Masters of the Universe category archive

Job prospects for process servers still look bright in Florida:

One in 32 homes in the Sunshine State faced foreclosure last year, more than double the national average. That equates to nearly 280,000 homes receiving a notice of default, bank auction or repossession.

Though statewide home sales are up and prices are on the rise, the widespread glut of unpaid mortgages continues to beat back a full recovery.

Florida wrested the top dishonor from Nevada, which had posted the highest state foreclosure rate for five years in a row, RealtyTrac vice president Daren Blomquist said. Nevada had the second-highest rate last year and Arizona came in third.

The legacy of the banksters continues, with interest (paid by you, not by them).

Via Bartcop.

Just when I think that regular bank failures might be passe, the FDIC proves me wrong.

Bank no more on

Westside Community Bank, University Place, Washington

What you see may not be what you get. Case in point:

Makedonsky’s tale is just one buyer-beware among many in the digital age, when reams of distressed and bank-owned properties are added daily to online auction sites, making the business of vulturing real estate cheaper and more accessible. The flipside: Establishing clear title and control of the home, which some cash buyers have never set foot in, can mean sorting through a thicket of foreclosure filings, fraud allegations, bankruptcies, other mortgages, association liens, creditors and combative tenants.

“People don’t realize there’s a lot more to it than ponying up some money,” said Dennis Donet, a Miami foreclosure defense attorney.

. . . this is why they are called “banksters.”

Switzerland’s oldest bank is to close permanently after pleading guilty in a New York court to helping Americans evade their taxes.

Wegelin, which was established in 1741, has also agreed to pay $57.8m (£36m; 44m euros) in fines to US authorities.

It said that once this was completed, it “will cease to operate as a bank”.

The bank had admitted to allowing more than 100 American citizens to hide $1.2bn from the Internal Revenue Service for almost 10 years.

Morgan-Stanley’s three-card monte with the the Zuckerboard’s IPO:

Morgan Stanley’s handling of Facebook Inc.’s (FB) initial public offering, a deal that cost investors billions of dollars, broke a decade-old pledge to block investment bankers from influencing analysts, according to Massachusetts regulators, who fined the bank $5 million.

A senior Morgan Stanley banker wrote a script that Facebook’s then-treasurer used to update research analysts on the company’s revenue outlook before the IPO, according to a settlement document with Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin. He faulted Morgan Stanley for dishonesty, ethics violations and failing to supervise employees — the first regulatory claims to stem from the bank’s handling of the deal.

More on how the banksters master the universe at the link.

From Crooks and Liars:

The banking giant HSBC has escaped indictment for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda. Despite evidence of wrongdoing, the U.S. Department of Justice has allowed the bank to avoid prosecution and pay a $1.9 billion fine. No top HSBC officials will face charges, either.

(snip)

“You can do real time in jail in America for all kinds of ridiculous offenses,” Taibbi says. “Here we have a bank that laundered $800 million of drug money, and they can’t find a way to put anybody in jail for that. That sends an incredible message, not just to the financial sector but to everybody. It’s an obvious, clear double standard, where one set of people gets to break the rules as much as they want and another set of people can’t break any rules at all without going to jail.”

Until the suits start going to jail and trade in their suits for jumpsuits, this stuff will not stop.

Read the rest.

Just when we were losing faith, another bank fails, restoring our opinion of the wisdom and efficacy of our Galtian overlords.

Bank no more on

Community Bank of the Ozarks, Sunrise Beach, Missouri

At Asia Times, Steve Fraser analyzes the banksters’ looting of America:

And yet the pit exists. It goes by the name of “austerity”. However, it didn’t just appear in time for the last election season or the lame-duck session of congress to follow. It was dug more than a generation ago, and has been getting wider and deeper ever since. Millions of people have long made it their home. “Debtpocalypse” is merely the latest installment in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the dispossession of American working people.

Think of it as the archeology of decline, or a tale of two worlds. As a long generation of austerity politics hollowed out the heartland, the quants and traders and financial wizards of Wall Street gobbled up ever more of the nation’s resources. It was another Great Migration – instead of people, though, trillions of dollars were being sucked out of industrial America and turned into “financial instruments” and new, exotic forms of wealth. If blue-collar Americans were the particular victims here, then high finance is what consumed them. Now, it promises to consume the rest of us.

