Masters of the Universe category archive

The headline said:

Dozens arrested at Bank of America offices

I turned hopefully to the story and read:

Police have arrested two dozen protesters for trespassing during a demonstration against Bank of America’s foreclosure practices at the banking giant’s offices in downtown Boston.

Why do I have this creepy feeling that the cops are arresting the wrong damned people?

Last night, one less master of the universe:

First International Bank, Plano, Texas

Another gambling addict teeters on the brink.

Morgan Stanley (MS), which owns the world’s largest retail brokerage, is being priced in the credit- default swaps market as less creditworthy than most U.S., U.K. and French banks and as risky as Italy’s biggest lenders.

The cost of buying the swaps, or CDS, which offer protection against a default of New York-based Morgan Stanley’s debt for five years, has surged to 456 basis points, or $456,000, for every $10 million of debt insured, from 305 basis points on Sept. 15, according to prices provided by London-based CMA. Italy’s Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (ISP) has CDS trading at 405 basis points, and UniCredit SpA (UCG) at 424, the data show. A basis point is one-hundredth of a percent.

I have difficulty feeling sympathy for a three-card monte dealer.

Live by the credit default swap, die by the credit default swap.

Your altruistic “job creators” at work:

The ConocoPhillips oil refinery in Trainer, Pa. may be closed within months if the company does not find a buyer.

In an announcement on Tuesday morning, the company said it is seeking a buyer for the 185,000 barrel-per-day facility.

ConocoPhillips said it will immediately being the process of idling the facility and will “permanently close the plant in six months if a sales transaction is unsuccessful.”

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

At Bloomberg, Jonathan Weil argues that the government of Switzerland must bail out the bonuses of the UBS bonus babies.

His argument boils down to this: If the geniuses who have run the banking industry into the ground, along with the international economy (persons labeled by Weil as the “best and the brightest”), don’t get their bonuses, they might go work somewhere else.

In other words: They work for a bank. Therefore they know what they are doing.

This is hardly persuasive; it is, indeed, wankery of the highest order.

Nothing in the banksters’ performance indicates that they are the best at anything or the brightest in anywhere.

Their exit to other employment, employment for which that have demonstrated expertise (perhaps administering ball-toss games at carnivals in the parking lots of your local Catholic Churches) would likely benefit the economy and the society.

Atrios cuts to the quick:

It isn’t a debt crisis, it’s a lending crisis. Nobody put a gun to their heads and made them lend the money.

A buyer’s market, if the buyer still has a job:

In fact, this home had been listed this year for $1.2 million – about $100,000 more than its 2004 purchase price, but perhaps unrealistic for the post-boom housing market, said Sona Shah of Prudential Towne Realty in Chesapeake.

Shortly after the Desais asked several friends and real estate agents to be on the lookout for a well-priced, well-equipped abode, Shah presented this newly bank-owned property in Chesapeake’s Emerald Greens community.

Intrigued by the $608,900 asking price, the Desais had to view it. They decided that day to make an offer.

Shall the circle be unbroken?

TCF National Bank is suing a firm it hired to appraise nearly 3,000 homes.

In a federal lawsuit filed in Minneapolis, TCF alleges Market Intelligence Inc. of Milford, Mass., improperly inflated the value of the residential properties the bank was financing. One of the services Market Intelligence provided was a field assessment, or a drive-by inspection.

The bank, of course, had no responsibility in this.

The FDIC is dining close to home tonight:

Bank of the Commonwealth, Norfolk, Virginia

Citizens Bank of Northern California, Nevada City, California

Also, the local rag gave about a 54 pt. headline to the failure of the Bank of the Commonwealth, as if bank failures have not been weekly occurrences since the bursting of the Bushonomics Bubble.

Maybe this has something to do with why Georgia leads the list in failed banks:

Thirty percent of all Georgia homes are underwater, CoreLogic estimates, and the number in metro Atlanta is higher, with nearly 35 percent of mortgages showing negative equity. Those percentages have crept up about a point since the beginning of 2010.

The Republican fuss over social security has one goal and one goal only: Using the social security fund to fund Wall Street’s gambling ambition.

Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

Indicators for the foreclosure-industry continue to look promising.

