Former Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry will become the next nominee for Secretary of State, replacing Hillary Clinton and creating another Senate vacancy. President Obama will formally announce the nomination today at the White House, according to sources. He is not expected to face much resistance in the Senate for confirmation. Kerry will likely recuse [...]

Former Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry has been chosen to serve as Secretary of State, according to a Chicago Sun-Times columnist who heard it from an unidentified White House source. This doesn’t exactly come from left field. Kerry, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was rumored to be on the short list for [...]

A number of states have announced that they are sending out claim forms to foreclosure victims who are eligible for a one-time cash payment under the foreclosure fraud settlement. $1.5 billion has been earmarked for roughly 750,000 homeowners (depending on takeup) who were foreclosed upon between Jan. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2011, by one [...]

A ruling in a long-awaited foreclosure case in Massachusetts had an ambiguous result today, though it’s presented here by Nick Timiraos as a win for banks: The highest court in Massachusetts rejected a challenge from a Boston homeowner who had contested the validity of her foreclosure in a widely watched case that threatened to create [...]

Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog 19th Century German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said, “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), put on the map by the Center for Media and Democracy in its “ALEC Exposed” project, is the archetype of von Bismarck’s truism. So too are the fracking [...]

Remember after Martha Coakley sued leading banks for illegal foreclosures in Massachusetts, when Ally Bank, one of the market leaders, stopped most of their lending in the state in a fit of pique? They actually only dropped their correspondent lending business, where a smaller bank does the origination and they pick up the loan later. [...]

One of the big claims by defenders of the foreclosure fraud settlement is that it’s just a down payment on future actions. The release was narrow enough that state and federal regulators can still hold the banks accountable for their crimes. Why, even some active lawsuits were carved out to allow state AGs to pursue [...]

As much as state and federal officials want to describe the foreclosure fraud settlement as a beginning, in many respects it was most certainly an ending. Analysts invested in the meme that “uncertainty” was crippling the housing market now are heavily invested in saying that the clearing of this uncertainty through the settlement will speed [...]

Just because state and federal regulators reached a settlement with banks over foreclosure fraud – we think – doesn’t mean that the banks have rid themselves of their liabilities, even on these foreclosure fraud-related issues. A settlement cannot stop court rulings, to use one example. In Massachusetts, a new ruling by the state Supreme Court [...]

So here’s one lagging mystery about the foreclosure fraud settlement: what becomes of Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley’s lawsuit against five banks over deceptive practices and illegal foreclosures? Now we know. Coakley says in a release that she got a carve-out over certain types of claims in the suit. Others, however, were extinguished in the settlement. [...]

Forty-nine states, every one but Oklahoma, as well as federal regulators will participate in a foreclosure fraud settlement that will release the five biggest banks (Wells Fargo, Citi, Ally/GMAC, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America) and their mortgage servicing units from liability for robo-signing and other forms of servicer abuse, in exchange for $25 billion [...]