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Jamie Dimon has a big plan to fix the housing market. It mirrors John McCain’s big plan to fix Iraq: get people in a room and yell “Stop the bullshit!”
“I would convene all the people involved in the business, I would close the door, I’d stay there until we resolved a bunch of these issues so we could have a more healthy mortgage market,” the 55-year-old chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. said today.
The patchwork of U.S. and international regulatory policies governing the housing and mortgage markets are hampering recovery here and abroad, Dimon said on a conference call with analysts after the New York-based bank released fourth-quarter earnings. In the U.S., state foreclosure laws conflict with a variety of federal policies on refinancing or modifying loans to troubled borrowers, Dimon said.
Leadership is needed to overhaul the industry, including reviving the market for private-label residential mortgage bonds and reforming regulations governing mortgage repurchases and foreclosures, he said.
“You could fix all this if someone was in charge,” Dimon said, tapping on the table for emphasis. “No one is in charge.”
When Dimon says “no one is in charge,” he really means that nobody has been able to intimidate those few Attorneys General and other regulators who actually take their job description seriously. If only they would fall in line, the problem could get “solved.” And by solved, Dimon means he could throw a few dollars to (insufficiently) compensate victims of what he would call irregularities, and keep doing what he wants. Dimon really has a problem with federalism, and a far bigger problem with the rule of law.
Don’t let it be said that Dimon’s supporters aren’t working on this. The New York Times published a story clearly intended to criticize Kamala Harris for walking away from the state AG talks, in the hopes that she will back down and return to the fold:
In an interview, Geoff Greenwood, spokesman for Attorney General Tom Miller of Iowa, who is leading the multistate settlement negotiations, said Ms. Harris’s decision to walk out of the talks had “enabled us to secure” a mortgage refinancing plan for borrowers who owe more than their houses are worth, which “added several billion dollars to the deal.” But the additional concessions, aimed at bringing California back to the negotiating table, have not been enough for Ms. Harris, who continues to hold out.
“We would certainly welcome California’s participation in a settlement,” Mr. Greenwood said, “but if absolutely necessary we’re prepared to pursue a path to a settlement without California.”
Dustin Hobbs, spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Association, said that raised the possibility California borrowers “would get nothing.”
Greenwood is laundering his demands for Harris through the media, with the absurd claim that Harris pulling out of the talks somehow rebounded positively on the settlement terms.
But this hasn’t worked yet to secure Jamie Dimon’s dream of everyone getting in a room and agreeing to something Jamie Dimon wants. And Dimon should hope that a real bout of democracy doesn’t break out.
The legal tide is turning against MERS and the banks, giving rise to some interesting possibilities for relief at the county level. Local governments have the power of eminent domain: they can seize real or personal property if (a) they can show that doing so is in the public interest, and (b) the owner is compensated at fair market value [...]
To ameliorate the negative effects of foreclosures, some communities are creating public entities – known as land banks – to return these properties to productive reuse while simultaneously addressing the need for affordable housing.
States named as adopting land bank legislation include Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Kentucky and Maryland. HUD notes that the federal government encourages and supports these efforts. But states can still face obstacles to acquiring and restoring the properties, including a lack of funds and difficulties clearing title.
Both of these obstacles might be overcome by focusing on abandoned and foreclosed properties for which the chain of title has been broken, either by MERS or by failure to transfer the promissory note according to the terms of the trust indenture. These homes could be acquired by eminent domain both free of cost and free of adverse claims to title.
The wrong people are getting in a room together!
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Thanks, David. Guess it’s time to fire off more emails, letters and phone calls to Kamala Harris.
He just proved how stupid he is. Seriously. Anybody that knows even a small amount about real estate law can see what an Idiot that man is.
One of the biggest issues missing in this CDS and foreclosure mess is the forced Mortgage Insurance on mortgages. I’d like to talk to Jamie face to face about that and a few other foreclosure problems he has. This Peasant could set his ass straight in about 3 minutes flat!
This sounds like a job for … the SUPERCOMMITTEE!
(my bold)
He doesn’t want to fix the housing market, DDay. He wants to fix the mortgage market. There’s a difference! Dimon doesn’t make as much money if people aren’t mortgaging houses.
