Study: Banks to blame for over 800,000 unnecessary foreclosures
Over the past several years, we’ve reported extensively on the big banks’ foreclosure failings. As a result of banks’ disorganization and understaffing — particularly at the peak of the crisis in 2009 and 2010 — homeowners were often forced to run a gauntlet of confusion, delays, and errors when seeking a mortgage modification.
But while evidence of these problems was pervasive, it was always hard to quantify the damage. Just how many more people could have qualified under the administration’s mortgage modification program if the banks had done a better job? In other words, how many people have been pushed toward foreclosure unnecessarily?
A thorough study released last week provides one number, and it’s a big one: about 800,000 homeowners.
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Study: Banks to blame for over 800,000 unnecessary foreclosures | The Raw Story, via @WhirlwindWisdom
Big Banks Continue to Suck at the Government Teat With Never-Ending Stealth Bailouts
Open-Ended Bailouts Are Continuing
We’ve previously documented the fact that bailouts of the big banks are continued in stealth mode up to the present day.
True, the banks claim they’ve repaid the Tarp bailout funds … but nearly half of the banks “repaid” such bailout funds by borrowing from other government bailout funds (and the rest could only repay money by fudging their accounting and using stealth bailouts which are are a little harder to detect).
Indeed, the government has decided on perpetual bailouts for the too big to fail banks.
Some of the ongoing stealth bailouts include:
- Obama’s erroneously-labelled “jobs” act (and see this, this and this)
- The mortgage settlement (and see this and this; indeed, settling prosecutions for pennies on the dollar is always a backdoor bailout)
- Interest rate swaps
- The Transaction Account Guarantee program, an extension of FDIC insurance coverage to all transaction balances
- And the fed is going easy on the big banks in many other ways as wells
But the biggest ongoing bailouts include interest rate spreads, interest on excess reserves and other constant streams of bailout revenue […]
Big Banks Continue to Suck at the Government Teat With Never-Ending Stealth Bailouts
Posted on March 24, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog, hence “old news”, but the blog itself contains some really interesting numbers like 77% of JP Morgan’s Net Income coming from Government subsidies.
#EU: Banks may not have to pay for phished users: German gets nasty TAN
27 Apr 2012 09:53 | by Nick Farrell
If you are dumb enough to fall for a phishing scam, you have only yourself to blame and your bank does not have to bail you out, a top German court has decided.
The German Federal Court of Justice in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe has ruled that clients, and not banks, are responsible for money lost in online phishing scams.
A German retiree lost $6,608 in a bank transfer fraudulently sent to Greece as part of a phishing scam.
According to the The Local, the man gave phishers 10 transaction numbers, also known as TAN codes, which are commonly used in German banks, on a site which looked like his bank’s site, Sparda Bank.
The court ruled the bank had specifically provided warnings to its customers against this practice, so the man was responsible.
The customer argued that the bank had a duty to protect its customers from the abuse of these codes. So far, however, the courts have not agreed.
Sparda Bank had warned that it was “widely known” that being asked to input multiple TAN codes was a sure fire sign of phishing.
It is not clear at this point how influential this ruling will be in the rest of the EU. Certainly we expect the court’s arguments will be touted in similar cases thoughout the region.
TechEye: Banks may not have to pay for phished users: German gets nasty TAN
Note: phishing schemes are evolving and soon much much harder to recognise. Time to leave the banks people. Taking our chances with a sock under the mattress or something like that may actually be a better idea than a bank.
Deeper Inquiry Of Greg Smith's Assertions: Might #GoldmanSachs Have Intentionally Precipitated The Financial Crisis?
Mere days after Greg Smith resigned from Goldman Sachs in a very public way, it is hard to imagine who has not heard of his damning assertions about the company. They paint a picture of a company that changed from a client-centric focus to one lining its pockets at the expense of its clients. Mr. Smith’s assertions beg deeper inquiry of Goldman Sach’s actions as well as the broader investment banking industry.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Congress held hearings as to how and why it happened. The Dodd-Frank Act attempts to impose systemic protections from a mechanical standpoint. While in committee, the Bill also attempted to impose behavioral protections by requiring brokerage firms be held as fiduciaries to their customers. The industry’s powerful lobby ensured that requirement didn’t make it out of committee. Instead, Congress directed the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission to “study” the issue. Currently, the SEC is headed by Mary Schapiro, who is formerly the head of FINRA, the brokerage industry’s trade organization. The current proposals by the SEC include a watered down fiduciary standard.