Another tale illustrating the marvelous magic of fee market capitalism.

Accusing a local trustee of engaging in a “feeding frenzy,” an appeals court justice Thursday expressed outrage over a case that has brought widespread attention to excessive fees plundering the estates of elderly and disabled adults.

Private estate manager Thomas Thorpe of Los Gatos charged a brain-injured San Jose man $108,771 after just 4½ months’ work — and then billed him more than twice that much in a legal battle to defend his fees.

“What did he contribute to the whole process? For the $100,000, could you give me one example?” Justice Franklin Elia demanded of Thorpe’s attorney, Ellyn Nesbit. “Give me a $20,000 example!”

At the rate Thorpe and his lawyers were running up bills in 2010, Elia said, there would soon be nothing left of 37-year-old Danny Reed’s $653,000 in life savings.

On this week’s Le Show, Harry Shearer and his guest, Nick Shaxson (author of Treasure Islands: Dirty Money, Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole Your Cash), discuss tax havens, how they grow and what they do.

My two or three Delaware readers might be interested in the bit at about the 50 minute mark, where the conversation turns to Wilmington, Delaware, and its blocks full of secretive banksters.

Give it a listen.

Better still, put Harry Shearer’s Le Show in your podcatcher and listen to it every week.

If they want your house, they will just take it.

. . . as the 54-year-old Mableton woman stood in her foyer one October afternoon, she could hardly believe what she was reading. It was an eviction notice and offer to give her as much as $3,000 if she quietly moved out of the house she built with her husband in 1999. Just leave the keys, the letter from law firm Pendergast & Associates said.

In the coming weeks, the state would wire CitiMortgage, the servicer for her loan, at least $13,000 to make Long’s mortgage current. But unbeknownst to the state or Long, Citi had already foreclosed, despite reaching an agreement with the program, known as Homesafe Georgia.

In this case, after a long struggle, the state got the bank to back down.

This is called “working with the customer.”

“Private equity” is buying up houses in Sacramento.

An investment firm that owns the Waldorf Astoria hotel and the Weather Channel has bought more than 500 houses in Sacramento in the past few months, betting upward of $60 million that home prices will rise.

Blackstone, a New York-based group with billions of dollars in investments and offices from London to Tokyo, has been snapping up low-priced homes across the region, from Elk Grove to Citrus Heights, at a rate of about 40 a week.

The article continues for 1500 words of speculation that amount to “this is unprecedented and no one knows what it implies.”

I believe it implies that they are betting on the return of the bubble.

In the meantime, they’ll find some way to give themselves bonuses for being such awesome masters of the universe, until the whole thing collapses into a pile of Twinkies with the cream sucked out of them, as by a giant vampire squid.

The Inky has a long story about a survey that reveals that homeowners in financial trouble are more willing to go to foreclosure than ever before. They no longer consider foreclosure an unforgivable financial sin.

The column theorizes several reasons: so many persons are in foreclosure that it has lost much of its stigma; persons have been stuck with houses so far underwater that they cannot sell them to pay off the loan; and so on. A mild undercurrent of oh! the horror runs through the article.

Buried in the middle is what I suspect is a key reason:

Matthew Hars, managing director of Varick Capital, a real estate advisory and investment firm, and Manhattan Spaces, a residential broker in New York, says that one reason for the increased acceptability of strategic default is consumer distrust.

Consumers have developed a deep resentment of financial institutions, he says, which they perceive as not dealing in good faith with distressed borrowers. “In this case, the rationale is that it’s okay to default if a lender won’t work with a borrower to right size a loan that’s upside down,” Hars says. They think “it’s the lender’s fault, because of their refusal to write down some of the principal balance, which they’re going to have to do anyway in a foreclosure.”

He left out the part about

“Consumers have developed a deep resentment of financial institutions” because, in the quest for sales commissions and mortgages to “securitize,” they pursued and made dodgy loans–ARMs, “liars’ loans,” no down payment loans–to persons in weak financial circumstances for undeserving properties, then turned around and crashed the market, leaving their loan customers holding the bag.

Persons who have been abused, once they realize they have been abused, have no loyalty to the abuser.

Thom takes on job creationism believer, Neal Asbury, host of “Truth for America.”

From the website:

We’ve seen a lot of so-called “job creators” announce layoffs since the election. They say they can’t afford to pay for their employees health insurance. But that’s not the reality.