Protesters have gathered outside a meeting taking place in Chicago today between officials with the Obama Administration and some state Attorneys General or members of their staff, aimed at reaching agreement on a low-ball settlement with leading banks over foreclosure fraud.  The proposed settlement would give homeowners a pittance in exchange for a broad release [...]

Chatter increased over the weekend on a long-awaited foreclosure fraud deal between top banks and state and federal regulators, led by the Justice Department and HUD. Yves Smith provides additional details today, including a Constitutional issue over servicers providing modifications on investor-owned mortgages without their consent, a violation of the takings clause of the 5th [...]

I brought up one of my chief problems with the possible foreclosure fraud settlement, the fact that AGs have already tried a settlement that mandated banks to deliver loan modifications to borrowers, and they flat-out didn’t do it. But Sen. Sherrod Brown offers up another problem. It turns out that, under the settlement, the banks [...]

Ten years ago, China joined the World Trade Organization, promising to reform and liberalize its command economy. Ten years later, very little has changed. The U.S. says that China has intensified state intervention in its economy despite reform commitments it made on joining the World Trade Organization 10 years ago. The office of the U.S. [...]

Ten Democratic Senators, led by Sherrod Brown (D-OH), have written to financial regulators expressing their opposition to the recent move of Bank of America derivative exposure from Merrill Lynch to their federally insured subsidiary. By putting the derivatives under the FDIC, this puts taxpayers on the hook for potentially massive losses (the notional value of [...]

John Boehner has declared the China currency bill, which passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support and 63 votes, “dead on arrival” in the House. Apparently the interests of multinational corporations to keep their labor costs low trumps the interests of out-of-work Americans. This House Speaker knows where his bread is buttered. Just to bring [...]

Yesterday, we learned that Harry Reid moved up a vote on a bill targeting China’s alleged currency manipulation ahead of the American Jobs Act. Improving the balance of trade with China, which forcing a revaluation of the yuan would accomplish as a kind of monetary stimulus, would have a greater economic and jobs impact than [...]

In addition to some lawmakers calling for increased regulation, oversight and enforcement after revelations of continued robo-signing, others with the ability to call hearings into the matter have announced that they would do so. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio., chair of the Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, said the subcommittee will hold a hearing on [...]

Like many other things for me while I was in Minneapolis, this came and went last week, but I think it’s a pretty important story to watch. Democrats in the House of Representatives will try to get a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill that would crack down on Chinese currency manipulation. [...]

A group of Democratic Senators demanded that Republicans take their plan to end Medicare off the table in the debt limit negotiations led by Vice President Biden. But they did not go that far with respect to the proposal to block grant Medicaid, although Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) did say that Democrats were “just as [...]

We know about the toothless consent decree on mortgage servicing by OTS, OCC and the Fed. I believe this undermines the AG settlement, but I wasn’t particularly wedded to that settlement, which suffered from many of the same problems and already looked dead in the water. It’s possible that this could turn out very well [...]