The notion that the entire global financial system is riddled with systemic fraud – and that key players in the gatekeeper roles, both in finance and in government, including regulatory bodies, know it and choose to quietly sustain this reality – is one that would have only recently seemed like the frenzied hypothesis of tinhat-wearers, but this week’s headlines make such a conclusion, sadly, inevitable.

The New York Times business section on 12 July shows multiple exposes of systemic fraud throughout banks: banks colluding with other banks in manipulation of interest rates, regulators aware of systemic fraud, and key government officials (at least one banker who became the most key government official) aware of it and colluding as well. Fraud in banks has been understood conventionally and, I would say, messaged as a glitch. As in London Mayor Boris Johnson’s full-throated defense of Barclay’s leadership last week, bank fraud is portrayed as a case, when it surfaces, of a few “bad apples” gone astray.

In the New York Times business section, we read that the HSBC banking group is being fined up to $1bn, for not preventing money-laundering (a highly profitable activity not to prevent) between 2004 and 2010 – a six years’ long “oops”. In another article that day, Republican Senator Charles Grassley says of the financial group Peregrine capital: “This is a company that is on top of things.” The article goes onto explain that at Peregrine Financial, “regulators discovered about $215m in customer money was missing.” Its founder now faces criminal charges. Later, the article mentions that this revelation comes a few months after MF Global “lost” more than $1bn in clients’ money.

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Wells Fargo’s Disgraceful Discrimination Scandal: A Guide

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The Week | July 13 2012 | Thanks, Minty

The bank ponies up $175 million to settle accusations that it charged blacks and Latinos higher interest rates and fees on their mortgages

A customer leaves a Wells Fargo Bank branch office July 12: The bank is accused of charging higher fees and interest rates for some 30,000 minority borrowers across 36 states. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

This week, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $175 million to settle charges that it discriminated against thousands of blacks, Latinos, and other minority borrowers between 2004 and 2009. The Justice Department had accused Wells Fargo, the country’s largest mortgage lender, of charging minority borrowers higher interest rates and fees on home loans than it charged white borrowers with similar credit ratings. Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general at the department, slammed Wells Fargo for levying the equivalent of a “racial surtax.” People ”should be judged by the content of their creditworthiness and not the color of their skin,” he said. Here, a guide to the case:

What exactly did Wells Fargo do?

The Justice Department says Wells Fargo engaged in a pattern of “systemic discrimination” in which some 30,000 minority borrowers across 36 states were charged higher fees and interest rates than their white counterparts. A black borrower in Chicago, for example, paid an average of nearly $3,000 more in fees than a white applicant who had the same credit rating. A Latino borrower paid more than $2,000 extra. The average “surtax” for a black borrower in the Miami area in 2007 was $3,657. In addition, Wells Fargo steered some 4,000 minority borrowers with good credit toward subprime loans — which are usually reserved for those with shaky credit, and have interest rates that often spike after several years.

What does Wells Fargo say now?
Though it’s coughing up a massive settlement, the bank did not officially admit wrongdoing, and claims that it settled the case “solely for the purpose of avoiding contested litigation” with the government. The bank stopped issuing subprime loans in 2008.

Why were minority borrowers treated differently?

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Travis Waldron ~ Former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine Gets $8 Million Pay Package After Firm Went Bankrupt

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Nation Of Change | May 22 2012

Jon Corzine, the former chief executive of bankrupt financial firm MF Global, received an $8 million pay package in the year his company plummeted into bankruptcy and faced a shortfall in customer funds totaling $1.6 billion.

Corzine resigned from the firm and turned down an $11 million severance package after MF Global filed for bankruptcy October, and he is not likely to realize the more than $5 million of his pay package that is tied to the firm’s now worthless stock. But he didn’t walk away empty-handed, the Wall Street Journal reports:

About $5.35 million of Mr. Corzine’s compensation came in the form of stock options, which are now worthless as a result of MF Global’s failure. Still, the former New Jersey governor and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chairman got more than $3 million in cash compensation, including a $1.25 million bonus.

Though Corzine may be the most extreme example, he isn’t the only financial industry CEO whose pay is out-of-whack with the performance of the company he oversees. In 2011, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan made six times what he made in 2010 even as the bank’s stock price was cut in half. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s pay increased 13.7 percent (to $19 million) in 2011, even as shareholder return declined 45.6 percent. Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf received a 2.1 percent bump in pay (to $17.9 million); the company’s shareholders saw their returns decline 9.5 percent.

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Common Dreams Staff ~ ‘Mortgage Settlement’ Funds Paying for Prisons, Not Foreclosure Relief

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Common Dreams | May 16 2012

Needy states use housing aid cash to fund prisons, education shortfalls, and plug budgets

As part of a financial settlement over fraudulent mortgage practices earlier this year, some of the nation’s largest banks agreed to make payments to state government totaling $2.5 billion that would be earmarked for victims of wrongful foreclosure and other distressed homeowners. Instead, reports the New York Times today, a majority of those funds are going to plug state budget shortfalls, leaving homeowners without recourse and validating critics who questioned the strength of the deal when it was announced in February.

Protesters staged a rally against home foreclosures in California on Tuesday outside the State Capitol in Sacramento. (Max Whittaker for The New York Times) The total settlement was for $25 billion, but only a tenth of that was to come in the form of cash payment to the states. The remainder was to come in the form of “credits” for reducing mortgage debt and other loan activities.

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Home Owners Across the Nation Sue All Bank Servicers and Their Offshore Havens ~ Spire Law Officially Announces Filing of Landmark Lawsuit (Thanks, Tobin)

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Marketwatch | April 23 2012

Largest International Money Laundering Network in History Formed During Obama Administration; U.S. Banks’ Theft of Home Owners’ Money Laundered Through Cayman Islands, Isle of Man and Numerous Offshore-Based Affiliates

NEW YORK, NY, Apr 23, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — In a lawsuit alleged to involve the largest money laundering network in United States history, Spire Law Group, LLP — on behalf of home owners across the Country — has filed a mass tort action in the Supreme Court of New York, County of Kings. Home owners across the country have sued every major bank servicer and their subsidiaries — formed in countries known as havens for money laundering such as the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man, Luxembourg and Malaysia — alleging that while the Obama Administration was publicly encouraging loan modifications for home owners, it was privately ratifying the formation of these shell companies in violation of the United States Patriot Act, and State and Federal law. The case further alleges that through these obscure foreign companies, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo Bank, Citibank, Citigroup, One West Bank, and numerous other federally chartered banks stole hundreds of millions of dollars of home owners’ money during the last decade and then laundered it through offshore companies. The complaint, Index No. 500827, was filed by Spire Law Group, LLP, and several of the Firm’s affiliates and partners across the United States.

Far from being ambiguous, this is a complaint that “names names.” Indeed, the lawsuit identifies specific companies and the offshore countries used in this enormous money laundering scheme. Federally Chartered Banks’ theft of money and their utilization of offshore tax haven subsidiaries represent potential FDIC violations, violations of New York law, and countless other legal wrongdoings under state and federal law.

Continue reading @ Marketwatch

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