Emma Berry

Archive for the ‘banks’ Category

US Bank Profits return to pre-crisis levels

“Nearly two out of every three banks are reporting better year-over-year earnings,” said Sheila Bair, chairman of the FDIC, which insures the deposits of 7,830 US banks. “As long as economic conditions remain supportive, most institutions should maintain profitability.”

Better profitability did not translate into more loans – a fact that could deepen political hostility towards the sector. Aggregate loans and leases fell by $95.7bn, or more than 1 per cent, amid big drops in construction and credit card loans.

ENTIRE ARTICLE

FROM: SHAME ON BANKS

Remember the Obama Administration’s “Making Home Affordable Plan”? The one that promised to help millions of financially strapped Americans who faced foreclosure on their homes by giving incentives to lenders to renegotiate their loans? And remember all the bailout money that the banks got in return for promises that they would do their part in getting everybody back on track? Well, guess what’s not working? And guess why it’s not working?

Although the plan was touted as providing much needed help to between 7 and 9 million eligible homeowners, very few citizens have actually been able to obtain a renegotiated loan under the program. Although the government is not releasing detailed statistics, it has announced that 200,000 modifications have been offered to date, but admits that only “tens of thousands” of loan modifications have actually been approved under the program. That’s not even one percent of the stated goal, a miserable record indeed! What happened?

Banks Don’t Really Want to Help

None of this is surprising news to the Consumer Warning Network. You can read our many stories about the loan modification problem (here, here and here). Our research over the past two years shows the notion that banks want to help homeowners modify loans to avoid foreclosure is simply a myth. One that’s been nurtured by these companies, despite the facts that stand in direct conflict.

Complaints to CWN continue unabated from homeowners unable to get their lenders to work with them. Everyone tells the same story. “I’ve tried for months and months to get my lender to talk to me about renegotiating my loan so we both can avoid foreclosure, but all I get is either a dial tone or a big run-around.”
The Numbers Don’t Lie

The Federal Reserve Board of Boston has shed light on this problem with a new economic study looking into the problem of infrequent loan modifications. The study concludes that “fewer than 3 percent of the seriously delinquent borrowers in our sample received a concessionary modification in the year following the first serious delinquency.” So, despite the legislative attempts to aid homeowners with troubled loans, only a very few are getting actual relief through a loan modification.

The leading culprit for the lack of renegotiated mortgages has been the argument that many mortgages are securitized (that is, split up among many investors in packaged mortgage backed securities). This supposedly limits the ability of lenders to engage in meaningful negotiations, as they are afraid of incurring the wrath of investors. In other words, they blame the investor for not letting them do loan modifications. How convenient to have a faceless, nameless “investor” to take the fall, but not so fast.

Keep reading: http://www.consumerwarningnetwork.com/2009/08/04/why-wont-lenders-renegotiate-delinquent-home-loans/

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) mocked the Federal Reserve on the floor of the House of Representative on Thursday. Grayson explains that a leveraged buyout gone bust apparently left the Fed holding the Red Roof Inn as part of a pile of crappy assets. The Federal Reserve became the sucker of last resort and thus the American taxpayers as well.

And the Obama Administration AND most Republican leaders who are keeping their traps shut on the matter do not want the Federal Reserve subjected to an audit?

WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON ANY WAY?

Apparently so.  The Huffington Post reports that Rahm Emanuel, President Obamas “big stick” is trying to whack elected officials into shape behind the scenes on the issue of auditing the Federal Reserve.

IT IS ABSURD THAT A FINANCIAL INSTITUTION SUCH AS THE FEDERAL RESERVE CAN BE IN BUSINESS FOR ALMOST  100 YEARS AND NEVER HAVE BEEN SUBJECTED TO AN AUDIT!

Yeah right!  We should trust THEM?  NO, I don’t think so.

The White House, Federal Reserve and Wall Street lobbyists are kicking up their opposition to an amendment to audit the Fed as a Senate vote approaches, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lead sponsor of the measure, said on Monday.

Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who is shepherding the bill through the Senate, told Sanders Monday afternoon that “there’s a shot we’ll be up tomorrow,” Sanders told HuffPost. In the spring of 2009, Sanders brought a similar amendment to the Senate floor and won 59 votes. Eight senators who voted against it then are now cosponsors of his current measure.

“I think momentum is with us. But I’ve gotta tell you, that on this amendment, you’re taking on all of Wall Street, you’re taking on the Fed, obviously, and unfortunately you seem to be taking on the White House, as well. And that’s a tough group to beat,” said Sanders.

CALL YOUR SENATORS TODAY AND DEMAND AN AUDIT OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE!

WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A CLASS WAR AND IF THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS DON’T STAND UP TO THE WEALTHY WHO ARE ROBBING US BLIND, OUR NATION WILL BE RUINED.

As  you can see from this video, Chairman Carl Levin nails Goldman Sachs employee regarding an email in which a Goldman Sachs senior executive Tom Montag wrote” That Timberwolf is one shitty deal. ” [Timberwolf  was a collateralized debt obligation of other collateralized debt obligations that were not based on actual home mortgage bonds but on those bonds' movements.]  In other emails following that one, Goldman Sachs employees were advised that selling Timberwolf  was a priority.

