I foolishly hoped the Facebook IPO might actually bring some confidence back to Wall Street.
What was I thinking?
Turns out it’s just another example of how the soulless Wall Street culture is destroying American style capitalism.
We have barely gotten past JP Morgan Chase’s $3 billion catastrophe, and the outrage over their foolish decisions, but here we are again. The attention span on Wall Street seems equivalent to that of a small child.
Scott Udine, a broker friend of mine, said it best, “The brokerage firm community is made up of salesmen and people that mainly care about THEIR bottom-line….not yours!!! They will sell anything, say anything and do anything.”
Morgan Stanley over sold and over hyped too many shares of Facebook to an unsuspecting public, while quietly telling large institutional investors another story. And to add insult to injury NASDAQ had such huge headaches processing all the buy, sell and cancellation orders that they now admit the whole IPO was an unmitigated disaster.
So once again its heads, the banks win, and tails, you lose.
I can only add this to the mounting list of evidence against the too-big-to-fail and too-big-to-jail banksters and sigh in disgust.
If you’re wondering why a foreclosure defense attorney is up-in-arms about a stock offering, it is because the same shady tactics that have led homeowners to my office are the same ones on display here. (more…)
Jamie Dimon’s heart-to-heart with his shareholders lasted a whopping 50 minutes on Tuesday. Apparently that was all the time he felt he needed to trot out the same apology speech he gave on Meet the Press, and then duck for cover.
And surprise surprise, nothing changed. Dimon held onto his dual roles as chairman and CEO, as I fully expected he would.
To the shareholders credit, they didn’t take this lying down. They challenged his role as a member of the New York Federal Reserve. They kept the heat on Dimon for Chase’s role in the mortgage servicing fiasco.
But Dimon’s responses were cursory at best, a brush off no different than the ones homeowners have gotten from Chase. They were hardly worth the price of admission.
Now I’m no conspiracy theorist, but clearly Chase held back this information about their $2 billion oops until after all the votes were in. That is clear.
Dimon may be saying the right things in public, but his actions clearly show that he is doing everything possible to downplay this loss. But if it goes unchecked, it could be a harbinger of even BIGGER losses.
Every consumer needs to a long hard look at the the way these banks do business and the interwoven relationship between these banks and our government. Not only are these banks too big to fail, but Dimon himself has become too big to fail in his own right. (more…)
He called it an “egregious mistake”. He claims he want to get rid of “Too Big To Fail”, and that he supported “portions” of the Dodd-Frank rule.
It might be one of the best acting performances I’ve seen all year. I think his chances of taking home an Oscar are all but guaranteed.
Maybe he had David Gregory fooled, (The NBC host’s lack of tough follow-up questions would seem to indicate it) but I am not buying it.
The reality is had JP Morgan not lobbied so hard against Dodd-Frank, and paid the lobbyists as much as they did, Dodd-Frank would have been much, much tougher, and Dimon would have $2 billion more in his coiffures.
It’s irony in its purest form.
This loss, which came on some very risky trades, is a perfect symbol of Wall Street’s hubris and greed. And it just goes to show you that the big banks have learned nothing from the crisis of years past.
And neither has Dimon. His apology on Meet The Press was the vocal equivalent of crocodile tears. He is another Chameleon, another Two-Face, putting on a public show for the masses, while privately lambasting anyone who is really looking to end “Too Big To Fail” when he thinks we are not paying attention. (more…)
How else can you explain your half-hearted apology over JP Morgan’spart in the robosigning scandal?
The CEO of JP Morgan Chase made some efforts towards reconciliation in his annual letter to shareholders, which is now out for all to see.
But it’s clear that Jamie Dimon is still delusional and suffers a full blown case of pass-the-buck disease, for which, apparently, there is no cure.
In the section titled “The Mortgage Business — The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”(He should have just left out the first two) Dimon admits to JP Morgan Chase’s shareholders that his companies ‘servicing operations left a lot to be desired’
He adds his company ‘made too many mistakes’ and that the it was ‘not our finest hour’.
