The Sun’s real estate reporter, Jamie Smith Hopkins, writes today that a record 4 percent of Maryland homeowners are in foreclosure. The number of delinquencies is much higher: All told, almost 14 percent of Maryland borrowers are behind, including those in the foreclosure process and those just a month late on payments. As Calculated Risk pointed...
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Go with the fraud and make big bux or fight & get fired, earning the right to battle for your job back in court for five or six years, with a less-than-10-percent shot at winning.
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Zerohedge.com, the home of canny (if conspiratorially minded) econo-blogger “Tyler Durden,” is not working at the moment. The Goog-cache is a few days old. If I thought like him I’d say it was the Dow going up 400 points that did him in.
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The Times has a pair of stories today that are fun to set next to each another. The first one is about lobbying on the financial reform bill. Banks don’t want to be thrown out of the derivatives market because that’s where the profits are. Watch for Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas) to get pilloried in...
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Look, folks, we’re all against our bribed congress and the nutzo bailouts they’ve engineered for the criminal class. But the way to fix this is not by marching in lock-step with a more blue-collar, angrier criminal class that doesn't actually oppose them.
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in 2009 the FBI investigated 5,316 bank robberies, recovering approximately $8 million out of a total of $46 million that had been stolen—less than a week’s pay for Paulson.
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Props to the NT Post for today’s front page headline: “Sachs of $#!T”. The  hieroglyph makes an appearance again on the jump page. For more shit, see this video. Meanwhile, buy-my-shitpile-dot-com has morphed into some kind of inexplicable hemorrhoid video compilation, with all possible spellings of that word. Better to spend some time with...
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Wall Street Journal reporters examine the mortgages beneath the Abacus deals. Nice mix here of foreclosure stories, from a guy who got hit by a truck and a Romanian immigrant who got scammed by a predatory lender, to a woman in California’s Inland Empire who worked as a nursing-home assistant and also somehow allegedly ran...
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Something that occurred to me as I learned of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil fraud suit against Goldman Sachs Friday (this New York Times piece has a link to the complaint): Who was buying mortgage-backed paper in mid 2007 and what were they thinking? Anybody whose skull wasn’t filled with oatmeal knew by late...
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The Wall Street Journal has a boffo take on corruption as a macroeconomic drag. The story is about Greece, but the methods are applicable worldwide, and in places like Baltimore. Leaning on forthcoming research from the Brookings Institution and reports from Transparency International, the story links Greece’s culture of corruption to its flagging tax collection...
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New reports show redefaults of modified mortgages have doubled. It’s still a small number—something like one percent of the modded mortgages. But people who watch these things expect the number to increase, both in absolute and percentage terms. Meanwhile, there still seems to be some “debate” over what caused the crash. Was it, a) the proliferation...
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The nonprofit watchdog group Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) has yet another report out based on data released by the Treasury Department showing that our tax collectors are auditing fewer large companies while bringing the hammer down on the little guys. The trend has continued since the last year of the George H.W. Bush administration....
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The Times’ David Leonhardt had a long and thoughtful take on financial re-regulation Sunday, focusing mainly on the details and their larger implications. But he brushed past the real issue in a couple of places. Here’s the closest he gets: What may be more worrisome than the size of any individual bank is the size...
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Good news, taxpayers! The tax burden on the 400 most accomplished Americans—the linchpins of our modern economy—has fallen precipitously over the past two decades, even as their earnings have increased. They used to make only about 3,000 times more than the rest of us, back in the dark, socialist days of 1992, under President...
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that President Obama plans to nominate Sarah Bloom Raskin, who has headed the Maryland Department of Financial Regulation since 2007, for an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
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The long-awaited autopsy on Lehman Bros. is out. Big news: The bank hid liabilities off its balance sheet! Everyone is shocked, shocked. The amazing thing is the mundanity of Lehman’s methods: Repos. This was inside-the-box thinking even 10...
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New York Times Opinionator blogger William D. Cohan steps in it today with this long plea for a presidential pardon for ex Goldman Sachs arbitrageur Robert Freeman, who two decades ago pleaded guilty to mail fraud, served four months in Club Fed, and paid his million dollar fine with a personal check. It was “A...
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Somewhere, Rene Magritte is smiling (from the WSJ): Herbert Allison, who oversees the Treasury’s $700 billion financial rescue plan, disagreed with members of a congressional oversight panel that some financial firms benefit from the assumption that the government would step in to prevent their failure. “There is no too big to fail guarantee on the...
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There are many nuances to former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling’s argument, now before the Supreme Court, that he should be released from the minimum-security federal prison that houses him. There is the question of venue—should he have been tried in Houston, where the bulk of the 5,000 people who lost their jobs (and $2...
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Today I received the first of what I expect will be a million billion (more) e-mails focused on the tyranny of forcing people to buy health insurance. It came from Joe of Towanda, Pa. (he doesn’t want his name used here—”I know where you’re coming from,” he says). I have no idea why he...
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