Masters of the Universe category archive

After a short interruption, the FDIC has resumed its series honoring our banking community for its integrity and responsible fiscal-ness.

Attempting to consolidate its hold on the position of the state with the most banks on the FDIC’s leader loser board, comes now Georgia.

These banks won’t be around for the rapture.

Atlantic Southern Bank, Macon, Georgia

First Georgia Banking Company, Franklin, Georgia

Later:

And the last entrant of the day:

Summit Bank, Burlington, Washington

Writing at Bloomberg, economist and professor William K. Black considers the price of coddling bankster crime. A nugget:

The defining characteristic of crony capitalism is the ability of favored elites to loot with impunity and the failure of regulators to do their jobs.

We have seen this in the financial crisis that started in 2008 and in an earlier era, when the savings-and-loan industry collapsed.

In the Texas “Rent-a-Bank” scandal of the 1970s, for example, two ringleaders created a fraud network of 50 lenders that caused billions of dollars in losses. The watchdogs removed and sanctioned one of the main culprits, but because the crimes weren’t prosecuted, the same crooks reappeared in the 1980s to do it all over again, only on a bigger scale. Unless you imprison the fraudsters, sophisticated financial scams grow ever more destructive.

It seems as if we have forgotten this lesson.

Read the whole thing.

It’s doing quite nicely, thank you.

Foreclosures are continuing apace, while shoddy bankster behavior contributes to reduced unemployment amongst lawyers and court personnel:

House prices are falling again, forcing more homeowners “underwater” — owing more than their house is worth. Lenders’ shoddy document practices have brought widespread court challenges, slowing the process and leaving millions of homeowners in limbo.

And the foreclosure crisis continues to weigh heavily on the fragile economy.

“Right now, it’s the second-biggest drag on the economy after the surge in oil prices,” said Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.

Already some 5 million homes have been lost to foreclosure; estimates of future foreclosures range widely. Zandi, who has followed the mortgage mess since the housing market began to crack in 2006, figures foreclosures will strike another three million homes in the next three or four years.

Much more at the link.

H/T Karen for the link.

And the FDIC starts its weekly trip to the West Coast, smiting banksters along the way:

Coastal Bank, Coco Beach, Florida

Aside: Cocoa Beach always makes me think of I Dream of Jeanie. Guess the magic’s gone out . . . .

On this week’s Le Show, Harry Shearer interviews Bill Black, one of the men who untangled the Savings and Loan frauds in the 1990s, on the mechanisms by which the banksters corrupted the home mortgage industry and the mortgage process and crashed our economy–and why no one has gone to jail.

They examine how the pay structure for the bankster bonus babies and deregulation of mortgage banks in particular and of the securities industry in general both allowed and encouraged CEOs of banks to make the biggest bad loans they could as fast as they could, so that they could take the money and leave the mortgage investors (read: the people who bought the mortgage-backed insecurities) holding their empty bags of air.

Here are just two quotes I caught:

The anti-regulators cost 10 million Americans their jobs and 10 million others the ability to work full-time, and they did so by creating an environment that . . . was an open invitation to fraud.

The Mortgage Bankers Association is the trade association of the perps . . . . (The bankers were) looting bankruptcy for profit.

Go listen.

The FDIC had mostly Southern cooking last night:

The Park Avenue Bank, Valdosta, Georgia


First Choice Community Bank, Dallas, Georgia

Cortez Community Bank, Brooksville, Florida

First National Bank of Central Florida, Winter Park, Florida

Community Central Bank, Mount Clemens, Michigan

In pictures.

Take over cities and sell them to the highest bidder, while making the rich richer and punishing the poor for being poor.

Via Bob Cesca, who has more.

From Dick Destiny:

. . . you hear things like this.

The disclosure Friday that a federal grand jury is investigating Bank of the Commonwealth and some of its current and former officers and directors could dampen investor interest and make it much more challenging for the bank to raise capital for its survival, individuals familiar with the financial markets said Monday.

Let’s look at the assumption in it:

The investigation, not the evidence of misconduct which led to the investigation, is held responsible for the bank’s troubles.

There’s something upside down and backwards about that kind of reasoning.

The FDIC has not yet exhausted the supply of responsible fiscals to honor by taking away their business licences.