What’s sarcasm!
Let’s be honest, it was your worst hour and your lasting legacy.
Here’s the problem Mr. Dimon. You didn’t just make a mistake. If I forget to buy milk on the way home, that’s a mistake. Your company, your officers and your top executives all suborned fraud forgery and perjury, all federal crimes.
Robosigning was more that just, as you put it, ‘paperwork errors’.
Everyone from the tippy-top of your company on down, encouraged this kind of illegal activity to happen, in fact it became part of the operating procedures of your company! You just farmed it out.
Why not just own up to the homeowners, the taxpayers and your shareholders. You’ve been caught with your hand in the cookie jar, I can still see the bruise. (more…)
It was HUD’s investigation that helped lead to the settlement in the first place.
The settlement is hundreds and hundreds of pages. Most of the audits were around 10 pages long. Yet there is more harsh truth about how far the banks went to rob people of their homes in those select pages than in the entire settlement.
So what’s in these audits that is so damning?
Facts. Numbers. Witness Statements. And just how far the banks went keep the lid on how pervasive robosigning was
In other words, plenty to make your skin crawl. There’s no whitewashing here.
In Bank of America’s case, their attorneys interfered with HUD’s investigation, refusing to allow some of their employees to answer questions, sometimes stopping them mid-sentence.
Ally Financial’s attorneys made 18 current employees plead the fifth and blocked them from talking to investigators. (more…)
Like the characters in "The Blair Witch Project", the banks are running scared!
Well what a wild week it has been. When we came to work on Monday we feared President Obama would put the housing crisis to bed without ever holding the banks’ feet to the fire.
The settlement with the banks, which we have blogged about ad nauseam this week, seemed as sure as a chip-shot field goal.
But thanks to President Obama’s suddenly get-tough approach, as evidenced by his State of the Union speech, we’ve seen the banks’ kick go wide-right and now all bets are off.
Can There Be Real Change In Mortgage Industry?
Now we are not completely sold that things will play out exactly as homeowners would like, this is of course the federal government we’re talking about, but for the first time we have a true sense of optimism. The President may finally be seeing things our way, and we want to throw our full support behind him.
There is no doubt cages have been rattled in the mortgage industry, and nerves have been frayed. If Obama’s plan to re-write the foreclosure rules didn’t have some kind of teeth, then we doubt we’d be seeing the type of reverberation thorough the media and the top echelons of government that we’ve detected in the last few days.
Banks Are Fearful of Settlement Collapse
The settlement could be falling apart at the seems, at least JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon thinks so. He told CNBC this morning that Obama’s announcement to investigate the packaging and servicing of mortgage loans could stop the settlement cold. (more…)
It is not just the daily news, it is the hourly news. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are reporting multiple stories daily about the unfolding developments and ramifications of the recent suspensions by four major companies that service mortgages and how this crisis will undoubtedly slow the housing recovery.
Roy Oppenheim wrote a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal in response to its The Politics of Foreclosure editorial that ran Saturday, October 9th. Oppenheim’s letter pointed out how the opinion article missed a number of significant legal, as well as macro-economic issues, that South Florida Law Blog will post if it is not printed by The Wall Street Journal.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article: Foreclosures, Forestalled by reporter Robbie Whelan discusses the cause and effect this moratorium could have on the housing recovery.
Here is an excerpt:
Consumer advocates say the judicial process gives consumers a better chance to work out their problems. But Florida’s court system is so overwhelmed with foreclosures that last year it began calling judges out of retirement to handle hundreds of foreclosure cases a day in a forum that became known as the “rocket docket.”
“Irresponsible banks need to be held accountable, but if we have not found a problem with a bank’s process we do not believe that we should impose a moratorium where that can hurt the market and hurt individual buyers,” said Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development. (more…)
I foolishly hoped the Facebook IPO might actually bring some confidence back to Wall Street.
