The audits accuse the five major lenders of violating the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law crafted as a weapon against firms that swindle the government…
The audits conclude that the banks effectively cheated taxpayers by presenting the Federal Housing Administration with false claims: They filed for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes that sold for less than the outstanding loan balance using defective and faulty documents.
Intellectually speaking, the bankers have no clothes. Unfortunately, the officials in charge of making policy on this issue are still unwilling to think through the implications; capital requirements need to be much higher.
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How is lowering the corporate tax rate going to change that exactly? Uh, it’s not. What it would do, is create a wider budget gap and send more politicians scratching their heads over why. So, it’s really just a super-bad and dumb idea.
“If the U.S. Armed forces can’t find Osama bin Laden in 10 years, let Goldman Sachs try to find me.”
“…Powerful people at the heart of our financial system still have the incentive and ability to take on large amounts of reckless risk – through borrowing large amounts relative to their equity.
There is an insularity and arrogance to policymakers around capital requirements that is distinctly reminiscent of the Treasury-Fed-Wall Street consensus regarding derivatives in the late 1990s – i.e., officials are so convinced by the arguments of big banks that they dismiss out of hand any attempt to even open a serious debate.
Next time, when our largest banks get into trouble, they may be beyond “too big to fail”. As seen recently in Ireland, banks that are very big relative to an economy can become “too big to save” …
…what the Bank of England refers to as a doom loop“.
…the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who’s in office or which party’s in power. To understand how the machinery functions, you have to start back at least a decade ago, as case after case of financial malfeasance was pursued too slowly or not at all, fumbled by a government bureaucracy that too often is on a first-name basis with its targets. Indeed, the shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society: whether we have created a class of people whose misdeeds are no longer perceived as crimes, almost no matter what those misdeeds are.
Not only did Capital One ignore the demand, under Pennsylvania’s version of the FDCPA, that all future communications be with Perry’s lawyer, continuing to make phone calls to her home, her office, and even some of her friends and relatives, but it kept arbitrarily changing the alleged amount due. Finally, Perry received a letter demanding payment of $286,651,237.00.
To those of you who don’t understand what the Federal Reserve Bank is doing to, er, for the economy, this HILARIOUS video is for you. It features two little fluffy characters who speak of the ‘Bernanc’ and explain why the Fed is printing $600BN dollars.
Why? ‘The Goldman Sachs’
Please forward this to as many people as possible.
Please forward this to as many people as possible.
Dispatches From The Front 