It is the lack of a fiduciary standard that is at the heart of Mr. Smith’s assertions. There is little doubt that the larger financial crisis stems from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Goldman Sachs has already pled guilty to civil charges that it defrauded customers. It touted and sold billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities when it well knew the securities were of poor quality. They themselves had even sold short the same securities. Emails from within Goldman Sachs regarding these sales to customers clearly support Mr. Smith’s portrayal of Goldman Sachs’ attitude toward its customers. Indeed, the emails are very unflattering to Goldman Sachs.
3 Mega-Banks Screwing You With Sneaky Fees -- Again
Consumers were outraged when Bank of America announced a $5 debit fee last fall. Undeterred, some banks are now quietly imposing even more fees.
March 2, 2012, by Lauren Kelley, via @Min_Reyes
In recent years, the U.S. government has imposed important new regulations on big Wall Street banks — rules designed to keep banks from preying on consumers. But ironically, the mega-banks have responded to those regulations in a decidedly anti-consumer manner, with a relentless campaign to impose unfair new fees on the very consumers the regulations were designed to protect.
For years, big shiny banks like Chase and Bank of America were where you went to get “no fee,” “no hassle” checking accounts. We all got so used to seeing ads touting free checking accounts that many of us just came to accept free checking as the norm. At the same time, many of us have had our checking accounts with the same big bank (and/or the big bank that bought out our original bank) for years, giving some of us the impression that we’re still getting the same great deal as when we signed up.
But think about it for a second: How many advertisements for “free checking” have you heard in recent months? Probably not very many, because free checking is no longer standard at big banks. Quietly, banks have ratcheted up the fees associated with their accounts, and now, according to research firm Moebs Services, virtually all of the big banks have stopped offering free checking accounts. At the same time, the banks have increased fees for everything from lost debit card replacements to account minimums and even the “privilege” of speaking to a bank teller — fees that often disproportionately affect poor consumers who may have less flexible schedules and a harder time maintaining account minimums.
Banks have long been fans of charging egregious, often hidden fees, but new regulations have made some of their old favorites illegal. For instance, banks can no longer charge those outrageous $35-per-transaction overdraft fees without giving customers the option to opt-out of overdraft protection, and they can no longer change interest rates and fees without informing customers. But as under-regulated industries in a capitalistic system are wont to do, the banking industry has focused on increasing profits, lousy economy and new regulations be damned. And if the banks can’t make money the old-fashioned way, they’ve decided they’ll just have to get creative with how they roll out their new fees. For the banks, getting creative means adding fees that specifically target lower-income customers — the customers who are struggling the most in this economic downturn.
The banks’ efforts to impose new fees have not been uniformly successful. Last fall when Bank of America tried to pave the way for other banks to charge monthly fees for debit card use, the consumer backlash was so huge that not only did Bank of America back off, Chase, Citigroup, and other big banks pre-emptively shied away from the idea too.
But apparently that backlash wasn’t enough for the big banks to give up on new fees altogether. Below are several banks that have announced sneaky new fees recently.
1. Bank of America may charge up to $25 per month for checking accounts
2. Wells Fargo starts charging $15 per month for non-wealthy checking customers.
3. Citibank’s fees go sky-high.
#KMFDM Bitch-Slaps #Plutocracy With A Drug Against #WallStreet #ows
From Johan of HoodooEngine:
The whole #OccupyWallStreet thing is cool and all, but it’s not a real party until some heavyweights of radical music start throwing their weight behind it. Fans of industrial metal will be pleased to know that KMFDM has done just that, releasing a new version of their classic track (which the more angsty of us rocked in our angsty bedrooms over a decade ago), A Drug Against War, but have altered their own lyrics to spotlight the recent rebellion against evil psycho-clown corporations.
The vocals in the track are now all about defeating our shady bankster-GMO-Annunaki overlords with the new title A Drug Against Wall Street!
Anonymous Dumps Bank of America client credit card info in #OpBank
Peter Scrooby | Rochester City Buzz Examiner | January 3, 2012
Rochester, NY ( Peter H. Scrooby ) - Anonymous says hackers affiliated with the group have plundered Bank of Americas servers and dumped data of customers and taken control of CEO Brian Moynihan Facebook and Twitter accounts.
For a world without #banks
:D Facebook page
