Hold Fast

The national mortgage settlement finally happened yesterday, over a month after it was triumphantly announced by the Obama administration. The documentation for the deal is long and confusing, so analysis is coming out slowly, but early indications are that the deal is just as bad as it looked like it would be and potentially quite [...]

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It continues to be hard to provide a full and thorough accounting for a national mortgage settlement where the terms are neither final nor public. This secret deal was agreed to, it seems, without state attorneys general having a full view of what they were signing onto. The fallout from that is likely on just [...]

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This thing hasn’t improved with age, but there is some more detailed and thoughtful commentary that I think is worth highlighting. The first is by Professor Adam Levitin, who scores it as a victory for the banks. He cites the small size as a major part of the settlement’s weakness: The formal price tag for [...]

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At this writing, the federal government and forty-nine state attorneys general (all minus Oklahoma) have agreed to a settlement with the nation’s five largest banks for their fraudulent robosigning practices. The banks will pay $5 billion penalty as part of this deal and also provide a vary range of credits which could account for another [...]

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There’s a lot of discussion going on now in liberal circles about a new Washington Post poll which shows that not just Democrats, but liberal Democrats support for President Obama’s policy of using drones to assassinate American citizens without warrant or judicial oversight, as well as support for his continued use of Guantanamo Bay. Greg [...]

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Glenn Greenwald has a post on the ACLU suing the Obama administration to find out what legal arguments and doctrines were used to justify the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was never charged with a crime. Greenwald notes throughout that the administration has used anonymity granted by a compliant press corps to [...]

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Yves Smith: If the Administration had really changed its stance on bank misdeeds, you’d see it putting the settlement on hold until the investigations led by Schneiderman had been concluded. The fact that they mortgage settlement is proceeding on schedule says this the Administration is, as before, trying to cover up its bank-favoring actions with [...]

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Yesterday I was somewhat sour on the chances of the mortgage fraud task force that Eric Schneiderman will co-chair of succeeding in producing positive results. I think the reasons for caution remain, but David Dayen reports on a number of new facts which could make positive outcomes much more likely. In short, Dayen and his [...]

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I’d really like to be enthusiastic about the announcement of a new federal investigatory task force looking at the foreclosure crisis. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, much like Elizabeth Warren, has done enough to show his commitment to holding Wall Street accountable for their crimes to trust that his motives are good and his [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog Yesterday I posted on the news of a pending settlement between the federal government, some state Attorneys General and the nation’s five largest banks around robosigning and other foreclosure fraud issues. The deal looked really bad and there was strong opposition coming not only from large progressive organizations, but a core [...]

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