By Pam Martens: April 23, 2013 Yesterday, Mary Jo White, the new Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, announced that a law partner from the firm she just left, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, would become the new Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement – the unit that decides who gets prosecuted and who gets a pass. In making the announcement that Andrew Ceresney of Debevoise & Plimpton will share the post with the Acting Director, George Canellos, White called Ceresney a “former prosecutor.” That hardly does justice to the cozy ties between Ceresney and Wall Street. (Ceresney worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York in a prior career but has been employed at Debevoise since 2003.) This time last year, Ceresney was basking in the glow of a herculean accomplishment for JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Ally. While … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 22, 2013 Corporate media is abuzz with the possibility that the Koch brothers will use their majority-control of Koch Industries to buy eight daily newspapers owned by the Tribune Company, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, the fourth and ninth largest dailies in the country, respectively. If the Kochs’ bid is successful, it will signal a plan by the Kochs to stop hiding behind front groups and the launch of a full-scale, open assault on reshaping the country to fit their agenda: deregulation, privatization, and dramatically shrinking the Federal government. Tribune also owns two of the largest dailies in the battleground state of Florida: the Orlando Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel out of Fort Lauderdale. Other dailies include The Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, The Morning Call and Daily Press.  According to the 2013 Forbes list of billionaires, both Charles and David Koch increased their wealth by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 19, 2013  President Obama has promised Americans greater transparency in their government and a crackdown on wrongdoing on Wall Street. What Americans have received instead is a dark curtain drawn around how Federal banking regulators settle cases against Wall Street and zero criminal prosecutions by the U.S. Justice Department against any major Wall Street executive. Both of those realities share a common factor: the powerful Wall Street law firm, Covington & Burling.  On January 9 of this year, it was announced that Julie Williams, the Chief Counsel of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) who had stepped down the prior summer, was taking a job as a Managing Director at Promontory Financial Group. The OCC is the regulator of national banks which, along with the Federal Reserve Board, had announced two days prior that it was abruptly dropping its discredited Independent Foreclosure Review … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 18, 2013 The past week has delivered revelation after revelation suggesting that the foreclosure frauds perpetrated against the American homeowner by the too-big-to-fail (or prosecute) banks, have been deviously matched with a corrupted settlement that has members of Senate hearings shaking their heads in astonishment. Yesterday brought the latest example of Federal bank regulators serving as lapdogs of their charges. The Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development held a hearing titled: “Helping Homeowners Harmed by Foreclosures: Ensuring Accountability and Transparency in Foreclosure Reviews, Part II.” Senator Merkley delivered the fireworks of the session. Early this year, when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Federal Reserve Board (Fed) announced that they were abruptly halting the Independent Foreclosure Reviews they had ordered 13 banks and mortgage servicers to have conducted by independent consultants, the party line was that it was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 17, 2013  When dazzlingly credentialed consultants are paid over $2 billion by some of the largest banks in the country to ostensibly restore trust among consumers by making a serious effort to root out foreclosure fraud and provide just restitution to the victims, what one doesn’t expect is for the exorbitantly paid consultants to trigger a Senate investigation, national media probes, two critical reports by the General Accountability Office and an explosion of outrage by foreclosure victims on hot social media sites.  While the government’s so-called Independent Foreclosure Review resulted in seven firms being hired by banks and mortgage servicers, the consultancy firm taking the brunt of the scrutiny, and rightfully so, is Promontory Financial Group. Its business model is only slightly less dangerous than the too-big-to-fail banks that employ it for everything from cost-cutting to regulatory reviews.  Promontory Financial Group was founded in 2001 by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 16, 2013 The $3.6 billion in checks from a government approved settlement fund for victims of foreclosure abuse by the country’s biggest banks and mortgage servicers began arriving in mailboxes this week, with additional mailings to extend into July. But what should also be tucked into the envelope is a truth in advertising disclaimer stating that the government is now disavowing the use of the phrase “Independent Foreclosure Review” as a hyperbolic and untruthful characterization. The process was anything but “independent” and out of more than 4 million foreclosure files potentially stuffed with evidence of illegal activity on the part of banks, only 100,000 files were actually reviewed, not even enough to constitute a reliable statistical sampling. In a Senate hearing last Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren revealed for the first time that it was the actual banks that engaged in the illegal foreclosure activities, not the so-called … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 12, 2013  There is only one thing more Kafkaesque than the ongoing Wall Street frauds and that is watching a live United States Senate investigation of a diabolical settlement the banks themselves concocted to repay the victims of their own fraud. Such was the case yesterday when Senators Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, and Elizabeth Warren grilled regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve along with outside consultants over allowing banks to hand pick the consultants to do their foreclosure reviews, negotiate confidentiality agreements with them and pay them directly. Hundreds of millions of dollars in checks from the Foreclosure Review settlement will start going out today, eventually topping $3.6 billion in the cash portion of the settlement, and yet it was revealed during yesterday’s Senate hearing that it was the actual banks that engaged in the illegal foreclosure actions that tallied up … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 11, 2013  If President Obama is trying to make it clear that he reports to the 1 percent, not the average Americans who elected him, he’s earning an A+ on his report card.  At 6:46 p.m. last evening, the White House sent out the President’s schedule for today. One item on the agenda reads as follows: “Later in the morning, the President will meet with members of the Financial Services Forum as part of the organization’s daylong Spring Meeting. This meeting in the Roosevelt Room is closed press.” There is no mention in this press announcement that the President will be meeting with the CEOs of the too-big-to-fail banks – certainly a detail worthy of the public’s attention. Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal’s link on the front page of its web site to its story on the President’s meet-up with members of the Financial Services … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 10, 2013  In what is likely an historical first for a Democratic President, groups that were his most loyal and hardworking supporters during last year’s campaign massed outside the White House yesterday to pronounce the President a traitor to his people and his party.  Just five months after spending millions from their campaign war chests and an equal amount of volunteer hours, the progressive groups who delivered a second term to Barack Obama feel betrayed. Using unusually harsh language and delivering 2.3 million signed petitions, the President’s base came to warn Congressional Democrats against falling in lockstep with the President.  The uproar comes over the President’s plan, to be unveiled today in his budget proposal, to cut Social Security payments by indexing benefits to a chained Consumer Price Index (CPI), a process viewed as a rigged system of reducing payments over time to the Nation’s most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 9, 2013  The Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, has been in office a mere 15 business days and has already logged more foreign travel on the taxpayers’ tab than most executive branch personnel see in a year.  Lew was sworn in on March 20, 2013. Five days later he was sitting in Beijing chatting it up with China’s President Xi Jinping. Yesterday and today, he’s flitting about Europe. His agenda includes meetings in Brussels with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and European Commission Vice President Olli Rehn, and European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Michel Barnier. Lew was also scheduled to meet in Frankfurt with European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.  Today, Lew heads to Berlin to have a conversation with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble. Lew’s meeting … Continue reading →