The banksters have created a new growth industry, promising jobs for hundreds of process servers and robosigners:

The number of local home-owners who were “underwater” on their loans rose to 83,542 at the end of June, according to CoreLogic, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based company that tracks mortgages nationwide. The number is up 4.2 percent from the roughly 80,150 who were underwater at the end of March.

The firm’s quarterly report forecast that 22,759 more mortgages in the region would be underwater if home prices declined 5 percent from current levels.

After pointing out that “speedup” refers to practices designed to wring more work for less money from employees (think Lucy in the candy factory), Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery point out that calling it “productivity increases” doesn’t make it any less insidious. Employees give the productivity and employers keep the increases.

A snippet:

Now the word we use is “productivity,” and pundits across the political spectrum revel in the fact that year after year, American companies are wringing more value out of their employees than they did the year before. Just counting work that’s on the books (never mind those 11 p.m. e-mails), we now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans. Worldwide, almost everyone except Americans has, at least on paper, a right to at least one day a week off, paid vacation time and paid maternity leave.

Sure, but we all have to do more with less — employers struggling to survive the downturn are just tightening their belts, right? That’s true for some. But in the big picture, the data show a more insidious pattern. After a sharp dip in 2008 and ’09, U.S. economic output quickly recovered to near pre-recession levels. The United States did better than most of its fellow G-7 economies. But U.S. workers didn’t see the benefit: During the recession, far more people here lost their jobs than anywhere else, and far fewer were hired back once the recovery began. And who knows what will happen now that the economy has made another downward turn?

Everything is just fine, thank you.

Sales of foreclosures and other distressed properties stoked the South Hampton Roads housing market last month, according to a report released Friday.

Nearly 1 of every 3 homes sold in August – 29 percent – were in foreclosure or sold for less than what the homeowner owed last month, reported Real Estate Information Network Inc. That’s up from 25 percent a year ago.

Also I missed one dustbiting bank that got blanked last night:

The First National Bank of Florida, Milton, Florida

No doubt it didn’t diversify its portfolio with enough foreclosures.

Like Crabby Appleton, the American banking industry appears to be rotten to the core.

The problem of shoddy mortgage paperwork, which comprises several shortcuts known collectively as “robo-signing,” led the nation’s largest banks, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., and other lenders to temporarily halt foreclosures nationwide last fall.

At the time, robo-signing was thought to be contained to the affidavits that banks file when a mortgage is issued and somebody buys a house. The documents are used to prove they have the right to foreclose if the homeowner isn’t making mortgage payments. Companies that process mortgages said they were so overwhelmed with paperwork that they cut corners.

But now, as county officials review years’ worth of mortgage paperwork, in some cases combing through one page at a time, they are finding suspect signatures — either signed with the same name by dozens of different people, improperly notarized or signed without a review of the facts in the paperwork — on all sorts of mortgage documents, dating as far back as 1998, The Associated Press has found.

One would expect that, sooner or later, the FDIC would run out of banks to close.

Looks like later.

CreekSide Bank, Woodstock, Georgia

Patriot Bank of Georgia, Cumming, Georgia

Last week, Fresh Air interviewed Frank Partnoy, a Wall Street veteran who is now a professor on the growth, power, and functioning of the investment ratings agencies. Here is a nugget from the transcript:

I don’t think any other industry has companies that have consistently done their job as poorly, and yet the paradox is that they have remained powerful even in recent weeks.

Follow the first link to listen or the second to read the transcript.

Facing South reports on the depredations of big coal. A nugget:

WKYT visited the home of Calvin and Denise Howard on Big Branch Road, where the Howards reported that the water, which runs orange and black, burned their skin when they bathed. They also said that Excel Mining, the operator of a nearby coal mine, had offered to install a water filtration system — but only if the residents signed a liability waiver.

The Howards refused the company’s offer — and when WKYT checked back in July, the flames that had been just about to the top of the well were shooting out at least a foot and a half.

Since then, the Howards have filed a lawsuit [pdf] over the contamination. In addition, environmental advocates have gotten involved, arranging for the delivery this week of clean water to 13 area families amid inaction by the company and state environmental regulators.

Unregulated industry at work.

Bloomberg reports that banks are falling down on the job and not foreclosing quickly enough.

Consequently, condo associations are suing banks to live up to their obligations to foreclose because the associations are suffering from vacancies and the loss of condo fees from deliquent homeowners.

Words fail me.