New York, as well …
Jamie Dimon must have inherited his fortune. Either that or an elder con-man held his hand and told him what levers to pull. He is as stupid as Rick Perry.
My plan is better than Dimon’s: put him in a room. A small room. A prison cell.
lol, that’s a good one!!!
really, why aren’t these people in jail? oh, i forgot, we have a DEMOCRAT in the white house. that’s so different from having a republican there.
What Dimon really wants is the Fed’s newest “help housing” program, i.e. keep people in their debt traps to preserve the mortgage cash flow for assholes like Dimon, all at taxpayer expense. Oh, and hide the true intent by telling people it’s all about “helping people keep their homes”, etc. etc.
The really sad thing is how people are being suckered into shilling for this nonsense by the touchy feely “help the homeowners” bullshit. Honestly, sometimes I think people in this country are getting exactly what they deserve.
No leadership! Jamie Dimon is also biting Obama’s hand. Why not? Everyone else does and Obama begs for more abuse.
Here’s Spoiled Rich Kid Jamie (Jamie’s Cryin’) Diamond – with a personal hotline to the President’s ear. And the dickhead cannot help himself, but to be a dickhead.
That said, Jamie is correct, of course. There is no leadership.
Obama gave away the farm to the banksters.
Half Measures (Cass Sunstein’s patented “Nudging”) were never going to cut it after giving away the goddamn farm.
I bumped into an ex-coworker about a week ago, she told me she was working for one of the big banks and that she was on a team that handles foreclosure paperwork.
I asked about the robo-signing issue and she said that her team was fielding requests for paperwork and sending out their own requests.
It sounded as if the process sans robosigning, amounts to a lot of hope-and-see, you send out requests to the bank that you think may have last had the paperwork, and then you hope they find something and send it to you.
On the other hand, you are recieving requests from banks looking for the paper and you search to see if you have it.
My friend told me they were shipping out up to 800 seperate boxes of mortgage paperwork a week and recieving boxes in answer to their requests, and much of the volume being worthless and non-productive.
All of this to further a foreclosure process that seems obviously counter-productive to reviving the main-street economy.
They’re trying to squeeze blood from rocks and won’t stop to consider any real, sensible solutions until they have squeezed them all about five times.
(meant to respond to somethingblue’s reference to the supercommittee. usually i do not find these posts humorous, my response is more along the lines of OUTRAGE)
Jaime,Jaime,Jaime–tsk,tsk,tsk.
Themarket is in charge. Didn’t you know? Haven’t you been paying attention the last 10 years? This is the natural consequence of the market. You can’t want to change that now, can you? Com’on, Jaime. This is government run like a business. This is what you get, Jaime.
uh… Jamie Dimon is a good DEMOCRAT.
Why wouldn’t you expect him to lie?…
When New York’s Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, one of the richest people in the country, doesn’t even bother to read the reporting in the magazine that bears his name and blames Freddie and Fanny for the housing problem getting the geniuses who rule us to hear anything other than their own cocktail chatter is hopeless. Of course Jamie doesn’t care, he has such contempt for our representative system that he laughs at its members concerns:
MARCY KAPTUR: Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, ‘What should I know?’ They said, ‘Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us.’
MARCY KAPTUR: I said, ‘Well, give me the top one.’ They said, ‘J.P. Morgan Chase.’ I went back to Washington that night. And one of my colleagues said, ‘You want to come to dinner?’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s a meeting with Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase.’ I said, ‘Wow, yes. I really do.’ So, I go to this meeting in a fancy hotel, fancy dinner, and everyone is complimenting him. I mean, it was just like a love fest.
MARCY KAPTUR: They finally got to me, and my point to ask a question. I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to speak out of turn here, Mr. Dimon.’ I said, ‘But your company is the largest forecloser in my district. And our Realtors just said to me this morning that your people don’t return phone calls.’ I said, ‘We can’t do work outs.’ And he looked at me, he said, ‘Do you know that I talk to your Governor all the time?’ He said, ‘Our company employs 10,000 people in Ohio.’
