Democracy Now: Yves Smith on $13B JPMorgan Settlement

Worth watching/listening to the whole thing, but excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to part two right now of what’s being touted as the biggest banking settlement in U.S. history. JPMorgan is set to pay a record $13 billion fine to settle investigations into its mortgage-backed securities. Five years ago, the bank’s risky behavior helped trigger the financial meltdown, including manipulating mortgages and sending millions of Americans into bankruptcy or foreclosure. JPMorgan said in a statement that its latest settlement is an "important step." However, many in the media have portrayed the deal as unfair to the bank.

We’re going to turn right now to Yves Smith. She is a well-known financial analyst, and she is the founder of Naked Capitalism, the blog. She’s also author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.
If you could talk about—how did JPMorgan Chase violate the law?

YVES SMITH: The violated the law part, we’re not—we’re not completely clear on JPMorgan proper. It’s important to understand there are three legal entities involved. One is Bear Stearns, which they acquired during the crisis. One is Washington Mutual, which they acquired during the crisis. Jamie [Dimon] was delighted to buy those both at the time. And we may get into that detail. These are still financially extremely attractive deals to him. So the idea that Dimon was in any way, shape or form a victim in doing these acquisitions is really overstated.

But the key part of this deal is that this is about liability to investors. So, the government—the government is representing, in this case, a whole bunch of states that have claims against JPMorgan and the different entities, as well as the FHFA, which—sorry, Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which entered into its own deal. But basically, the bank sold—these different banking entities sold bonds to investors that they said would be of a certain quality, and they were way short of that. And then, it was because they were, you know, lousy borrowers. They basically would say that it had a higher loan-to-value ratio; that the fellow had income, and he didn’t; that it was a primary resident, and it wasn’t—those sort of misrepresentations.

AMY GOODMAN: Is this evidence that the Obama administration is getting tough on Wall Street?

YVES SMITH: I don’t really buy that theory, because the thing that brought Jamie Dimon to the table was actually a criminal investigation which was initiated in 2007 under the Bush administration. It takes a long time to develop these prosecutions of these complex criminal frauds. So that’s why it’s been such a long lead time. And this settlement has been under negotiation for some time. There have been various investors, private investors, as well as the government, that has been pursuing these investor claims. So this has been sort of cycling through on all kinds of fronts. These suits—you know, for example, different other banks, Bank of America and, I believe, HSBC has settled their investor claims with the government. So those claims—they’re just cycling through those kind of settlements right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Yves Smith, can you talk about the pain that was caused by this? It’s always talked about in these sort of very un-understandable financial terms, macro terms, so it’s hard to really understand, though millions of people felt what JPMorgan did.

YVES SMITH: Well, there—again, this part of the settlement actually doesn’t get to the pain. That was a settlement we had last year. The settlement last year was the part—there was a huge federal-state settlement last year that was supposed to be about the homeowners. But in this case, this—these settlements are all about the investors. And so, you know, to your point, what JPMorgan is going to pay in this settlement is larger than what it paid in the settlement last year to homeowners. I mean, that just intuitively seems extremely unjust, you know, the fact that investors are basically going to get a bigger dollar compensation out of all these banking entities than homeowners got last year. I mean, that’s crazy by anybody’s standards.

A Bought-Off, Shamelessly Corrupt US House of Representatives Set to Pass Bank-Written Deregulatory Legislation

A must-read and grimly amusing piece:

WASHINGTON –– To Wall Street, this town might seem like enemy territory. But even as federal regulators and prosecutors extract multibillion-dollar penalties from the nation’s biggest banks, Wall Street can rely on at least one ally here: the House of Representatives. The House is scheduled to vote on two bills this week that would undercut new financial regulations and hand Wall Street a victory. The legislation has garnered broad bipartisan support in the House, even after lawmakers learned that Citigroup lobbyists helped write one of the bills, which would exempt a wide array of derivatives trading from new regulation. The bills are part of a broader campaign in the House, among Republicans and business-friendly Democrats, to roll back elements of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the most comprehensive regulatory overhaul since the Depression. Of 10 recent bills that alter Dodd-Frank or other financial regulation, six have passed the House this year. This week, if the House approves Citigroup’s legislation and another bill that would delay heightened standards for firms that offer investment advice to retirees, the tally would rise to eight.

Both the Treasury Department and consumer groups have urged lawmakers to reject the bills, warning that they could leave the nation vulnerable again to excessive financial risk taking. The House proposals stand little chance of becoming law, having received a much chillier reception in the Senate and at the White House, which on Monday threatened to veto the bill on investment advice for retirees.