Dan Sparks, the former head of Goldman’s mortgage department, was asked why Montag would describe Timberwolf as “shitty,” how long they had known it was “shitty,” and whether they knew the deal was “shitty” when they peddled it to clients.

“Our clients’ interests always come first,” Goldman says on its website.

That security was rated less than three months prior to Montag’s email.  It lost 80 percent of its value within five months of issuance.

Sparks was true to the Goldman Sachs arrogant style–as if they have a right to sell junk to their investors.

COMMENTS FROM EMMA:
Apparently the traders at Goldman Sachs will bet on anything–even how many White Castle Burgers some of them can eat. Perhaps after serving time in prison for fraud, a condition for their parole will be to join gamblers anonymous. However, as far as I’m concerned, the biggest pig of them all is their CEO, Lloyd Blankfein. Without his leadership in greed, none of this would have been possible.

I hope that the members of the US Senate have the guts to convict these people for the fraud they committed, but I’m not holding my breath. If it is not fraud to sell junk and then buy insurance betting on its failure, then Wall Street may as well declare official war on the American people. Any ordinary American who purchases stock or who allows their companies to purchase stock in their name from Wall Street criminals in a 401 K or pension fund is a damn fool.

How many times do the Wall Street crooks get to commit fraud against the American public before the American people say ENOUGH? Does no one remember Wall Street’s demonstration of greed and avarice from the 1980’s? Did no one learn a lesson from that?

One of the problems is that we have too many (263) multimillionaires in Congress whose campaigns are paid for by Wall Street crooks. They have a conflict of interest. Not only does Wall Street fund their campaigns, these elected officials themselves have large stock portfolios to protect.  Are they going to stab their own golden geese? Not likely. More like a light tap on the wrist is what will be forthcoming from those who are supposed to represent us.

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From the Wall Street Journal

In December 2007, after the firm distributed multimillion-dollar bonus checks in part thanks to bets on a mortgage meltdown, about 10 Goldman mortgage traders, surrounded by dozens of cheering colleagues, wolfed down the burgers, according to attendees. Bystanders wagered cash on how many burgers the traders could eat.

he annual event resembled a scene out of “Liar’s Poker,” a book depicting bawdy antics of bond traders at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. In fact, the 2007 contest was held just a few floors away from where the Salomon traders worked when that firm leased space in the same Manhattan building.

It was a lower-stakes version of what went on every day in the group: aggressive, take-no-prisoners trading. Mortgage-backed bonds, including complex derivatives that tracked pools of risky loans, were traded for big money in Goldman’s 400-person mortgage unit.

In 2007, the group wagered that mortgage prices would plunge, creating a nearly $4 billion windfall, according to people familiar with the matter at the time.

Goldman Sachs was charged Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud for selling securities to investors that were handpicked and destined to fail without disclosing that to investors.  The immediate losers  from this Goldman Sachs swindle were pension funds.

If you think that these charges would have been brought up under a Republican leadership, you need to wake up and rethink the clowns you are voting for—especially if you are a retired person living on a pension.

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This particular security, a collateralized debt obligation named ABACUS 2007-AC1 illustrates Wall Street’s role in fueling the housing boom, and then profiting from its bust.  A hedge fund, knowing the home mortgages on which that security was based helped pick the worse of that lost to be included in that security.  Goldman didn’t disclose that to investors.  The hedge fund, Paulson & Co. Inc. made $1 billion while Goldman Sachs made profit from the fees.

Knowingly selling junk to investors is fraud. Millions of families lost their homes.  More than 8 million US jobs were lost.  Our nation is in the midst of the worse economic downturn since the Great Depression and it all happened on George Bush’s watch.

IF ANY AMERICAN VOTES FOR  A REPUBLICAN IN NOVEMBER THEY ARE VOTING AGAINST NOT ONLY THEIR FUTURE, BUT THE FUTURE OF THE USA AS WELL.

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Although the person who runs Paulson & Company is not related to Hank Paulson, Bush’s Secretary of Treasury and former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson is the one who orchestrated the $trillion plus bailout of the too big to fail banks in September 2008 when George Bush was still in office.  Hank Paulson like all the  big shots at Goldman Sachs personally made millions on this fraud against the American people.

SO IF YOUR PENSION HAS BEEN GREATLY REDUCED, OR IF YOU HAVE LOST YOUR HOME, YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT YOUR TEA PARTY RALLIES, WIPE THE MUSTACHES OFF OBAMA’S POSTERS AND PUT THE BLAME WHERE IT SQUARELY BELONGS–ON THE PARTY OF NO.

That would be “NO” to ordinary Americans.  “No” to the home owners who lost their homes.

Most likely if almost anyone but Barack Obama were president today, we would be in a full-on Depression.

The Treasury Department is vigorously opposed to a House-passed measure that would open the Federal Reserve to an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a senior Treasury official said Monday. Instead, the official said, the Treasury prefers a substitute offered by Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.), and would like to see it enacted as part of the Senate bill.

The Watt measure, however, while claiming to increase transparency, actually puts new restrictions on the GAO’s ability to perform an audit.