Deutsche Bank AG and France’s BNP Paribas SA separately sued Bank of America Corp on Wednesday, claiming that the largest U.S. bank breached its obligations on a total of more than $1.7 billion of mortgage-related transactions.
Read more about BofA...
Bank of America, which acquired Merrill Lynch in January, has taken heat recently for not being very helpful to customers needing help renegotiating their mortgages to avoid foreclosure.
Read more about Bank of America...
I would like to see this senior economic advisor's opinions embraced by the administration. Most importantly, we require a new Glass-Steagall type regulation which would insulate and separate investment banking activities from comercial bank services.
Should an institution be viewed as "too big to fail" the FDIC insurance premiums should be too large for it to be a viable entity, especially if the risks of investment banking operations are a portion of the commercial bank's activities.
Friday, 12 June 2009
Congressman Dennis Kucinich talks on Fox about the Bank of America Situation WATCH HERE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkSl_HLXBGM
Very interesting article on the problem / disaster of trying to rescue the national banks. The large, national banks need to be broken into pieces.
http://www.dismountingourtiger.com/economics/bank-bailout-yields-collateral-damage-double-standards-poor-solutions/comment-page-1#comment-91
How can we as consumers help?
http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/AmericansforSmartBanking
May 6, 2009
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.–MFI-Miami, LLC, a mortgage fraud investigation company, announced today that it’s calling on regulators from the state of Florida and the federal government to investigate how Bank of America serves its elderly mortgage clients.
Since the beginning of February 2009, MFI-Miami has been working with Harry and Sonia Taub to get a copy of their loan file from Bank of America. The elderly hearing-impaired couple contacted Steve Dibert, President of MFI-Miami, because they suspected that something wasn’t right with their mortgage.
“I have multiple elderly clients who have mortgage loans from Bank of America, and I hear the same horror stories from all of them,” says Dibert. “This is clearly elder abuse on a massive scale.”
Dibert notes that he and the Taubs have heard every imaginable excuse from Bank of America. “My favorite was when BofA Customer Service told Mrs. Taub that they could not accept her verbal permission to release her file to MFI-Miami because it came through a TDD translator,” he says. “We have jumped through every hoop they have asked us to, but enough is enough.”
MFI-Miami has received complaints from other elderly homeowners about Bank of America. “The bank has consistently shown disregard for seniors, especially seniors with disabilities,” says Steve Dibert, President of MFI-Miami. “I would like federal and state regulators to intervene on their behalf. I think it’s disgusting for my tax dollars to be spent bailing out a bank that treats our most vulnerable citizens like yesterday’s trash.”
About MFI-Miami
Headquartered in Boynton Beach, Florida, MFI-Miami, LLC and its sister companies conduct forensic mortgage audits and mortgage fraud investigations. MFI-Miami, LLC is also only one of a few firms that investigate the transfer of the securitization instruments of homeowners’ mortgages. For more information, visit www.mfi-miami.com, contact 561-317-9978, or email info@mfi-miami.com. Contacts
MFI-Miami, LLC, West Palm Beach Stephen Dibert, President, 561-317-9978 steve@mfi-miami.com www.mfi-miami.com
Bank of America: Are They Preying On the Elderly?
A mortgage fraud investigation is underway in the state of Florida, to find out if there were any improprieties by the Bank of America, which has put them on the hot seat. Mortgage Fraud Investigations, LLC of Florida, launched an investigation to discover why a deaf, elderly couple was denied access to their mortgage records.
So far they have uncovered substantial improprieties and found that they have been virtually uncooperative with their elderly clients. MFI’s president, Steve Dilbert, stated, “This is clearly elder abuse on a massive scale.”
5/6/2009
http://www.mfi-miami.com/bank-of-america’s-treatment-of-the-elderly
Bank of America online banner....reads.....FREE CHECKING.....no service charge
The gimmick is put and maintain balance of $300.
If your balance of YOUR MONEY in YOUR ACCOUNT goes below $300 they can charge you $5.95
monthly service charge ...on ....MY MONEY.
MY MONEY in their pocket...but if is use ...MY MONEY...they charge me.
That means....I should just GIVE THEM ...$300 for life...as a CHARGE for a FREE CHECKING ACCOUNT.
I would be better off than to think it was still ...MY MONEY...as I would not be tempted to use it if it were not in MY ACCOUNT,...and get CHARGED...to use it.
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Then there is FREE OVERDRAFT...up to $300 .....that cost.....$36 ...on approved credit.
I was GIVEN ...FREE OVERDRAFT...after passing a CREDIT CHECK...on one account.
DENIED IT ON THE SECOND ACCOUNT......member of the bank ...for decades....V.
