I just ran Eric "InAction Jackson" Holder's announcement relating to "Operation Broken Trust" through a word cloud generator to demonstrate a simple point.
According to the feared one, this is what the combined resources of the United States Government enforcement apparatus (Obama's "Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force") has been busy doing during the past three months, chasing Ponzi clowns to see if there is another Bernie Madoff hidden in the financial cracks and bringing down pump and dump schemes.
What is it these vermin financial predators are pumping and dumping is what I want to know.
Fraud, investment, financial, schemes...those are the big words you see.
Here are some of the big words you don't see: the name of a major Wall Street institution or any Wall Street firm for that matter, the word bank, the word mortgage, the words origination fraud, the words title and foreclosure fraud, the word housing, the word securitization, the word RICO, the word subprime and finally, the word C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-T.
ATTENTION ALL BANKSTAS, you have nothing to fear, InAction Jackson and the Federal posse are busy chasing the financial Boogeymen so the rest of you can sleep tight tonight.
TEXT OF BUFFOON:
Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the Operation Broken Trust Announcement
Washington, D.C.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Good morning, and thank you all for being here.
I’m pleased to be joined today by several key leaders in our collective effort to combat financial fraud – FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry and SEC Director of Enforcement Robert Khuzami, as well as the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s Chief Postal Inspector, Guy Cottrell; IRS Criminal Investigation Deputy Chief Rick Raven; and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Acting Director of Enforcement Vincent McGonagle.
We are here to announce the results of Operation Broken Trust, a three-and-a-half-month targeting of investment fraud schemes throughout the country – and a critical step forward in law enforcement’s work to protect American investors, to ensure the strength of our markets, and to prevent financial fraud schemes.
While there is nothing new about conducting nationwide operations and sweeps – this one is different in that it brought together a broad array of criminal and civil enforcement tools, at both the federal and state level, to attack investment fraud schemes collectively. Operation Broken Trust is the first national operation in history to target the many different types of investment fraud schemes that prey directly on the investing public.
This historic effort has been coordinated, executed, and led by members of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force that President Obama created in November 2009. This task force is the broadest coalition of law enforcement, investigatory and regulatory agencies ever established to combat fraud. Multiple federal agencies, as well as partners at the state level, are working together to ensure that no stone is left unturned when it comes to protecting consumers and investors.
Our mission is simple – to bring financial fraud schemes to light and those who operate them to justice.And our aggressive, coordinated approach is working.
Since Operation Broken Trust was launched on August 16th, all across the country investment fraud cases have been prioritized. To date, the operation has involved enforcement actions against 343 criminal defendants and 189 civil defendants, whose conduct harmed more than 120,000 victims. Several individuals have been charged with defrauding men and women across the country out of thousands – and sometimes millions – of dollars. The cases in this operation involve a variety of different investment fraud schemes that have led to more than $8.3 billion in losses in just the criminal cases alone. Staggering numbers. These losses represent hard-earned money and even life savings. They represent needs that may not be met and dreams that may not be fulfilled.
All of these victims can tell a tragic and cautionary story of being misled and exploited – often by someone they trusted. In fact, many of the scam artists we’ve identified were preying on their own neighbors – and on the most vulnerable members of their communities. Several of those prosecuted during this operation solicited victim investors from their own churches. One man in Texas allegedly targeted his fellow parishioners, asking them to invest with him and claiming that his success in foreign exchange trading was “a blessing from God.”
In Florida, one defendant was convicted recently for his role in an investment scam that specifically targeted the local Haitian community. In Ohio, a former police officer operating a Ponzi scheme solicited investments from active and retired police officers and firefighters. And in Chicago, another Ponzi scheme resulted in more than $30 million in losses to hundreds of victims – many of them elderly, Italian immigrants. As a result of our prosecution, the man who operated this scheme has been sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Many of the criminals we’ve identified used investor funds to support lavish lifestyles. One man operating an $880 million Ponzi scheme in Florida duped investors from across the country – and used the money to buy floor seats at professional basketball games and to make payments on his personal yacht, his beach house, and his Mercedes. A New Jersey man charged with operating an investment scam allegedly used investor funds to make payments on three different luxury cars and to pay fees at two country clubs.
With this operation, the task force is sending two messages. A message to the public: be alert for these frauds, take appropriate measures to protect yourself, and report such schemes to proper authorities when they occur. And a second message to anyone operating or attempting to operate an investment scam: we will use every tool at our disposal to find you, to stop you, and to bring you to justice. Cheating investors out of their earnings and savings is no longer a safe business plan.
