Today, the SEC announced fraud charges against a third banker for selling worthless and non-existent mortgages to Colonial Bank, leading to its collapse. This is on the heels said executive confessing to conspiracy and being sentenced to 30 years in prison. Most reporting on “mortgage fraud” centers on one of two themes: Joe Average knew perfectly well he couldn’t afford the house and lied to get the mortgage in the first place; or robosigning was a just an unfortunate oversight...

Tuesday, the President said we don’t need a moratorium on foreclosures. Indeed, the statement said the administration was concerned about unintended consequences. Wednesday, the states rendered his opinion irrelevant. Forty states — no, 49! — no, all 50!* — state Attorneys General have opened investigations into mortgage fraud. It should surprise nobody if one of the first things those investigations do is halt pending foreclosures. Ally has joined Bank of America in voluntarily...

/// This can effect you greatly, in terms of refinancing or buying new home/ or if Feds decide to ‘nationalize’ your home loan. Ed.dr.e /// Unfortunately, some observers suspected that the conference — currently underway — might be biased against homeowners and advocates for affordable housing. As a bit of background, remember that in addition to the ongoing foreclosure and real estate valuation crisis, homebuilder confidence is sinking and mortgage backed bonds are slumping....

Among states having a Primary election today is Nevada. Nevada voters were faced with two big decisions today in addition to a couple dozen local level races. The electronic ballot in some precincts was 9 pages long. While the nation has one eye on our race, it turns out that the majority of Nevadans won’t even bother showing up at the polls. The headline star of the show here and across the country is of course the race for United States Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid has been a fixture...

Finance Minister Naoto Kan has been nominated to lead the Democratic Party of Japan, and is expected to be confirmed as the new Prime Minister within hours. His predecessor, Yukio Hatayama, only held the post for 8 months before his resignation on Wednesday. Kan has already gone on record as saying he cannot fix Japan’s problems overnight, but nevertheless Japanese stocks and the Nikkei index are expected to rise on the news. It is hoped that his administration will be “pragmatic.”...

It was 30 years ago today. A huge ash cloud moved across the country over the following days, reminding anyone who cared to look up what had happened. Many considered it a disaster. People had died. Property was just plain gone. After all, a forest had been destroyed. Surely life would never get back to normal with the ecosystem blown up. Those experts were wrong; the aftermath offered a tremendous opportunity to study life returning to the area, cleansed of what had come before. And now, 30 years...

Or, The Mainstream Media Makes Itself Obsolete What happens when you strike flint and steel? Fire. In this case, lots and lots of fire. Back on March 25, the City of Flint, Michigan made the decision to lay off 23 of 88 firefighters and 46 of 150 police officers. Almost immediately, the fires started. Several fires, every night. Sometimes, 8 or 9 fires. Mostly, they were among the 3000 vacant structures in need of demolition. Two were apartment buildings. A couple have been occupied homes. All have...

Last night Senator Ensign arranged for phone calls about health insurance reform to constituents in the Congressional District of Dina Titus (D). While at least one political scientist called this move “clumsy,” today that is the least of the Senator’s problems. It seems that Sen. Ensign and 6 local businesses got subpoenas today regarding his now-ended affair with Cynthia Hampton. Confirmed recipients include political rainmaker Sig Rogich, former state assemblyman Pete Ernaut,...

This week’s Time Magazine arrived in the mail a little while ago. Here’s what the cover looks like. Accompanied by a big picture of a deflated football, the cover stories are “The Most Dangerous Game. How to Fix Football” and “The Crisis in High Schools.” My immediate thought was that somehow football is more important that education? Will football impact America’s ability to compete in the world economy more than what high school kids are learning? I have...

Notice I never call it health care reform? That’s because it isn’t. Very little of what is being discussed will change what happens between you and your doctor beyond how (and how much) he* gets paid. As I see it, there are 4 points of view on the bill currently being rammed through the Senate: 1. It goes too far. This point of view has a problem with anything that might be called “socialized”. They are barely able to tolerate the idea that their tax dollars go towards schools...

While everyone is understandably focused on Afghanistan, health insurance reform, Dubai, and Tiger Woods driving ability, the Treasury Department quietly released rules that may have an impact on house sales near you. Specifically, the new rules will apply to “short sales”, where the home is not worth what is owed on it, so the bank will end up “short” money at the end.

The Japanese seem to really like President Obama. This goes beyond last year’s song from Obama City in Fukui Prefecture (it’s easiest to think of prefectures as being like states). Japanese youths are now using the President’s name as the verb “obamu”, which means “To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think ‘Yes we can, Yes we can,’ and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to...

Nevada’s senior Senator and the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has taken time out to make a new enemy. Reid publicly threatened the Las Vegas Review Journal — the state’s largest daily paper — saying he hoped it would go out of business. He later added that “he wants the Review-Journal to continue selling advertising because the Las Vegas Sun is delivered inside the Review-Journal.” This story has been picked up by a wide range of news sources including the...

The fall semester begins soon, and many new college students will be away from home for the first time as adults. It seems likely that a small portion TMV readers are college students, and many other readers know at least one college student. Please feel free to forward this to any college students or young adults you know. Hey guys. I know this is a pretty cool time in your lives: you are legally grown-ups; you are making new friends, some of whom are from wildly different places and have wildly...

Myrna Ulfik’s item in the Wall Street Journal says: I didn’t run to Canada for [cancer] treatment. Medicare took care of my needs right here in New York City. To endure, I just need the freedom to choose my insurance, my doctors, and get the diagnostic scans and care I need. And one more thing: I need hope that a treatment will be developed that can control my diseases the way insulin controls diabetes. Every cancer patient needs these things, especially hope. But the government’s plan...

In a victory for common sense, the Supreme Court has ruled 8-1 that the strip search of a 13 year old girl was unconstitutional. Among the factors that the court considered were that the girl’s parents were never called, the fact that she was effectively held hostage in the Assistant Principal’s office for 2 hours, the lack of corrroborating evidence, and the nature of the contraband they were seeking. in Justice Souter’s words: “In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts...

Graduate students spend a lot of time talking. One topic that we used to discuss, as music students, was various styles of music. Academic music of course, nothing more popular than Laurie Anderson. In retrospect, we came off as a bit pretentious. A quick look at the various periods of music history reveals that style periods got shorter as time marched on. While we don’t know as much as musicologists would like about music much before about 1300, surviving manuscripts show that styles moved...

This week, the FDIC couldn’t even wait until Friday to close BankUnited of Coral Gables, FL. This has apparently been in the works since April, when the bank was told by regulators they needed to merge or sell itself. Why did they do this on Thursday? When they usually swoop in on Friday afternoons? Well, it wasn’t so they could enjoy the holiday weekend. The FDIC had even more work to do yesterday, as they oversaw the takeover of Strategic Capital Bank of Champaign, IL (a college town...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation always does their dirty work at closing time on Friday. That way they have all weekend to figure out what is going on, get things in order so Joe and Jane Average can get their bills paid on Monday, and Wall Street has 2 days to sort through the carnage. Last night, the FDIC shut down four banks in four different states. That brings 2009′s running total to 29 banks, exceeding the entire number of banks to fail in all of 2008. If this trend merely continues...

Most of us know what the International Monetary Fund prescription for saving any given economy is, right? Drastically cut spending. No really, cut it. Slash it to the bone. Even military spending. Cut cut cut cut cut! This approach has opened them to criticism both from true conservatives and progressives. So then, you know it’s a big deal on those rare occasions that the IMF tells a country they need to spend more money. Yesterday, the IMF urged the 20 largest economies to spend more on...