Category Archives: Real estate

The Revival of Cities and the Urban Land Premium

The popularity of certain cities is explained by their attractiveness for innovative enterprises and high-educated top talent. Is this a durable trend?

Dick Fuld Continues to Exhibit Advanced Case of Wall Street CEO Derangement Syndrome

It appears that having the financial crisis analogue to the captain of the Titanic carry on in the stereotypical super-entitled Wall Street CEO manner was too much for the tender sensibilities of CNBC.

The Great Land Banking Scam Exposed

It should come as no surprise that real estate kingpins buy political favors on a regular basis. A new study estimates the payoff.

Wall Street’s Nemesis, Benjamin Lawsky, to Resign in June

Yesterday was a sad day for American citizens. Benjamin Lawsky, the Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, announced that he was resigning in June.

Wolf Richter: How Soaring Housing Costs Impoverish a Whole Generation and Maul the Real Economy

Housing costs are beyond the reach of many middle class earners. And while that is no news, housing has been the engine of past recoveries. So inflated home prices are part of why the economy will stay mired in low growth.

The Foreclosure Crisis Caused a Great Migration in Miniature

Several commentators picked up on the relationship between the events in Baltimore and the dearth of economic opportunity that leads to a sense of hopelessness. But precious few added the component of the foreclosure crisis, a dislocating event that has few parallels in American history. A new paper in the American Sociological Review by Matthew Hall (Cornell), Kyle Crowder (University of Washington) and Amy Spring (Georgia State) puts numbers to this, and shows that we really had a small-scale version of the Great Migration, the shift of African-Americans from the rural south to the big cities of the north. This migration hollowed out and segregated African-American and Latino communities to an even greater degree than where they already were.

How Pending “Trade” Deals Would Undermine Zoning and Local Land Use Rules

A key principle of land use in the United States is that homeowners can often veto new buildings on nearby land that other people own. A trade agreement that’s currently in the works could have a huge impact on that long-established system of local control.

Bill Black: How the “Super Crunchers” Became the “Super Torturers” of Finance Data

Many of the concerns about Big Data focus on the surveillance apparatus used to collect it, or on the naive modeling approaches, like attributing causality to mere correlations. Here Black addresses an established problem: that of deliberate abuse of models.

CFPB Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Proposal May Enable Redlining

CFPB’s HDMA proposal includes no reporting requirements to determine whether mortgage servicers are treating distressed borrowers equally.

Tom Adams: The Ocwen Meltdown: When a Company Discloses Conflicts of Interest, You Should Believe Them

By Tom Adams, securitization professional for over 20 years and partner at Paykin, Krieg & Adams, LLP. You can follow him on Twitter at @advisoryA It’s been a while since I wrote here about Ocwen Financial Corporation http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/tom-adams-ocwens-servicing-meltdown-proves-failure-of-obamas-mortgage-settlements.html , the large non-bank mortgage servicer, but things haven’t gotten any better for the company or its […]

Bill Black: Meet Citi’s Ethical Underwriter Who Fought and Won: Sherry Hunt

How Citi ran into a buzz saw and lost a False Claims Act case when it tried stymieing whistleblower Sherry Hunt. But true to form, the DoJ took the easy way out.

Bill Black: How FCIC Spurned Its One Chance at Greatness

How the FCIC not merely ignored but actually suppressed information that revealed what and more important, who, drove the crisis.

Bill Black: The DOJ and the SEC Spurn their Ace in the Hole – Richard Bowen

This is the second post in a devastating series on why major banks and their executives got away with large-scale, systematic fraud in the runup to the crisis. Bill Black uses Citigroup whistleblower Richard Bowen as a case example of how derelict the DOJ and SEC were in the performance of their duties.

Here, Black describes how historically frauds and criminal conduct were pursued primarily by regulators and the FBI. However, not only were regulations were weakened, but the Bush Administration ended criminal referrals: “References to the criminal referral coordinators disappeared or were removed from the bank examiners’ manuals.” FBI staffing for white collar crime was cut drastically as the war on terror was given precedence.

That meant, as Black describes, whistleblowers became more important than ever as not just a source of information for civil and criminal prosecutions, but as key witnesses. Yet in many cases they are problematic. They are often disaffected former employees who call out the bad conduct they saw after they were terminated, or were so badly roughed up by their former employer for becoming an internal dissident that they were traumatized and don’t hold up well on the stand. Hence, as Black explains, the failure to take advantage of a stellar whistleblower like Richard Bowen. As Bowen put it, “Not only did they bury my testimony, they locked it up.”