Along with the agencies represented here on stage, I also want to thank the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Secret Service, and the National Association of Attorneys General. Because of their work, and the contributions of everyone involved in Operation Broken Trust, dozens of criminals who hatched fraud schemes now face significant time behind bars – including one sentence of 85 years.
Although this operation marks an important step forward, our fight to combat financial fraud goes on.
The task force will continue working with consumer groups to increase financial literacy and raise awareness about the warning signs of financial scams. And we encourage investors to share tips and concerns with us by visiting stopfraud.gov. With the commitment of so many partners and with the help of an informed public, I am confident that we can take our fight against financial fraud to a new level.
And now I’d like to turn things over to FBI Executive Assistant Director, Shawn Henry.
WB7: No need to edit the speech because it is funny enough as is. Here is my closing question: What precisely is it that they were doing prior to the last three months?
This evil financial genius was foiled from bringing down the financial system.
MEANWHILE: This is for those of you losing faith in Federal law enforcement:
"A German man apparently smuggled hundreds of tarantulas and various other arachnids into the US, authorities said on Friday, according to AFP.
Authorities set up a sting to catch 37-year-old Sven Koppler in a sting called “Operation Spiderman,” the news agency reported. He was arrested on Thursday after flying into Los Angeles.
"He is one of the largest importers of illegal tarantulas into United States.
He has been doing it for several years," Assistant US Attorney Mark Williams told the Los Angeles Times.
Williams said that Koppler made around $300,000 for selling off the spiders in various countries including the US. The Times reported that he could get a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and fine of $250,000."
Despite escalating outrage over rampant foreclosure fraud, the Federal Reserve now appears ready to eviscerate a key mortgage regulation in an effort to spare banks the losses from their own wrongdoing. Even as bank executives preposterously claim to have wronged nobody in the foreclosure process, they're pushing hard to unwind the only serious federal rule that protects borrowers from predatory loans and improper foreclosures. As if the last decade of abuse wasn't bad enough, banks are once again mobilizing to screw borrowers in the pursuit of epic bonuses. And once again, it appears that the Federal Reserve has become an accomplice to this nationwide mortgage scam.
Today, top mortgage officers from the nation's largest banks are telling the Senate Banking Committee that they aren't kicking the wrong people out of their homes. This is simply false. Problems at mortgage servicers have been going on for years, long before banks got into trouble for illegally robo-signing foreclosure documents. People are kicked out of their homes without cause in the United States every day. If the top executives at America's largest banks don't know this fact, they lack the competence needed to run their organizations.
Law firms that work with troubled borrowers are jam-packed with horror stories about foreclosures caused entirely by banks, not borrowers. Families who never miss a payment come home to an eviction notice, or a thug breaking down their door.
But it's even more common for borrowers to find themselves in trouble because their bank engaged in blatantly predatory lending. There is only one serious federal remedy for predatory lending, and the Fed is now knowingly trying to gut that remedy in order to help banks avoid losses from their own fraud. The remedy is called rescission, and it works like this:
If a bank failed to make key consumer protection disclosures about a mortgage, the borrower can demand that all of the interest and closing costs on the loan be refunded. Equally important, the bank must also stop all foreclosure proceedings and give up its right to foreclose. Once the bank gives up its right to foreclose, the full amount of the mortgage, minus interest and closing costs, becomes due. This isn't a free lunch for the borrower, especially when the value of her home has declined dramatically, but it's better than nothing, and it does impose real costs on banks.
For this process to function at all, it is absolutely critical that the bank be barred from foreclosing before the borrower has to pay off the remainder of the loan. A borrower can easily owe hundreds of thousands of dollars after winning a rescission. Few victims of predatory lending actually have that kind of money on hand.
This is the whole point of rescission, and it's been on the books since the Truth in Lending Act was passed in 1968. Without it, the consumer protections detailed by that law have no teeth. A bank is barred from engaging in predatory lending, but if it does it anyway, it faces no serious punishment.
Rescission, in other words, is the only federal legal device keeping banks in check on predatory lending (as the last decade proves, it's nowhere near enough). Predatory lending is really bad. If banks engage in it, they should face dramatic consequences. They don't get to foreclose and they give up all of the profit they expected to score from the predatory loan. If the borrower doesn't have all of the money on hand to pay off what's left, the bank has to deal with this money coming in over time.
