Over the past several weeks, Democratic lawmakers and allied groups have launched an all-out effort to get Ed DeMarco, the head of the FHFA, fired. They cite his resistance to allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to engage in principal reductions on their loans as the main reason. This culminated in Barney Frank, the ranking [...]

The foreclosure fraud settlement has been filed in federal court in Washington. The Justice Department has provided the relevant documents, over a month after the settlement was announced. So now we can finally begin to assess the settlement and what it will mean for housing policy. It’s going to take a while. The documents are [...]

I think my disgust over federal housing policy is just about complete. As you know, we’re still waiting for the actual terms of the foreclosure fraud settlement, more than one month after the announcement. But more information has dribbled out, not much of it to the good. Michael Hiltzik rounded up some of the more [...]

I want to turn back to Phil Angelides’ op-ed in the New York Times this morning, because in addition to making the case for bank accountability as a deterrent to future crimes, he says that the relevant authorities have had smoking gun evidence in their hands for two years. Meager resources have been applied to [...]

Congressman Brad Miller will not become the staff director of the celebrated working group investigating securities fraud by the big banks, according to a source close to the process. Miller was on progressives’ wish list to run the RMBS working group, which is co-chaired by Eric Schneiderman as well as members of the Department of [...]

A statement sent my way from Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, plays into this debate over the RMBS working group in some interesting ways. The crux of the matter is that Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican commissioner on the FCIC who did not sign onto the final report, made some statement [...]

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Eric Schneiderman, co-chair of the newly titled “RMBS working group” investigating financial fraud, appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show last night (the interview starts around the 5:00 mark), and there were a few interesting moments. First you have his assessment of the the [...]

In addition to the proposed settlement, there’s news on the Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses front. (As an aside, I don’t know what to call this thing. You could say “Financial Fraud Unit,” but there’s already one of those. The name above is the official title, but it’s a mouthful. You could shorten [...]

If you want to see some tremendous activism that acknowledges advances while keeping the big picture squarely in mind, check out CREDO’s statement on the new financial fraud unit. It’s long, but important, so I’m going to put it here in full. After months of activism from people like you, President Obama announced in his [...]

Just to recap the last 24 hours in the rule of law: if you order the massacre a village of Iraqis, you will get your charges reduced to “dereliction of duty” and get sentenced to no more than three months confinement. Furthermore, the rest of your colleagues that participated in the incident will not serve [...]

When I started digging into whether this Monday meeting with HUD and DoJ officials to go over a proposal for a foreclosure fraud settlement was legitimate, I couldn’t find one state Attorney General who mattered actually committed to showing up. When I say AGs who “matter,” I mean the ones who have been critical of [...]