had given up on the idea that anyone associated with Lehman would be charged with fraud, even though it was blindingly obvious even before the investment bank failed that it was up to no good. So tonight’s report in the Wall Street Journal, that the New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is about to file a lawsuit against Lehman accountants Ernst and Young, is welcome news indeed.
Read more...Mobile phone masts linked to mysterious spikes in births Guardian 13 Products Most Likely To Made By Child Or Forced Labor Huffington Post (hat tip reader May S) The U-bend of life Economist Bad Expectations New Republic (hat tip reader Skippy) Swedish Police Report Details Case Against Assange New York Times ‘A new type of […]
Read more...By Richard Smith The latest Bank of England Financial Stability Report is worth decoding. My last post on the UK sketched a scenario in which the very large 2011 funding programme for UK banks, discussed in the June BoE FSR (back issues all available here), could be quite problematic, in adverse markets. I hinted that […]
Read more...Per the order below (hat tip Matt Weidner) a judge in Broward County appears to have cancelled all foreclosure sales in one of the foreclosure division from December 20 to December 31: Broward County Judicial Order Canceling Foreclosure Sales One might think this has something to with the Fannie and Freddie foreclosure halts, with run […]
Read more...I got this report from an attorney who is doing work in one of the top five foreclosure states. I’m relying this account in a somewhat sanitized form; he provided far more in the way of specifics.
One of his colleagues has a monthly mortgage payment considerably above $20,000 a month. He has not made a single payment in over 18 months. He has also not received a foreclosure notice or even as much as a call from his servicer.
Read more...
How Green Is Your Artificial Christmas Tree? You Might Be Surprised New York Times. My favorite fake tree was a tinsel tree when we lived in Boston and that year, real trees were pretty much impossible to obtain. Tinsel trees were not included in this study (and since this type is quite the antique, it has probably recouped whatever environmental damage it has caused). I also wonder whether the green v. fake tree calculations include the cost of transporting and disposing of real trees each year. But the flip side is colored plastic is a terrible material from an environmental standpoint.
‘Bad Santa’ sends message to Harrods It’s Rude to Stare (hat tip reader Martin W)
Tuberculosis thriving in ‘Victorian’ London, says expert Guardian (hat tip reader May S)
Read more...The Administration’s po-faced insincerity on the mortgage crisis front is wearing thin now that other authorities are taking action against the worst abuses.
Read more...Let’s take an honest look at the facts, and leave labels (and the fear of touching third rail) behind.
Read more...hhm, despite the breezy assurances of the American Securitization Forum that everything was handled properly when residential mortgage backed securitizations were created, the SEC does not seem completely convinced. Reuters reports it has expanded its ongoing probe into foreclosure practices
Read more...Wikileaks’ Julian Assange tells of ‘smear campaign’ BBC
Leaked document shows EPA allowed bee-toxic pesticide despite own scientists’ red flag Grist (hat tip reader Ted L)
Building the shadow Internet Pruning Shears
Read more...As much as a whole bunch of bank executives and securitization industry types have given Congressional testimony in which they maintained that they were duly concerned about “technical” errors like robo signing and would clean up their act, it appears that follow-through has been less than stellar.
Read more...This post’s headline misrepresents the apparent intent of a new Google filter in its advanced search function. Per the SearchEngineLand report, “Google Lets You Dumb Down Your Search Results With “Reading Level” Filter,” the aim is apparently to allow web surfers to steer clear of pages that might be too taxing.
Read more...A newly released report, “Grow Together or Pull Further Apart? Income Concentration Trends in New York,” by the Fiscal Policy Institute (hat tip reader Thomas R) gives a picture of how New York City is now at Latin American levels of income disparity.
Read more...f you thought that the rating agencies had cleaned up their act in the wake of the crisis, think again. Our Richard Smith reported on a couple of black eyes by Moody’s, one a rather implausible 180 degree turn on its take on the US tax deal, the other a suspiciously flattering take on whether Countrywide had indeed transferred notes (retaining them, as an executive testified they did on a routine basis, would confirm our suspicions about widespread problems in the securitization industry.
Now we have a big blooper by S&P, this one in the form of mass rerating, based on an admitted faulty analysis. That is code for “big error in the model that everyone missed.”
Read more...