The bank lobby and the Fed are now trying to completely gut the substance of this regulation. The Fed has just proposed a new rule that would reverse the order of payments and the right to foreclose under rescission. Under the new rule, a bank that has engaged in predatory lending does not have to give up its right to foreclose until after the borrower has paid off the full remaining balance of the loan.
Under the Fed's proposal, if you're the victim of illegal predatory lending, the bank will still get to foreclose on you unless you pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars all at once. And you'll have to pony up what the bank says you owe, which may be very different from what you actually owe. That eliminates the usefulness of rescission, making the new rule a bailout for predators.
The Fed knows full well that it's gutting the law here. The Board of Governors and their staff have met with key consumer lawyers no less than three times about this exact rule proposal, and the Fed is going ahead with it anyway.
Here's what's really going on. The largest banks don't have enough capital to weather a bad housing market. And any process that sheds light on the documentation procedures at mortgage servicers will expose the big banks to investor lawsuits. But investors can't sue without those documents. Rescission judgments create a paper trail for illegal loans. In addition to creating immediate losses for banks, rescission documents that banks sold illegal loans, giving investors who bought mortgage-backed securities ammunition for well-founded lawsuits. Those lawsuits, in turn, could sink some of the biggest names on Wall Street, something the Fed has been trying to prevent at all costs since 2008.
How close to the edge are the banks? Many mortgages that they account for as profitable assets are actually huge losses. The most obvious example of this insanity involves second lien mortgages. There are lots of kinds of second liens loans, but the important thing to remember is that they're the first asset to be wiped out when housing prices decline. Right now, they're in big trouble.
The second-lien holdings of Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are about equal to their total capital. If you wipeout second liens, these banks are done. Right now the banks are accounting for these second liens as if they were worth nearly 100 percent of their original value—even though these loans only trade at only about one-quarter of that value. If banks take the market's value of just one class of assets, they're gone.
This class of assets goes completely under if banks have to own up to the current foreclosure fraud mess. The only real way to fix the documentation fraud problems is a nationwide program reducing the amounts that borrowers owe on their mortgages to current home values. Doing that forces the banks to acknowledge that their second lien mortgages are, in fact, worthless.
So the big banks and their protectors at the Fed are launching a two-pronged strategy. First, they're trying to prevent investors from obtaining the loan documents that will fuel well-justified lawsuits. Second, they're trying to give banks even greater control over the foreclosure process, in order to allow banks to continue to game accounting rules. This is a premeditated strategy to save banks from losses created by their own fraudulent, predatory behavior. It has no place on the books of the Fed, particularly after the central bank's total failure to prevent the mortgage abuses of the past decade.
It's not too late for the Fed to turn back. It can, in fact, abandon this bailout, and leave consumer protection issues to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is designed to handle exactly this sort of issue, for exactly this reason.
bench craft company rip off adviceVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
bench craft company rip off medicineVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
bench craft company rip off tipsVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
http://ddfghhdfxd.com/Vice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
home bench craft company rip offVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
truth aboutbench craft company rip offI just ran Eric "InAction Jackson" Holder's announcement relating to "Operation Broken Trust" through a word cloud generator to demonstrate a simple point.
According to the feared one, this is what the combined resources of the United States Government enforcement apparatus (Obama's "Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force") has been busy doing during the past three months, chasing Ponzi clowns to see if there is another Bernie Madoff hidden in the financial cracks and bringing down pump and dump schemes.
What is it these vermin financial predators are pumping and dumping is what I want to know.
Fraud, investment, financial, schemes...those are the big words you see.
Here are some of the big words you don't see: the name of a major Wall Street institution or any Wall Street firm for that matter, the word bank, the word mortgage, the words origination fraud, the words title and foreclosure fraud, the word housing, the word securitization, the word RICO, the word subprime and finally, the word C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-T.
ATTENTION ALL BANKSTAS, you have nothing to fear, InAction Jackson and the Federal posse are busy chasing the financial Boogeymen so the rest of you can sleep tight tonight.
TEXT OF BUFFOON:
Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the Operation Broken Trust Announcement
Washington, D.C.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Good morning, and thank you all for being here.
I’m pleased to be joined today by several key leaders in our collective effort to combat financial fraud – FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry and SEC Director of Enforcement Robert Khuzami, as well as the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s Chief Postal Inspector, Guy Cottrell; IRS Criminal Investigation Deputy Chief Rick Raven; and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Acting Director of Enforcement Vincent McGonagle.
We are here to announce the results of Operation Broken Trust, a three-and-a-half-month targeting of investment fraud schemes throughout the country – and a critical step forward in law enforcement’s work to protect American investors, to ensure the strength of our markets, and to prevent financial fraud schemes.