Two more banks shot (and it’s still early yet):

New Horizons Bank, East Ellijay, Georgia

Bartow County Bank, Cartersville, Georgia

Second Round:

Rosemount National Bank, Rosemount, Minnesota
Superior Bank, Birmingham, Alabama
Nexity Bank, Birmingham, Alabama

Nexity?

And finally

Heritage Banking Group, Carthage, Mississippi

Aside:

The Bugs Bunny cartoons used to feature the Last National Bank. At the time, they thought it was a humorous concept.

Derrick Z. Jackson on our modern robber barons and how they, with the aid of the Republican Party, are benefiting from the panic depression recession:

The only people being saved are the wealthy.

While unemployment remains at close to 9 percent, the average salaries for CEOs at 200 of America’s largest companies rose 20 percent, to $11.7 million, according to the New York Times. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that CEO bonuses at 50 major corporations rose 30.5 percent last year, the biggest gain in three years, to an average bonus of $2.5 million.

(snip)

Then income for the wealthy roared back full circle. The share for the top 10 percent was back up to 45.6 percent in 2008. For the top 1 percent, it was back up to 18.3 percent in 2007. All signs point to these shares breaking the records of the 1920s and ’30s. In an email, Saez (Emmanuel Saez of the University of California–ed.) said, “I expect top income shares to be going up sharply in the near future . . . With a split Republican/Democrat, Congress/administration, it does not look like the government will take drastic policy steps to change this trend in the medium run (such as more progressive taxation, or stringent regulations).

Follow the link to get even more panic and depression.

The masters’ strategy to fuel housing sales by reselling houses taken from their previous owners seems to be working most splendidly, thank you.

Real Estate Information Network Inc. reported that 1,090 homes sold last month in the area, up 56.4 percent from February and 13.2 percent from a year ago. Three of every seven homes sold – or 43 percent – were bank-owned or were sold for less than the seller owed on the mortgage.

That is the highest volume of foreclosures sales on record, up from 42 percent in February.

While I was trying to get CentOS to dual boot with Slackware last night, the FDIC was honoring the American Banking Community by debanking more of its responsible fiscals.

The debanked:

Nevada Commerce Bank, Las Vegas, Nevada

Western Springs National Bank and Trust, Western Springs, Illinois

And here I thought the FDIC was running out of fodder.

Joselph Stiglitz explains. More at the link.

The consequences of the Japanese earthquake – especially the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant – resonate grimly for observers of the American financial crash that precipitated the Great Recession. Both events provide stark lessons about risks, and about how badly markets and societies can manage them.

Of course, in one sense, there is no comparison between the tragedy of the earthquake – which has left more than 25,000 people dead or missing – and the financial crisis, to which no such acute physical suffering can be attributed. But when it comes to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, there is a common theme in the two events.

Experts in both the nuclear and finance industries assured us that new technology had all but eliminated the risk of catastrophe. Events proved them wrong: not only did the risks exist, but their consequences were so enormous that they easily erased all the supposed benefits of the systems that industry leaders promoted.

Afterthought:

My friend watched this last night while I was at my meeting and found it astounding.

I burned out on 60 Minutes a long time ago.

Afterthought 2:

But I’ve been following this story. Nothing in it surprised me.

Via Atrios.

Holy Bat Cave, Batman:

Neighbors living near a bat-infested Georgia home in foreclosure are trying to figure out what to do about the flying mammals.

They say the smell outside is so overwhelming they can’t sit on their porches and enjoy the spring weather.

A pest-control company has assessed the situation and sent a letter regarding options to the responsible fiscals at the bank that owns the property.

Why am I thinking they would have better luck opening a guano factory?

Gosh.

Just when I was starting to think the FDIC had run out of banks to close in honor of the integrity and acumen of our responsible fiscals, they find another one:

The Bank of Commerce, Wood Dale, Illinois

No doubt the government will invoke sovereign impunity immunity:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was sued by eight of indicted financier R. Allen Stanford’s investors, who claim regulators’ negligence and misconduct caused their losses.

The investors, in a lawsuit filed yesterday in federal court in Dallas, said regulators should have investigated Stanford earlier and detected what the agency later concluded was a “massive” Ponzi scheme.