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 [...]

As other Attorneys General took the lead in efforts to fight foreclosure fraud, with lawsuits from Delaware’s Beau Biden, Massachusetts’ Martha Coakley and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, we hadn’t heard as much from New York’s Eric Schneiderman lately. But he’s back in the news, teaming with a federal Inspector General on an investigation: The federal [...]

If the President wants to show the country that he now wants to give Americans a fair shake and break up the “invisible government” that exists in parallel with Wall Street, he could give a statement on last night’s 60 Minutes story on two whistleblowers at mortgage originators who stand ready to work with the [...]

More attention needs to be paid to the LA Times’ excellent series on subprime auto loans. The first installment concerned Buy Here Pay Here used car dealerships, and how they hook low-income borrowers into high-interest loans, then repossess the car when the loans go bad and resell the car to the next mark. This is [...]

I should have given the Bevilacqua case a bit more attention yesterday rather than sticking it in the Roundup. It represents the nightmare scenario we all expected to come to pass. The highest court in Massachusetts ruled that a homeowner who bought a foreclosure that hadn’t been properly conducted by the foreclosing bank in 2006 [...]

The big meeting on the dead-on-arrival foreclosure fraud settlement is today. Banks may have actually shown up to this meeting, whereas they blew off the last one, so I guess that’s progress. But the fact that six Democratic AGs have said they wouldn’t sign a deal that releases the banks from liability without a vigorous [...]