While there is nothing new about conducting nationwide operations and sweeps – this one is different in that it brought together a broad array of criminal and civil enforcement tools, at both the federal and state level, to attack investment fraud schemes collectively. Operation Broken Trust is the first national operation in history to target the many different types of investment fraud schemes that prey directly on the investing public.
This historic effort has been coordinated, executed, and led by members of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force that President Obama created in November 2009. This task force is the broadest coalition of law enforcement, investigatory and regulatory agencies ever established to combat fraud. Multiple federal agencies, as well as partners at the state level, are working together to ensure that no stone is left unturned when it comes to protecting consumers and investors.
Our mission is simple – to bring financial fraud schemes to light and those who operate them to justice.And our aggressive, coordinated approach is working.
Since Operation Broken Trust was launched on August 16th, all across the country investment fraud cases have been prioritized. To date, the operation has involved enforcement actions against 343 criminal defendants and 189 civil defendants, whose conduct harmed more than 120,000 victims. Several individuals have been charged with defrauding men and women across the country out of thousands – and sometimes millions – of dollars. The cases in this operation involve a variety of different investment fraud schemes that have led to more than $8.3 billion in losses in just the criminal cases alone. Staggering numbers. These losses represent hard-earned money and even life savings. They represent needs that may not be met and dreams that may not be fulfilled.
All of these victims can tell a tragic and cautionary story of being misled and exploited – often by someone they trusted. In fact, many of the scam artists we’ve identified were preying on their own neighbors – and on the most vulnerable members of their communities. Several of those prosecuted during this operation solicited victim investors from their own churches. One man in Texas allegedly targeted his fellow parishioners, asking them to invest with him and claiming that his success in foreign exchange trading was “a blessing from God.”
In Florida, one defendant was convicted recently for his role in an investment scam that specifically targeted the local Haitian community. In Ohio, a former police officer operating a Ponzi scheme solicited investments from active and retired police officers and firefighters. And in Chicago, another Ponzi scheme resulted in more than $30 million in losses to hundreds of victims – many of them elderly, Italian immigrants. As a result of our prosecution, the man who operated this scheme has been sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Many of the criminals we’ve identified used investor funds to support lavish lifestyles. One man operating an $880 million Ponzi scheme in Florida duped investors from across the country – and used the money to buy floor seats at professional basketball games and to make payments on his personal yacht, his beach house, and his Mercedes. A New Jersey man charged with operating an investment scam allegedly used investor funds to make payments on three different luxury cars and to pay fees at two country clubs.
With this operation, the task force is sending two messages. A message to the public: be alert for these frauds, take appropriate measures to protect yourself, and report such schemes to proper authorities when they occur. And a second message to anyone operating or attempting to operate an investment scam: we will use every tool at our disposal to find you, to stop you, and to bring you to justice. Cheating investors out of their earnings and savings is no longer a safe business plan.
Along with the agencies represented here on stage, I also want to thank the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Secret Service, and the National Association of Attorneys General. Because of their work, and the contributions of everyone involved in Operation Broken Trust, dozens of criminals who hatched fraud schemes now face significant time behind bars – including one sentence of 85 years.
Although this operation marks an important step forward, our fight to combat financial fraud goes on.
The task force will continue working with consumer groups to increase financial literacy and raise awareness about the warning signs of financial scams. And we encourage investors to share tips and concerns with us by visiting stopfraud.gov. With the commitment of so many partners and with the help of an informed public, I am confident that we can take our fight against financial fraud to a new level.
And now I’d like to turn things over to FBI Executive Assistant Director, Shawn Henry.
WB7: No need to edit the speech because it is funny enough as is. Here is my closing question: What precisely is it that they were doing prior to the last three months?
This evil financial genius was foiled from bringing down the financial system.
MEANWHILE: This is for those of you losing faith in Federal law enforcement:
"A German man apparently smuggled hundreds of tarantulas and various other arachnids into the US, authorities said on Friday, according to AFP.
Authorities set up a sting to catch 37-year-old Sven Koppler in a sting called “Operation Spiderman,” the news agency reported. He was arrested on Thursday after flying into Los Angeles.
"He is one of the largest importers of illegal tarantulas into United States.
He has been doing it for several years," Assistant US Attorney Mark Williams told the Los Angeles Times.
Williams said that Koppler made around $300,000 for selling off the spiders in various countries including the US. The Times reported that he could get a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and fine of $250,000."