You all need to respond to this even if you are not currently having credit card issues or any financing issues. This is directed primarily at credit card companies; however, it should apply to all financing / loan activities. Feel free to add to this list and reply to all as well as forward to new email addresses.
The Fed has been joined in putting forth these proposed changes by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration.The Fed has provided a seventy-five day comment period - to approximately mid-July. Providing your comments to the Fed is easy:On the Fed's web site (scroll down to the bottom of the page to Regulation AA - click on submit comment)By email to: regs.comments@federalreserve.govBy fax to (202) 452-3819 or (202) 452-3102By regular mail to:Jennifer J. JohnsonSecretary, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System20th Street and Constitution Avenue, NWWashington, DC 20551Be sure to reference Docket No. R-1314 in your written comments.All comments will be public and can be viewed online on the Fed's web site. Pro or con - this is an important payment card industry issue worth your comments.
Video interview: Kucinich outraged over $3.7 billion in bonuses paid by Merrill Lynch Today at 12:27am
Kucinich focuses attention on bailouts given to big banks.
Dennis Kucinich on Fox with Greta Van Susteren 03/11/09
Citigroup, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Invest TARP funds overseas.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7tT4BAiJU
What and “all” we Americans and the international community basically understands is the United State’s economy is in trouble; and for some unknown and unexplainable reason the folks that “we think” lost our money while destroying our economy, are still in charge for some foolish reason; of which, we are still relying on these same institutional folks to restore the broken system they corrupted to their advantage.
Simply stated, for me, this is like requesting Al Capone to assist us in revising our Internal Revenue Service’s tax codes or Bernard Madoff’s given time off for good behavior for his bring to light the troubles of our SEC regulation policies?.
Also, for some reason I receive the impression that we as “ordinary people” are not capable of understanding the problem; hence the words of “complex issues” as presented and used by our Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, along with “reinvestment needs time to settle”, as spoken by Hank Paulson our former Treasury Secretary. So, the question comes to mind, “are we this uneducated” or could it be “our saviors in the government unable to understand the magnitude of the problem?”
We are definitely afraid of the words “Socialism” and “Nationalize” when it comes to AIG, Citicorp, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch because this possibly means too many of us, bigger government, which in turn, means higher taxes, which is not wanted or needed. Perhaps the simple answer lies within who is trying to solve the economic problem within our government.
So, as an individual, perhaps of limited intelligence, for not being able to totally grasp and understand the complexity of the economic problem; I wonder if Eric Holder of our Justice Department could perhaps help the CEOs of the aforementioned institutions to educate the American public and myself, as to “why” we are in these troubling times, “where” did our money go and “how” do we recover our country’s economic strength.
Placing these CEOs on the “hot seat” I’m sure will simplify their complex possible solutions to our problem while educating us all as to how the “old boys club” really as operated for the past thirty years.
What brought this posting to being comes from a lady I have a deep amount of admiration for; Ms. Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post in an article entitled: “Tim Geithner, CNBC, and the Second Coming of Known Unknowns”, which was posted on her website, March the 9th of this year, and which follows:
Tim Geithner
Tim Geithner, CNBC, and the Second Coming of Known Unknowns Arianna Huffington Huffington Post March 9, 2009 | 02:38 PM (EST)
A formerly famous and now mostly forgotten poet of nonsense verse once said: “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns….there are also unknown unknowns.”
That was, of course, Donald Rumsfeld, but it doesn’t sound too different from your average briefing/Congressional testimony/interview by Timothy Geithner. Besides being awash in toxic paper, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations, we seem to be drowning in unknowns. Only, I get the sense that there are fewer unknowns than we’re being told.
While we’re rewarding the risk-taking shareholders of various zombie banks — not to mention the mysterious, unconfirmed counterparties to AIG’s serial recklessness — how about rewarding the taxpayers, if not with an actual return on our bailout investment then at least with information about what exactly is being done with our money? It’s time to call in all the unknowns.
Instead, we’re greeted with a wall of manufactured complexity by the people whose job it is to make known unknowns into known knowns. There is nothing complex about the way CEOs like John Thain, Ed Liddy, Lloyd Blankfein, John Mack, Vikram Pandit, and Ken Lewis turned bailout billions into Wall Street bonus money — and no justification for keeping taxpayers in the dark about the giveaways (Vanity Fair’s Michael Shnayerson breaks down the jaw-dropping and blood-boiling numbers).
Which brings us to the holy temple of unknown unknowns — CNBC. The financial channel’s Erin Burnett (Street Signs, Squawk on the Street) was on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, suddenly seeing all kinds of complexity, nuance, and ambiguity in what can be known and not known about the economic crisis. Does the government know more than they’re telling us, asked Bill.
“I don’t think they know,” said Burnett. “I don’t think anybody knows.”
And: “I don’t even know that the CEOs themselves know.”