MARCY KAPTUR: And I’m thinking, ‘What is that? A threat?’ And he said, ‘I speak to the Mayor of Columbus.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you come further north?’ I said, ‘Toledo, Cleveland, where the foreclosures are just skyrocketing.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll have someone call you.’ And he gave me a card. And they never did. For two weeks, we tried to reach them. And finally, I was on a national news show. And I told this story. They called within ten minutes. And they said, ‘Oh, we’ll work with you. We’ll try to do some workouts in your area.’
We planned the first one after working with them for weeks and weeks and weeks. Their people never showed up. And it was a Friday. Our people had taken off work. They’d driven from all these locations to come. We kept calling J.P. Morgan Chase saying, ‘Where’s your person? Where’s your person?’ And they finally sent somebody down from Detroit by 3:00 in the afternoon. But out people had been waiting all morning and a lot of people that’s how they treat our people.
BILL MOYERS: You did a remarkable thing on the floor of the House recently. And I want to show my audience a clip of a speech in which you urge people to break the law.
MARCY KAPTUR: So why should any American citizen be kicked out of their homes in this cold weather? In Ohio it is going to be 10 or 20 below zero. Don’t leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don’t have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can’t find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave. In Ohio and Michigan and Indiana and Illinois and all these other places our people are being treated like chattel, and this Congress is stymied.
BILL MOYERS: Wow. You are urging them to resist the law when the Sheriff shows up to throw them out of their home.
MARCY KAPTUR: I’m saying that they deserve justice, too. And that the scales of justice in front of the Supreme Court are supposed to be balanced, and they’re not. And that possession is 90 percent of the law. And that you have legal rights, as a home owner. You have a right to legal representation. You have a right before the judge to have the mortgage note produced by whomever in the system has it. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/transcript1.html
No doubt, these are very, very smart people who dreamed up the formulas for the derivative scam they played on the rest of us and the world in their impatient, greedy want to have it all at the expense of “Grandma Millie” (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104×1711340)
And yet also, too very stupid as they fucked it all up and don’t know how to fix it other than to add more IOU’s to the pile. The threat of taking the system down ties the hands of every politician in the “free market” world, pussys. Atrios is right, Greece should tell them to fuck off and print Colbert Cash as its new currency.
ew’s take.
How about just me and Jamie in a room?
But Ellen Brown’s story of Land Banks, and local eminent domain laws! So inspiring. It’s so great that even some of the OWS aggregator sites are featuring it. Whoosh!
How about Jamie and everyone he wants in the room with a copy of the movie Valkyrie (unless someone can think of a bigger bomb) :)
No Leadership? Who sits on the board of the NY Federal Reserve??? The banks of course.
It’s sad to think that the only thing standing in the way is a hand full of AG’s who will probably all be fired next year.
What is sadder is that the solution of a settlement won’t fix anything.
Would Jamie be talking about Mitt Romney’s “quiet room” where plots to screw the 99% are formulated? What Jamie hates is that states create their own rules for mortgages making it more expensive to lobby for laws that favor his industry. Jamie would love for there to be just one federal law covering all mortgages so he could spend enough lobbying money in one place to get outcomes favorable to him. If you check the term “bottom feeder” in Webster’s, Jamie’s photo pops up.
There is only one thing Jaime is is loyal to–money, period
they don’t return calls and they don’t do real workouts. Whether it’s Chase, bank of america, gmac, wells fargo…it doesn’t matter. They were all doing the same things…they don’t return phone calls…they never returned my calls and refused to give me pay out or a payment history. All violations of federal laws. Dear god…I just want the world to finally get it…let go of the lie. They cheated americans out of their homes and they had a very good reason to do it, to risk it all.
Dear Jamie, For 38 years as a real estate broker in California, I took 45 hours of continuing education every 4 years mostly in CA real estate law. You might begin there if you want to understand why you and your friends are a walking bunch of criminals who bought a “get out of jail” card from Congress. If I had been dumb enough to have my client accept one of the fraudulent offers that was funded by you, I might be in jail. You are a fat cat and could not be expected to understand what happens to the little mice you use for fun and profit. Time for you to go to jail.
hahahahahahahah!!!!
thanks right, Jamie. No one is in charge of YOU! this is so typical. It’s all about how big your schlong is, not what the laws of the land are. screw you, Jamie. I can’t wait until you are someone’s bitch in the big house.