Despite escalating outrage over rampant foreclosure fraud, the Federal Reserve now appears ready to eviscerate a key mortgage regulation in an effort to spare banks the losses from their own wrongdoing. Even as bank executives preposterously claim to have wronged nobody in the foreclosure process, they're pushing hard to unwind the only serious federal rule that protects borrowers from predatory loans and improper foreclosures. As if the last decade of abuse wasn't bad enough, banks are once again mobilizing to screw borrowers in the pursuit of epic bonuses. And once again, it appears that the Federal Reserve has become an accomplice to this nationwide mortgage scam.
Today, top mortgage officers from the nation's largest banks are telling the Senate Banking Committee that they aren't kicking the wrong people out of their homes. This is simply false. Problems at mortgage servicers have been going on for years, long before banks got into trouble for illegally robo-signing foreclosure documents. People are kicked out of their homes without cause in the United States every day. If the top executives at America's largest banks don't know this fact, they lack the competence needed to run their organizations.
Law firms that work with troubled borrowers are jam-packed with horror stories about foreclosures caused entirely by banks, not borrowers. Families who never miss a payment come home to an eviction notice, or a thug breaking down their door.
But it's even more common for borrowers to find themselves in trouble because their bank engaged in blatantly predatory lending. There is only one serious federal remedy for predatory lending, and the Fed is now knowingly trying to gut that remedy in order to help banks avoid losses from their own fraud. The remedy is called rescission, and it works like this:
If a bank failed to make key consumer protection disclosures about a mortgage, the borrower can demand that all of the interest and closing costs on the loan be refunded. Equally important, the bank must also stop all foreclosure proceedings and give up its right to foreclose. Once the bank gives up its right to foreclose, the full amount of the mortgage, minus interest and closing costs, becomes due. This isn't a free lunch for the borrower, especially when the value of her home has declined dramatically, but it's better than nothing, and it does impose real costs on banks.
For this process to function at all, it is absolutely critical that the bank be barred from foreclosing before the borrower has to pay off the remainder of the loan. A borrower can easily owe hundreds of thousands of dollars after winning a rescission. Few victims of predatory lending actually have that kind of money on hand.
This is the whole point of rescission, and it's been on the books since the Truth in Lending Act was passed in 1968. Without it, the consumer protections detailed by that law have no teeth. A bank is barred from engaging in predatory lending, but if it does it anyway, it faces no serious punishment.
Rescission, in other words, is the only federal legal device keeping banks in check on predatory lending (as the last decade proves, it's nowhere near enough). Predatory lending is really bad. If banks engage in it, they should face dramatic consequences. They don't get to foreclose and they give up all of the profit they expected to score from the predatory loan. If the borrower doesn't have all of the money on hand to pay off what's left, the bank has to deal with this money coming in over time.
The bank lobby and the Fed are now trying to completely gut the substance of this regulation. The Fed has just proposed a new rule that would reverse the order of payments and the right to foreclose under rescission. Under the new rule, a bank that has engaged in predatory lending does not have to give up its right to foreclose until after the borrower has paid off the full remaining balance of the loan.
Under the Fed's proposal, if you're the victim of illegal predatory lending, the bank will still get to foreclose on you unless you pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars all at once. And you'll have to pony up what the bank says you owe, which may be very different from what you actually owe. That eliminates the usefulness of rescission, making the new rule a bailout for predators.
The Fed knows full well that it's gutting the law here. The Board of Governors and their staff have met with key consumer lawyers no less than three times about this exact rule proposal, and the Fed is going ahead with it anyway.
Here's what's really going on. The largest banks don't have enough capital to weather a bad housing market. And any process that sheds light on the documentation procedures at mortgage servicers will expose the big banks to investor lawsuits. But investors can't sue without those documents. Rescission judgments create a paper trail for illegal loans. In addition to creating immediate losses for banks, rescission documents that banks sold illegal loans, giving investors who bought mortgage-backed securities ammunition for well-founded lawsuits. Those lawsuits, in turn, could sink some of the biggest names on Wall Street, something the Fed has been trying to prevent at all costs since 2008.
How close to the edge are the banks? Many mortgages that they account for as profitable assets are actually huge losses. The most obvious example of this insanity involves second lien mortgages. There are lots of kinds of second liens loans, but the important thing to remember is that they're the first asset to be wiped out when housing prices decline. Right now, they're in big trouble.
