Yesterday, the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder, Phil Ting, released the results of a cursory review of foreclosure documents, finding widespread irregularities in the vast majority of them. The documents included foreclosures from 2011, after the point at which the banks allegedly “fixed” their foreclosure document problems. Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting in partnership with mortgage investigation firm, Aequitas, [...]

I think you can divine what I think of the foreclosure fraud settlement which releases liability on a host of fraudulent conduct for only a $5 billion guarantee from the banks, as well as $20 billion made up mostly of “credits” that HUD believes will translate into around $34.5 billion overall. The credits play out [...]

One reason why I don’t think we should particularly accept a six-month timeline on significant action from the RMBS working group is that there’s so much already in the public record. I recognize that criminal or civil enforcement actions take voluminous legal work and due diligence, but quite a bit of it has already been [...]

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 New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman continued his MSNBC tour by joining Chris Hayes on his Sunday morning show. These interviews really aren’t that good to conduct for TV. If you don’t assume a certain facility with the material on the part of [...]

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 [...]

Former Obama Administration transition official Mike Lux was the first to report that the liability release on foreclosure fraud “looks tight.” In other words, the release is limited to mostly post-crisis conduct, basically robo-signing and servicer abuse. Private right of action would still be available under any settlement – Attorneys General cannot stop the right [...]

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 [...]

I got a lot of response to my post on the new federal financial fraud unit (not to be confused with the old financial fraud unit) looking into mortgage origination and securitization abuses. I criticized New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for walking into a bear trap, as co-chair of a panel where three of [...]

I have some additional reporting on the financial fraud unit that will be co-chaired by Eric Schneiderman, and how he will approach it. But before I get to that, I want to pick up on something that came up when I appeared on Sam Seder’s Majority Report radio program today. The thing is, and this [...]

I’ll pepper in my thoughts on the State of the Union Address throughout the day, but I would be remiss if I didn’t start with the announcement of a Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses (UMOSA) to investigate bank practices during the financial crisis. The unit will be co-chaired by Eric Schneiderman, the New [...]