It’s time to call them out once more. Not for another column, but rather, a lack of one.
In October 2010 their column“The Politics of Foreclosure” made light of the plight many of my clients have undergone, and shrunk the foreclosure crisis down to a mere inconvenience for a few Washington insiders.
And as the crisis grew wider and wider, and the expansiveness of the banks fraud became even more apparent,The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Boardcontinued to be a haven for outdated ideas, protection of the status quo and disgust for anyone trying to do good by the American homeowner.
I found it disturbingly amusing that a settlement that was basically little more than a public spanking for the banks angered them so. The settlement didn’t land a single banking executive in jail, yet the columnists at The Wall Street Journal still treat the banks as the victims in the housing crisis.
The crisis, you know that the banks basically created.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board still believes the banks didn’t illegally foreclose on a single homeowner, something I personally know not to be true.
Either their editorial board is remarkably stupid or just ignorant.
And so I shouldn’t be all that surprised that they have been silent after the Department of Housing and Urban Developmentreleased auditsthat laid out how pervasive the culture of fraud was amongst our nation’s lenders. (more…)
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the economy at Shaker Heights High School,Shaker Heights, Ohio, Jan. 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
We really haven’t seen President Obama insert himself directly into the housing crisis, but there are rumblings that he may do just that during Tuesday’s State of The Union address.
The fact is that is what homeowners have been clamoring for. A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found 58% of Americans want the government to do more to help people keep homes.
According to HousingWire, Ohio senator Sherrod Brown told reporters today that there was evidence that Obama would address the robo-signing case which involves several major banks. A North Carolina congressman even said there were rumours that Obama would announce a settlement, something HUD secretary Shaun Donovan suggested last week was ‘very close’, as we mentioned in our Week In Review on Friday.
For the record, Obama’s press secretary refused to confirm any details, saying only that the President was “focused on the issue of housing”.
Between Dononvan’s comments and the recent white paper sent out by the Federal Reserve, it seems that more and more top government officials are finally realizing how important the housing market is to our economic recovery, not to mention their own political survival.
In the Huffington Post last September, Roy Oppenheim called housing the “thousand pound gorilla in the room” in the 2012 election, as many of the states with the highest underwater mortgages, such asFlorida, are also key electoral swing states. The pressure on Obama to be more aggressive on the banks is growing in Washington, and it’s about time. (more…)
Word on the street is credit rating companies are committing mortgage fraud, and ‘the street’ is none other than Wall Street.
With a foreclosure fraud financial crisis this intense and prolific, there’s certainly enough blame to go around for everyone, but we have one more culprit to add to the list! News broke this week that the SEC is investigating and considering civil fraud charges against credit rating companies for their role as “key enablers” of our country’s financial meltdown.
Critics of the leading credit rating companies like Standard and Poor’s argue that these firms fueled the $1 trillion Wall Street mortgage-securities machine before the boom ended.
Regulators, however, should not be free from blame: there is clear evidence of incompetence and deliberate neglect by the SEC in keeping credit rating companies in line. The fact is that credit rating companies and the SEC itself have served as co-conspirators with Wall Street banks to bury us in this seemingly insurmountable hole.
According to the Wall Street Journal, SEC officials are finally investigating whether the ratings companies committed fraud by failing to do enough research to be able to adequately rate the pools of subprime mortgages and other loans that underpinned mortgage-backed securities.
Allegations continue to swirl that the credit rating companies relied on incomplete or out-of-date information about the pools of loans in the mortgage-backed securities or ignored obvious problems among subprime loans to give unduly high ratings to slices of deals, known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), that were then sold to investors. (more…)
In an era in which almost every bank on Wall Street was entangled in financial scandal, millions of Americans are left in an impoverished hole and billions of dollars in wealth has been destroyed, no one has been held accountable.
Today’s article highlights a corrupt government culture in many of the agencies that were supposed to protect Americans from banks like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Particularly, there is a glaring problem at the SEC where a revolving door that sends government employees out into to private practice and then back to the government, blurring loyalties and breeding distortion.
And Wall Street’s punishment for their brazen schemes and artificial financial boom? According to Taibbi: “carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing.”
Americans who sense two sets of laws in this country are completely correct. One set has developed for the masses, and a second special set of rules exists for the wealthy and powerful. This is not the America many of us remember growing up in.
Join Oppenheim Law next Wednesday, March 9 at 6 PM as Roy Oppenheim discusses how the aftermath of Wall Street’s greed is still affecting homeowners across the country and what you can do to pull yourself out of the hole the banks created.
Tomorrow, we will examine the perspective of arguably the poster child of Wall Street greed with Bernie Madoff’s jailhouse interview.
The tides turned from mortgage crisis to foreclosure financial crisis in October 2010. Florida Attorney Roy Oppenheim made the call three days before the bank fraud story broke in the Wall Street Journal. He reflected on that day with leading Asset Protection Attorney Douglass Lodmell in a recent interview on the talk show “Mind of Money.”
On September 28th at a Florida Assets Protection seminar, Oppenheim predicted: “In the next 72 hours the news you are about to hear, not about the mortgage crisis, but what will be called the foreclosure crisis will make most attorneys in this country question what they learned in law school and why they became lawyers.”
“It’s the tip of a very ugly iceberg,” Oppenheim says about the foreclosure crisis
“The crisis has moved from the debtors to the banks. It’s the repercussions of the banks not playing fair–basically cheating with sloppy and fraudulent paperwork including backdated affidavits, forgeries, and notary fraud.”
While yes, banks did this to try to cut corners, what the banks actually did was cut the corners of the Constitution. Banks were missing essential documentation and denying homeowners of their fundamental constitutional rights.
Is 2012 the bottom of the market? Not yet. Most economics are saying in 2019 the homeowners will still owe more than what their homes are worth, considering the banks currently have 107 months worth of inventory in foreclosure.
Millions of people have been illegally foreclosed or are in the process of being foreclosed. The bottom line: banks did not have the right to bring these foreclosures and homeowners now have the ability to push back. (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…)
Over a year ago I felt compelled to call out The Wall Street Journal after a particular column really got under my skin.
