More crypto chicanery! How crypto-focused bank Silvergate got a very big ticket rescue from a quasii-government mortgage banker’s bank.
Read more...The idea of getting rid of a hopelessly captured and largely redundant bank regulator, the OCC, is gaining support.
Read more...The OCC and CFPB imposed $1 billion in fines on Wells Fargo Friday, continuing the kind and gentle treatment of bank transgressions pioneered by the previous administration.
Read more...How Trump’s financial deregulators are arranging more gimmies to banks.
Read more...Black discusses subprime auto lending and the failure of federal banking regulators to regulate– a problem that didn’t originate w/ Trump.
Read more...Stumpf has another deservedly bad day in the Congressional hot seat.
Read more...Yves here. Former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin famously said that the job of the central bank was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” That line of thinking went out of fashion under Alan Greenspan. Now we have the perverse spectacle of the most bank-cronyistic regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, berating the Fed for spiking the punch via overly accommodative monetary policy.
Read more...Repeated foreclosure attempts against an on-time borrower reveal why servicing remains hopelessly broken. That also means government guaranteed mortgages are here to stay.
Read more...Yves here. I’m highlighting this post for a basic reason: there’s a lot of cynicism about regulation. Many Americans have bought the right-wing line that regulations can’t work. But here, whether by accident or design, a reform program at a key bank regulator, the OCC, is going off the rails due to bad strategic choices.
Read more...At this point, it seems hard to add insult to injury, given the terrible track record of the OCC Independent Foreclosure Reviews. But it’s nevertheless been done.
Read more...I’ve been going out of my mind the past few days seeing the easily duped traditional media uncritically printing statistical analysis from JPMorgan Chase’s roundelay of get-out-of-jail-almost-free settlements. The gist of it, and this must have been in a Department of Justice release somewhere, is that JPM has “paid” $20 billion over the last calendar year to resolve a variety of disputes, the most recent being their admission that they knew the bogus nature of Bernie Madoff’s business and never generated any suspicious activity reports or raised red flags for regulators (the fact that they took their money out of Madoff feeder funds right before he was arrested being a smoking gun)… $20 billion is a FAKE NUMBER.
Read more...If you managed to be late to the Volcker Rule party, you can learn a great deal of what you’d need to know via the revealing contrast between two reasonably detailed accounts, one at Huffington Post by Shahien Nasiripour, the other by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. If you didn’t know better, you’d wonder if they were talking about the same rule.
Read more...Reuters has a new article, Insight: A new wave of U.S. mortgage trouble threatens, which is simultaneously informative and frustrating. It is informative in that it provides some good detail but it is frustrating in that it depicts a long-standing problem aided and abetted by regulators as new.
Read more...I thought readers would have fun taking apart a reply by the Thomas Curry, the Comptroller of the Currency, to some written questions posed by Elizabeth Warren after a July 11 Senate Banking Committee hearing on systemic risk.
Read more...Congressmen Alan Grayson and John Conyers have published a well-thought-out proposal on bank equity, with the objective of assuring that when banks do stupid things (which they do with great regularity, even before the era of casino banking, they’d embrace some new fad and run off the cliff together, like lemmings), they have enough capital to absorb losses. And that means a lot more capital than regulators are demanding they have now.
So I urge you to co-sign their letter (full text below) at http://nobankwelfare.com/.
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