But simply voting on the bills generates benefits for both House lawmakers and Wall Street lobbyists, critics say. For lawmakers, it comes in the form of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. The banks, meanwhile, welcome the bills as a warning to regulatory agencies that they should tread carefully when drawing up new rules.

In other corners of the nation’s capital, Wall Street has received a decidedly less cordial reception. The Justice Department recently struck a tentative $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s mortgage practices. Federal regulators are also increasingly demanding that JPMorgan and other financial firms admit to wrongdoing when settling enforcement actions.

“The House is the odd man out in terms of doing Wall Street’s bidding,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit group critical of the financial industry. “They’re letting Wall Street write the law to its own benefit in ways that harm the public.” The lawmakers who support the bills say the legislation is good for the nation, not just the bank’s bottom lines.

Still, in the case of the derivatives trading bill, Citigroup’s lobbyists redrafted the proposal, striking out certain phrases and inserting others, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. The House Financial Services Committee, a magnet for Wall Street campaign donations, adopted the bank’s recommendations in 2012 and again this May.

Wall Street’s support from the House extends beyond favorable votes. When bank executives are called to testify before Congress, industry lobbyists distribute proposed questions to lawmakers and their staff, seeking to exert some control over the debate, according to emails written by staff members on the House Financial Services Committee that were reviewed by The Times.

One House aide, in an email exchange among House Financial Services staff members last year, warned that lawmakers should not mimic the talking points from lobbyists.
“I know that some of our members are inclined to whore, but we cannot be apes,” the Republican aide said.

A Thing of Beauty and Hilarity

Matt Taibbi, Sam Seder on Alex Pareene, Popping CNBC's Bubble

NSA Spying on Financial Transactions-- Part of US Economic Sabotage Against Other Countries?

A really good bit from Max Keiser that puts a lot together on what the NSA spying is really about-- the big banks:


"Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss economic espionage and, perhaps, sabotage by the NSA against the corporations and innovators of competitor nations. In the second half, Max interviews author, journalist and filmmaker, Greg Palast of GregPalast.com, about the Larry Summers' secret 'End Game' memo and the decriminalization of what were once financial crimes."

My personal theory is these gun massacres are not about gun control at all, but events just waiting to go off when the controllers want, to distract from news coming out that the elites don't like. This story about the NSA spying on financial transactions, is such a story, imo. Which goes along with this: The NSA Is Also Grabbing Millions Of Credit Card Records

Also Emptywheel on this-- pretty weedy stuff.

The Ratings Agency Scam

Taibbi:

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. These gigantic companies – also known as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, or NRSROs – have teams of examiners who analyze companies, cities, towns, countries, mortgage borrowers, anybody or anything that takes on debt or creates an investment vehicle. Their primary function is to help define what's safe to buy, and what isn't.

A triple-A rating is to the financial world what the USDA seal of approval is to a meat-eater, or virginity is to a Catholic. It's supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolable: According to Moody's own reports, AAA investments "should survive the equivalent of the U.S. Great Depression." It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

That this happened is even more amazing because these companies naturally have powerful leverage over their clients, as they are part of a quasi-protected industry that enjoys massive de facto state subsidies. Largely that's because government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission often force private companies to fulfill regulatory requirements by retaining or keeping in reserve certain fixed quantities of assets – bonds, securities, whatever – that have been rated highly by a "Nationally Recognized" ratings agency, like the "Big Three" of Moody's, S&P and Fitch. So while they're not quite part of the official regulatory infrastructure, they might as well be.

It's not like the iniquity of the ratings agencies had gone completely unnoticed before. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission published a case study in 2011 of Moody's in particular and discovered that between 2000 and 2007, the agency gave nearly 45,000 mortgage-backed securities AAA ratings. One year Moody's doled out AAA ratings to 30 mortgage-backed securities every day, 83 percent of which were ultimately downgraded. "This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies," the commission concluded.

Thanks to these documents, we now know how that happened. And showing as they do the back-and-forth between the country's top ratings agencies and one of America's biggest investment banks (Morgan Stanley) in advance of two major subprime deals, they also lay out in detail the evolution of the industrywide fraud that led to implosion of the world economy – how banks, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and ratings agencies, working at an extraordinary level of cooperation, teamed up to disguise and then sell near-worthless loans as AAA securities. It's the black box in the American financial airplane.

Everything Is Rigged, Continued: European Commission Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe

Not trivial:

According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/everything-is-rigged-continued-european-commission-raids-oil-companies-in-price-fixing-probe-20130515#ixzz2VlmzfLiN