And: “Tim Geithner may know more than most, but no, he doesn’t know.”
And as for whether the financial geniuses at CNBC should have known something:
“It’s easy to say [there's] a bubble, but you don’t know when it’s gonna burst. And I think that the question of timing and magnitude, nobody got. That wasn’t just a CNBC pundit thing, that was any expert out there.” I guess she missed experts like Roubini and Taleb.
And I certainly don’t remember that kind of circumspection in the run up to the meltdown. For a look at what the CNBC sages thought they knew, and how wrong they were, there is, of course, Jon Stewart’s already legendary evisceration.
As Stewart shows, the essential truth of what went on is really quite simple. Using complexity as a cover for accountability has a long historical track record of ending in disaster.
“The most dangerous thing in any economic crisis is denial,” writes MIT professor Simon Johnson, a former official at the IMF, where he specialized in dealing with banking crises around the world. He’s become one of the leaders of the camp arguing that the administration needs to admit the scope of the banking problem and deal with it sooner (wildly expensive) rather than later (insanely and unsustainably expensive). While “the degree of denial in the United States has fallen dramatically,” Johnson writes, “there is one major aspect of denial still remaining: the scale and nature of our banking difficulties.”
(Johnson, by the way, is doing his part to get rid of unknowns at his blog Baseline Scenario, which includes a terrific primer on the financial crisis.)
Johnson’s insights mirror those of Paul Krugman, who writes that “officials still aren’t willing to face the facts. They don’t want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it’s very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over.” Not coming clean and doing what needs to be done, adds Krugman, “could result in an economy that sputters along, not for months or years, but for a decade or more.”
Speaking of nationalization, CNBC’s Burnett told Maher, “Nobody wants it on the left, nobody wants it on the right” — even as calls for it continue to come from both the left and the right, demonstrating once again how obsolete that way of looking at the world is becoming. America’s Business Channel, indeed.
The list of knowable knowns that we still don’t know about includes the final destination of the taxpayer money the government keeps funneling to AIG. The Wall Street Journal reports that around $50 billion of the $173 billion in bailout funds given to the insurance behemoth has gone to pay off financial institutions that had insured their wildly irresponsible credit default swaps with AIG.
So who, exactly, has our money — and why don’t we know? AIG CEO Ed Liddy prefers not to say. Same with the Fed, which refused a congressional request for the names of AIG’s derivative counterparties. According to unnamed sources, the list includes Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch/Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank.
It’s worth noting that, thanks to the industry-written 2005 Bankruptcy Bill, derivatives claims are not stayed in bankruptcy — so the financial institutions that gambled and lost would nevertheless be the first ones paid off. Isn’t gaming the system fun?
The stimulus package — and the media’s coverage of it — has also been a hotbed of known unknowns. Or, if you prefer, unreported knowns.
According to a Media Matters study of 59 network news broadcasts about the stimulus in the three weeks prior to the vote, only three mentioned concerns that the package was inadequate — even though many economists believed it was not big enough to do the job. Another known known treated like an unknown when we most needed to know. And now, of course, we’re already getting reports that the bill was, indeed, too small.
I’m not saying that everything about this crisis is knowable — far from it. But there are a number of very simple truths that are being hidden behind a smokescreen of complexity and unknowability.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to know that you can’t have CEOs whose companies have received billions in bailout funds going to court and threatening to sue employees to keep the public from knowing which executives pocketed millions in bonuses — and you can’t have them pretending that no bailout money was used to pay said bonuses.
You can’t have insolvent banks pretending that the problem is one of liquidity, and then using taxpayer money to protect their balance sheets instead of lending money to credit-worthy businesses and consumers.
And, ultimately, you can’t allow the same people who were part of the problem to be part of the solution. There is absolutely no way on earth that the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess will ever get us out of it. We need to clean house, taking the steering wheel away from the executives and the compliant boards that steered us over the economic cliff. They didn’t get it then; they still don’t get it now (see handing out bonuses, hosting spa retreats, redecorating, and throwing lavish parties while America teeters on the verge of economic collapse).
That is something we all know that we know — even Tim Geithner and the experts at CNBC.
Complementing my posting regarding “Tim Geithner” and his explaining of where the Obama Administration stands on the economy and their expectations:
Charlie Rose -Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary
Additional information on Rose’s interview with Timothy Geithner may be found on Huffington Post here:
Charlie Rose Interviews Timothy Geithner: “Capitalism Will Be Different”
Update 11 March 09:
Bernanke’s Vision for Change from Wash Post - World News by Annys Shin and Lori Montgomery
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke yesterday laid out his most comprehensive vision yet for how to overhaul the rules governing the nation’s financial system, and advocated changing accounting methods that he said have exacerbated the financial crisis.