The second-lien holdings of Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are about equal to their total capital. If you wipeout second liens, these banks are done. Right now the banks are accounting for these second liens as if they were worth nearly 100 percent of their original value—even though these loans only trade at only about one-quarter of that value. If banks take the market's value of just one class of assets, they're gone.
This class of assets goes completely under if banks have to own up to the current foreclosure fraud mess. The only real way to fix the documentation fraud problems is a nationwide program reducing the amounts that borrowers owe on their mortgages to current home values. Doing that forces the banks to acknowledge that their second lien mortgages are, in fact, worthless.
So the big banks and their protectors at the Fed are launching a two-pronged strategy. First, they're trying to prevent investors from obtaining the loan documents that will fuel well-justified lawsuits. Second, they're trying to give banks even greater control over the foreclosure process, in order to allow banks to continue to game accounting rules. This is a premeditated strategy to save banks from losses created by their own fraudulent, predatory behavior. It has no place on the books of the Fed, particularly after the central bank's total failure to prevent the mortgage abuses of the past decade.
It's not too late for the Fed to turn back. It can, in fact, abandon this bailout, and leave consumer protection issues to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is designed to handle exactly this sort of issue, for exactly this reason.
bench craft company rip off operationVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
dobench craft company rip off pills workVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
urlVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
bench craft company rip off exerciseVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
bench craft company rip off pills reviewsVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
advertising enlargement exersizesVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
free advertising enlargementI just ran Eric "InAction Jackson" Holder's announcement relating to "Operation Broken Trust" through a word cloud generator to demonstrate a simple point.
According to the feared one, this is what the combined resources of the United States Government enforcement apparatus (Obama's "Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force") has been busy doing during the past three months, chasing Ponzi clowns to see if there is another Bernie Madoff hidden in the financial cracks and bringing down pump and dump schemes.
What is it these vermin financial predators are pumping and dumping is what I want to know.
Fraud, investment, financial, schemes...those are the big words you see.
Here are some of the big words you don't see: the name of a major Wall Street institution or any Wall Street firm for that matter, the word bank, the word mortgage, the words origination fraud, the words title and foreclosure fraud, the word housing, the word securitization, the word RICO, the word subprime and finally, the word C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-T.
ATTENTION ALL BANKSTAS, you have nothing to fear, InAction Jackson and the Federal posse are busy chasing the financial Boogeymen so the rest of you can sleep tight tonight.
TEXT OF BUFFOON:
Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the Operation Broken Trust Announcement
Washington, D.C.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Good morning, and thank you all for being here.
I’m pleased to be joined today by several key leaders in our collective effort to combat financial fraud – FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry and SEC Director of Enforcement Robert Khuzami, as well as the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s Chief Postal Inspector, Guy Cottrell; IRS Criminal Investigation Deputy Chief Rick Raven; and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Acting Director of Enforcement Vincent McGonagle.
We are here to announce the results of Operation Broken Trust, a three-and-a-half-month targeting of investment fraud schemes throughout the country – and a critical step forward in law enforcement’s work to protect American investors, to ensure the strength of our markets, and to prevent financial fraud schemes.
While there is nothing new about conducting nationwide operations and sweeps – this one is different in that it brought together a broad array of criminal and civil enforcement tools, at both the federal and state level, to attack investment fraud schemes collectively. Operation Broken Trust is the first national operation in history to target the many different types of investment fraud schemes that prey directly on the investing public.
This historic effort has been coordinated, executed, and led by members of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force that President Obama created in November 2009. This task force is the broadest coalition of law enforcement, investigatory and regulatory agencies ever established to combat fraud. Multiple federal agencies, as well as partners at the state level, are working together to ensure that no stone is left unturned when it comes to protecting consumers and investors.
Our mission is simple – to bring financial fraud schemes to light and those who operate them to justice.And our aggressive, coordinated approach is working.
Since Operation Broken Trust was launched on August 16th, all across the country investment fraud cases have been prioritized. To date, the operation has involved enforcement actions against 343 criminal defendants and 189 civil defendants, whose conduct harmed more than 120,000 victims. Several individuals have been charged with defrauding men and women across the country out of thousands – and sometimes millions – of dollars. The cases in this operation involve a variety of different investment fraud schemes that have led to more than $8.3 billion in losses in just the criminal cases alone. Staggering numbers. These losses represent hard-earned money and even life savings. They represent needs that may not be met and dreams that may not be fulfilled.
