There’s a lot of pushback anytime someone points the finger at banks. As I’ve argued for a couple of years now, virtually all recent foreclosures really amount to theft. The banks have no legal standing to take homes. They created the MERS monster, which destroyed the chain of title and “lost” all the documents. That […]
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has long been skeptical of the negotiations by the State Attorneys General and the banksters over the foreclosure frauds (see here http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/settlement-breakdown-by-state-plus-other-official-propaganda.html). And while I had held out some hope that California and New York would either refuse to join, or would insist on good terms, today’s announcement of the […]
I have argued that if we want to get a measure of the size of the Fed’s bail-out, we ought to add up the lending and asset purchases undertaken over the past three years through its alphabet soup of special emergency facilities. This is what my students Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson have done, and you […]
(Keynote Presentation For Conference: The Capitalist Mode of Power: Past, Present, Future, York University, Toronto, October 2011.) by L. Randall Wray Back in 1997 I was finishing up my book titled Understanding Modern Money and I sent the manuscript to Robert Heilbroner to see if he’d write a blurb for the jacket. He called me […]
It was obvious to those who understand Modern Money Theory that the set-up of the European Monetary Union was fatally flawed. We knew that the first serious financial and economic crisis would threaten its very existence. In a sense, it was from the beginning much like the US in 1929, on the eve of the […]
United States Bankruptcy Judge Robert Grossman has ruled that MERS’s business practices are unlawful. He explicitly acknowledged that this ruling sets a precedent that has far-reaching implications for half of the mortgages in this country. MERS is dead. The banks are in big trouble. And all foreclosures should be stopped immediately while the legislative branch comes up with a solution.
Every link of the home finance food chain was designed to promote fraud—from the mortgage brokers and appraisers who conspired to overvalue property to stick buyers with overpriced homes, to the mortgage lenders who preferred the riskiest mortgages to maximize interest and fees, on to the investment bankers that packaged them into securities that they bet would blow up, and to the credit rating agencies who conspired to certify the junk as triple A. We should not forget the hedge fund managers who worked closely with investment banks like Goldman to re-securitize the very worst stuff into CDOs, sold on to Goldman’s gullible customers, nor the mortgage servicers (who not coincidentally happen to be the same biggest banks that created the toxic mortgages) who now maximize late fees as they drag out foreclosures while preventing loan modifications.