Let’s contrast two lawmakers from the Upper Midwest and their reactions to the still-without-terms foreclosure fraud settlement. Al Franken has a video out toeing the party line on the settlement, really just informing borrowers that, over the next 6-9 months, they may be contacted if they’re eligible for a cash payment from a wrongful foreclosure [...]

Over the Thanksgiving break, a relative of mine showed me his Android phone, and a new app that had recently popped up on it without his consent. He could not get it to go away, and according to him it was some kind of tracking facilitator. I forgot about this until I read Al Franken’s [...]

Sit down for this one. Because you’re just not going to believe it. It seems that the more credit rating agencies are paid by corporations and banks to rate their debt, the more favorable ratings they hand out! This goes against everything I know about the untainted, incorruptible hand of the free market, and comes [...]

When Dodd-Frank passed, I said that the legislation was not a bill but a plan to write a bill later. Dodd-Frank had dozens of studies and rules that would be written and implemented by regulators. The legislation would offer a rough guideline, but ultimately it would be up to the regulators to actually determine whether [...]

The Government Accountability Office gave a fairly glowing report about the efect of the federal medical loss ratio, a policy inserted into the Affordable Care Act by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) that forces insurance companies to spend 80-85% of their premiums (depending on the type of coverage) on medical treatment, and to rebate customers if [...]

It turns out that the Justice Department is not only concerned with Standard and Poor’s but the entire credit rating agency industry, it appears. The reported investigation into the ratings of mortgage backed securities during the housing bubble is centered on S&P, but not limited to them: The probe by lawyers in the Justice Department’s [...]

Standard and Poor’s has a bad track record in rating securities. Sometimes they even screw up on basic math, as they did with their $2 trillion error in downgrading US debt. They apparently don’t want anyone to know about that. Standard & Poor’s, whose unprecedented downgrade of U.S. debt triggered a worldwide stocks sell-off, is [...]

There’s a small bit of solace in the face that the president of Standard and Poor’s had to go out and defend his company from the charge that their downgrade of US debt was politically motivated. Standard & Poor’s president defended his company’s downgrade of the U.S. triple-A credit rating, saying S&P had no political [...]

Members of Congress expressed outrage and surprise that the nation’s leading banks have continued to engage in robo-signing, months after they swore to the public and in Congressional testimony that they would end the practice. Lawmakers in the House and the Senate said that regulatory enforcement and monitoring needed to be increased, and no settlement [...]

Social insurance advocates remain dismayed by AARP’s decision to accept Social Security benefit cuts as part of a balanced solution to address the long-term funding gap, a decision they claim was not any different than their prior stances. AARP popped up yesterday to insist on their opposition to including Social Security as part of the [...]

Democrat Janice Hahn’s campaign for the House of Representatives against Republican Craig Huey, which takes place July 12, has mostly been waged on the territory of social issues. Hahn has delivered a selection of TV ads and mailers citing Huey’s opposition to abortion and his naming of Planned Parenthood as a “murder mill.” And an [...]