Anyone remember that Mortgage Task Force President Obama put together to finally take on Wall Street over rampant fraud in the mortgage market? You know, the one Obama announced while running for re-election after having done exactly nothing to help struggling homeowners while shoveling taxpayer money to the banks. Well, apparently even that miniscule gesture [...]

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 [...]

As if more evidence was needed that Wall Street has rigged the game in its favor, the IRS is going to allow the banks that engaged in a massive nationwide program of mortgage fraud to write off their settlement: Consumer advocates have complained that U.S. mortgage lenders are getting off easy in a deal to [...]

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged one trading house and two individuals for illegally manipulating oil prices during the price spike of 2008, when oil reached $147 a barrel, by creating the appearance of a shortage to drive up the benchmark for crude. While the action covers oil trading in 2008, the connection to today, [...]

Maybe the foreclosure crisis hasn’t been fully solved. But at least we have those consent orders on the top mortgage servicers. At least federal regulators will lay down the law and we’ll get to see those independent reviews of each mortgage company and the wrongful foreclosures they initiated. I mean, at least there will be [...]

I enjoyed the 60 Minutes story last night on the mortgage mess, because it actually went beyond robo-signing and touched on some of the more fundamental ways in which banks have committed fraud on state courts. Sheila Bair, in suggesting that individual homeowners could be paid off as a make-good for this trouble, and also [...]

You may not know that there’s a new round of stress tests for the banks on the horizon. The Federal Reserve announced these stress tests late last year, designed to determine whether the banks could handle another downturn. The last stress tests were plagued by actual bargaining between the administrators of the tests and the [...]

Diana Henriques snagged the first interview with Bernie Madoff since his arrest in late 2008. And while he maintained that his family knew nothing about his Ponzi scheme, he asserted that banks and hedge funds “had to know.” But during a private two-hour interview in a visitor room here on Tuesday, and in earlier e-mail [...]

Here’s Politico being just dense (but I repeat myself): “We don’t see ourselves as left,” she told POLITICO. “And I think it’s one area where news consumers are ahead of the media, because they know that continuing to see everything that’s happening as a right-left issue is missing what’s happening, and is also making it [...]

In a sometimes contentious call, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission representatives Phil Angelides and Brooksley Born acknowledged that we might still be in a financial crisis, and that their report should not be seen as the last word on an event that still has the capacity to significantly damage the global economy. Brooksley Born, who as [...]

GMAC, the struggling financing arm of General Motors, whose mortgage arm holds $26 billion of mortgages, just suspended foreclosures in 23 states in a harried, chaotic policy shift. Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC Mortgage unit told brokers and agents to halt foreclosures on homeowners in 23 states including Florida, Connecticut and New York. GMAC Mortgage may [...]