All of these victims can tell a tragic and cautionary story of being misled and exploited – often by someone they trusted. In fact, many of the scam artists we’ve identified were preying on their own neighbors – and on the most vulnerable members of their communities. Several of those prosecuted during this operation solicited victim investors from their own churches. One man in Texas allegedly targeted his fellow parishioners, asking them to invest with him and claiming that his success in foreign exchange trading was “a blessing from God.”
In Florida, one defendant was convicted recently for his role in an investment scam that specifically targeted the local Haitian community. In Ohio, a former police officer operating a Ponzi scheme solicited investments from active and retired police officers and firefighters. And in Chicago, another Ponzi scheme resulted in more than $30 million in losses to hundreds of victims – many of them elderly, Italian immigrants. As a result of our prosecution, the man who operated this scheme has been sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Many of the criminals we’ve identified used investor funds to support lavish lifestyles. One man operating an $880 million Ponzi scheme in Florida duped investors from across the country – and used the money to buy floor seats at professional basketball games and to make payments on his personal yacht, his beach house, and his Mercedes. A New Jersey man charged with operating an investment scam allegedly used investor funds to make payments on three different luxury cars and to pay fees at two country clubs.
With this operation, the task force is sending two messages. A message to the public: be alert for these frauds, take appropriate measures to protect yourself, and report such schemes to proper authorities when they occur. And a second message to anyone operating or attempting to operate an investment scam: we will use every tool at our disposal to find you, to stop you, and to bring you to justice. Cheating investors out of their earnings and savings is no longer a safe business plan.
Along with the agencies represented here on stage, I also want to thank the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Secret Service, and the National Association of Attorneys General. Because of their work, and the contributions of everyone involved in Operation Broken Trust, dozens of criminals who hatched fraud schemes now face significant time behind bars – including one sentence of 85 years.
Although this operation marks an important step forward, our fight to combat financial fraud goes on.
The task force will continue working with consumer groups to increase financial literacy and raise awareness about the warning signs of financial scams. And we encourage investors to share tips and concerns with us by visiting stopfraud.gov. With the commitment of so many partners and with the help of an informed public, I am confident that we can take our fight against financial fraud to a new level.
And now I’d like to turn things over to FBI Executive Assistant Director, Shawn Henry.
WB7: No need to edit the speech because it is funny enough as is. Here is my closing question: What precisely is it that they were doing prior to the last three months?
This evil financial genius was foiled from bringing down the financial system.
MEANWHILE: This is for those of you losing faith in Federal law enforcement:
"A German man apparently smuggled hundreds of tarantulas and various other arachnids into the US, authorities said on Friday, according to AFP.
Authorities set up a sting to catch 37-year-old Sven Koppler in a sting called “Operation Spiderman,” the news agency reported. He was arrested on Thursday after flying into Los Angeles.
"He is one of the largest importers of illegal tarantulas into United States.
He has been doing it for several years," Assistant US Attorney Mark Williams told the Los Angeles Times.
Williams said that Koppler made around $300,000 for selling off the spiders in various countries including the US. The Times reported that he could get a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and fine of $250,000."
Despite escalating outrage over rampant foreclosure fraud, the Federal Reserve now appears ready to eviscerate a key mortgage regulation in an effort to spare banks the losses from their own wrongdoing. Even as bank executives preposterously claim to have wronged nobody in the foreclosure process, they're pushing hard to unwind the only serious federal rule that protects borrowers from predatory loans and improper foreclosures. As if the last decade of abuse wasn't bad enough, banks are once again mobilizing to screw borrowers in the pursuit of epic bonuses. And once again, it appears that the Federal Reserve has become an accomplice to this nationwide mortgage scam.
Today, top mortgage officers from the nation's largest banks are telling the Senate Banking Committee that they aren't kicking the wrong people out of their homes. This is simply false. Problems at mortgage servicers have been going on for years, long before banks got into trouble for illegally robo-signing foreclosure documents. People are kicked out of their homes without cause in the United States every day. If the top executives at America's largest banks don't know this fact, they lack the competence needed to run their organizations.
Law firms that work with troubled borrowers are jam-packed with horror stories about foreclosures caused entirely by banks, not borrowers. Families who never miss a payment come home to an eviction notice, or a thug breaking down their door.
But it's even more common for borrowers to find themselves in trouble because their bank engaged in blatantly predatory lending. There is only one serious federal remedy for predatory lending, and the Fed is now knowingly trying to gut that remedy in order to help banks avoid losses from their own fraud. The remedy is called rescission, and it works like this:
If a bank failed to make key consumer protection disclosures about a mortgage, the borrower can demand that all of the interest and closing costs on the loan be refunded. Equally important, the bank must also stop all foreclosure proceedings and give up its right to foreclose. Once the bank gives up its right to foreclose, the full amount of the mortgage, minus interest and closing costs, becomes due. This isn't a free lunch for the borrower, especially when the value of her home has declined dramatically, but it's better than nothing, and it does impose real costs on banks.
