Yearly Archives: 2012

Judge Rules Wells Fargo Engages in “Reprehensible,” Systemic Accounting Abuses on Mortgages, Hits with $3.1 Million Punitive Damages for One Loan

One of our ongoing frustrations about media coverage of the mortgage mess is its failure to pay much attention to ample evidence of substantial servicer overcharges to borrowers. It’s bad enough that that happens, but far worse is that when servicers are told that they’ve been caught out, they refuse to make corrections and stonewall court-ordered remedies.

The facts that have surfaced in before one bankruptcy judge, Elizabeth Magner of the Eastern District of Louisiana, and one servicer, Wells Fargo, should give industry defenders pause.

Links 4/9/12

What the equity herd might look like

By trend trader, whose aim is to fine tune tools and examine critical economic and industry data to help himself and others navigate the rise and fall of equity and currency markets. Via Macrobusiness, originally published at tradersrant.

… aka, equity market agents and non-linear dynamic behaviour. Inspired by reading Professor Steve Keen’s book on ‘Debunking Economics’, this is a first pass at quantifying what many call the ‘herd’. Understanding herd mentality/crowds/group behaviour is a cornerstone to successful investing. In my (slow and winding) path of development of a better toolset for analysing price history for investment decisions, I have a string of projects that are effectively Engineering applications to the field of economics.

Three things I learned last week

“It would be irresponsible not to speculate.” – Peggy Noonan

Links 4/8/12

Fault Lines – Occupy Wall Street: Surviving the Winter

You don’t get to see an Episcopal Bishop, en regalia, climbing over a chain link fence all thst often.

Dr. King’s 2 minutes to you: “Silence is betrayal… speak as one who loves America”

A year before the US government assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, he asked Americans to end their silence over an unlawful, treaty-violating, and lie-started war killing millions.

Dan Kervick: Contra Krugman, Why Increasing Inflation is Not Likely to Increase Employment

By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Paul Krugman argues in a recent New York Times column that right-wing critics of Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are trying to bully the Fed into a misguided obsession with inflation, and that “the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.”

Krugman is absolutely right to lament conservative pundits’ and politicians’ obsessions with inflation when tens of millions of Americans are languishing in unemployment, with all of the personal, social and economic misery and waste that unemployment entails. But his argument, which assumes that the Fed can boost employment by engineering higher inflation, is problematic.

Links 4/7/12

Jobs Act 2012 a Recipe for Fraud

It is hard to say enough bad things about the Jumpstart Obama’s Bucket Shops act in a short space. I’m in the UK now, and a contact asked me to explain it to him. When I told him of some of the major provisions, he could not believe what he was hearing. He said (correctly) that it was a great boon for conmen and aside from a few companies who were early to raise money under the new law, would make obtaining equity funding more difficult and costly for legitimate operators.

This Real News Network interview with Bill Black gives an overview:

The Coming Housing Finance Train Wreck

The interaction of immovable objects and inexorable forces is seldom pretty. One example is housing finance in the US. If no one blinks, an ugly situation could get even worse.

Links 4/6/12

Lynn Parramore: Capitalism’s Dirty Secret: Corporations Don’t Create Jobs, They Destroy Them

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part AlterNet series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?