Elizabeth Warren is not wasting any time trying to get answers from Wall Street’s regulators. Warren asked for documents relating to the recent mortgage settlement. U.S. lawmakers on Thursday asked bank regulators to turn over documents related to the $8.5 billion settlement that ended a government-mandated review of crisis-era foreclosures, saying transparency was needed to [...]

Watch Alarm Bells In The Housing Market on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE. Last night Frontline aired a program on the Department of Justice’s failure to prosecute Wall Street executives over fraud in the mortgage market that caused the 2008 financial crisis. The program included compelling testimony from the “due diligence underwriters” those responsible for [...]

In what can only be described as a slap to the face of victims of the housing crisis and an insult to even the vaguest notion of the rule of law, the banks responsible for the mortgage meltdown and subsequent financial crisis and recession have once again escaped justice. After criminal cases were dropped despite [...]

In what is becoming a trend, the Wall Street banks have been able to once again dodge Dodd-Frank, at least for now. From Bloomberg: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Bank of America Corp. won a delay of Dodd-Frank Act requirements that they wall off some derivatives trades from bank [...]

This one offers a bit of vindication. I cannot tell you how much grief I got from “official sources” over the clear reality that banks would be able to pay off their penalties in the foreclosure fraud settlement with investor money. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan flat-out said it, and then had to backtrack and obfuscate. [...]

Zach Carter find yet another indicator that, after the election, Barack Obama plans to fire Federal Housing Finance Agency Administrator Ed DeMarco. But this claim has even less meat on its bones than the previous pledge. It comes from Bank of America analyst Ralph Axel, who argues that the Administration plans to use housing policy [...]

I’ve taken a closer look at the US Attorney from the Southern District of New York’s $1 billion lawsuit against Bank of America – particularly their subsidiary Countrywide – for “the hustle,” the program of selling mortgages with practically no underwriting and passing them on to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And there’s something interesting [...]

It’s been painfully clear for a while that these “independent foreclosure reviews” directed by the OCC were nothing more than a scam, a way to once again build hopes among foreclosure victims of restitution for the fraudulent actions of their lenders. The OCC, the lead regulator on the reviews, already biased the entire enterprise by [...]

Though I’m not sure anyone pays attention to them anymore, the President delivered his weekly address this weekend, and it was all about how Congress has to help “responsible” homeowners (because the irresponsible ones deserve nothing, after all they fleeced those responsible banks to get the loan). In the address, President Obama contrasted his approach [...]

Yesterday, Bank of America fired off one of their biggest settlements yet, spending $2.4 billion to quiet claims with investors over their purchase of Merrill Lynch. As Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, Bank of America agreed to buy Merrill Lynch. But in the weeks after that agreement, the bank tried unsuccessfully to scrap the [...]

I think today is the day for really horrible stories of market dysfunction amid ignorance or outright collusion by the authorities. This does not end with debt collectors on bad checks. It leads back to the mortgage market, where we’ve seen the most horror stories over the last several years. Most market analysts focus on [...]