For this process to function at all, it is absolutely critical that the bank be barred from foreclosing before the borrower has to pay off the remainder of the loan. A borrower can easily owe hundreds of thousands of dollars after winning a rescission. Few victims of predatory lending actually have that kind of money on hand.
This is the whole point of rescission, and it's been on the books since the Truth in Lending Act was passed in 1968. Without it, the consumer protections detailed by that law have no teeth. A bank is barred from engaging in predatory lending, but if it does it anyway, it faces no serious punishment.
Rescission, in other words, is the only federal legal device keeping banks in check on predatory lending (as the last decade proves, it's nowhere near enough). Predatory lending is really bad. If banks engage in it, they should face dramatic consequences. They don't get to foreclose and they give up all of the profit they expected to score from the predatory loan. If the borrower doesn't have all of the money on hand to pay off what's left, the bank has to deal with this money coming in over time.
The bank lobby and the Fed are now trying to completely gut the substance of this regulation. The Fed has just proposed a new rule that would reverse the order of payments and the right to foreclose under rescission. Under the new rule, a bank that has engaged in predatory lending does not have to give up its right to foreclose until after the borrower has paid off the full remaining balance of the loan.
Under the Fed's proposal, if you're the victim of illegal predatory lending, the bank will still get to foreclose on you unless you pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars all at once. And you'll have to pony up what the bank says you owe, which may be very different from what you actually owe. That eliminates the usefulness of rescission, making the new rule a bailout for predators.
The Fed knows full well that it's gutting the law here. The Board of Governors and their staff have met with key consumer lawyers no less than three times about this exact rule proposal, and the Fed is going ahead with it anyway.
Here's what's really going on. The largest banks don't have enough capital to weather a bad housing market. And any process that sheds light on the documentation procedures at mortgage servicers will expose the big banks to investor lawsuits. But investors can't sue without those documents. Rescission judgments create a paper trail for illegal loans. In addition to creating immediate losses for banks, rescission documents that banks sold illegal loans, giving investors who bought mortgage-backed securities ammunition for well-founded lawsuits. Those lawsuits, in turn, could sink some of the biggest names on Wall Street, something the Fed has been trying to prevent at all costs since 2008.
How close to the edge are the banks? Many mortgages that they account for as profitable assets are actually huge losses. The most obvious example of this insanity involves second lien mortgages. There are lots of kinds of second liens loans, but the important thing to remember is that they're the first asset to be wiped out when housing prices decline. Right now, they're in big trouble.
The second-lien holdings of Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are about equal to their total capital. If you wipeout second liens, these banks are done. Right now the banks are accounting for these second liens as if they were worth nearly 100 percent of their original value—even though these loans only trade at only about one-quarter of that value. If banks take the market's value of just one class of assets, they're gone.
This class of assets goes completely under if banks have to own up to the current foreclosure fraud mess. The only real way to fix the documentation fraud problems is a nationwide program reducing the amounts that borrowers owe on their mortgages to current home values. Doing that forces the banks to acknowledge that their second lien mortgages are, in fact, worthless.
So the big banks and their protectors at the Fed are launching a two-pronged strategy. First, they're trying to prevent investors from obtaining the loan documents that will fuel well-justified lawsuits. Second, they're trying to give banks even greater control over the foreclosure process, in order to allow banks to continue to game accounting rules. This is a premeditated strategy to save banks from losses created by their own fraudulent, predatory behavior. It has no place on the books of the Fed, particularly after the central bank's total failure to prevent the mortgage abuses of the past decade.
It's not too late for the Fed to turn back. It can, in fact, abandon this bailout, and leave consumer protection issues to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is designed to handle exactly this sort of issue, for exactly this reason.
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http://ddfghhdfxd.com/Vice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
advertising enlargement infoVice President Biden heads to Capitol Hill today to lobby Senate Democrats to support the tax cut compromise, as President Obama faces criticism from congressional Democrats that he should have fought more for the Bush tax cuts on the ...
The Solar Dynamics Observatory never fails to deliver absolutely stunning images from the Sun: as of 18:49 UT today, the above picture is what the Sun looked like in the ultraviolet spectrum. The prominence that you are seeing looping ...
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective.
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