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By Joe Sacco
$19.77
By Dave Eggers
$25.00
$23
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Flickr/MoneyBlogNewz
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A typo by banking giant Wells Fargo resulted in a more than two-year legal battle that came to a tragic conclusion in December when Larry Delassus’ heart stopped in a Los Angeles area courtroom, a new LA Weekly report reveals.
Posted on Mar 10, 2013
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By David Sirota — With Congress finally starting to have a serious conversation about our revenue crisis, there are obvious reasons to limit the amount of mortgage interest that Americans can deduct from their taxable income.
Posted on Dec 13, 2012
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Philip Taylor PT (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Record low interest rates on mortgages and refinancing deals are reducing costs to homeowners. But banks are making unusually high profits by selling bundles of those loans to investors at similarly low rates, which means borrowers could be saving even more.
Posted on Aug 9, 2012
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Mike Keefe, Cagle Cartoons —
Posted on Apr 13, 2012
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Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi joins “Democracy Now!” to discuss the dual history of Bank of America and the deregulation of banking ownership in the United States and to expose the holes in the $26 billion settlement deal that President Obama said would provide relief for American homeowners.
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Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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Did you know that it was actually jumping gas costs, and not deceptive lending practices on the part of mortgage financiers and deregulation madness on Wall Street, that got us into the recessionary quandary in which the majority of Americans still find themselves?
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AP / Cliff Owen
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On Thursday, state and federal government representatives announced that five major banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Ally Financial, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase—had agreed to pay their part in a settlement of more than $25 billion stemming from the mortgage market meltdown that caused millions of Americans to lose their homes.
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Flickr / respres (CC-BY)
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A joint investigation by NPR and ProPublica has rustled up some disquieting trading practices on the part of Freddie Mac that suggest the taxpayer-run mortgage company hasn’t exactly done its darndest to help struggling Americans hold on to their homes—in fact, the opposite may be more the case.
Posted on Jan 30, 2012
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AP / Erich Schlegel
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Here’s a sobering dose of reality: Poverty in America has risen to the 27 percent mark in the last half-decade and, perhaps worse, the prospects for our nation’s poorest won’t necessarily get better as the economy picks up. It’s not news many want to hear, but we’re glad a group of researchers at Indiana University were gutsy enough to release it.
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Steve Rhodes (CC-BY)
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By Nora Eisenberg —
This season, don’t look to bells on bobtails to make your spirits bright. Kindle the mood with dreams and songs of Occupation, sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”
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Flickr / futureatlas.com (CC-BY)
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It’s a start, but let’s hope Friday’s fraud charges against six former higher-ups at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t represent the only attempts that the Securities and Exchange Commission will make to hold financial executives responsible for the disastrous economic mess that’s still upon us.
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cbsnews.com
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It’s all too rare that a mainstream news network goes after just the sort of financial heavy hitters that tend to have ties to their own corporate sponsors, but thankfully, that’s what CBS News’ “60 Minutes” did last weekend with the help of two principled mortgage specialists.
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AP / Lucy Nicholson
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Patrick Meighan is a husband, a father, and a “Family Guy” sitcom writer who was among the 292 people arrested when the cops raided the Occupy Los Angeles encampment early on Nov. 30. As his powerful testimony makes clear, that was actually not “the LAPD’s finest hour.” (more)
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Flickr / respres
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Those critics of Occupy Wall Street who claimed the movement lacked direction might look to foreclosed homes around the country, as well as housing auctions at select banks, where activists turned up Tuesday as part of the Occupy Our Homes initiative.
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Composite image: Handout / Mary Altaffer, AP
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There are those occasions when the choice for Truthdigger of the Week is so clear that our tribute practically writes itself. This is one of those times.
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Flickr / respres (CC-BY)
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President Obama is doing an end run around Congress with a new strategy to target one of the most crucial sectors of the U.S. economy, and one clearly in need of serious resuscitation—the mortgage market. This first installment of Obama’s proposed economic rehab program, which he dubbed the “We Can’t Wait” campaign ... (more)
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Flickr / Diana Parkhouse (CC-BY)
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U.S. mortgage rates on 30-year fixed loans have fallen to a record low after the Federal Reserve last week announced its plan to reduce borrowing costs by replacing short-term debt with more long-term debt. (more)
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Flickr / woodleywonderworks (CC-BY)
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Federal regulators filed lawsuits against 17 financial institutions Friday afternoon for allegedly misrepresenting the poor quality of mortgage securities they sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the height of the housing bubble. (more)
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Flickr / respres (CC-BY)
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The Federal Housing Finance Agency is set to file lawsuits against more than a dozen big banks for allegedly misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities they were assembling and peddling at the height of the housing bubble. (more)
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AP / Susan Walsh
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This is not really the kind of headline we want to read about the Federal Reserve right now, but top banana Ben Bernanke acknowledged at a news conference Wednesday that the Fed was “caught off guard by recent signs of deterioration in the economy.”
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AP / Jacquelyn Martin
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By Robert Scheer — Endorsing the Republican agenda of financial industry deregulation, reversing New Deal safeguards, President Clinton pursued policies that in the long run created more damage to the American economy than any other president since Herbert Hoover.
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AP / Paul Sakuma
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In a startling move, the Obama administration is holding three major banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase—accountable for their bad lending habits on the mortgage market, cutting off funds from the Home Affordable Modification Program until they shape up.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — How I wish that Ben Bernanke would get caught emailing photos of his underwear-clad groin. Otherwise we don’t stand a chance of reversing this administration’s economic policy, which is shaping up to be every bit as disastrous as that of its predecessor.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court order for a Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit.
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Flickr/Images_of_Money
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According to at least some sources, certain sectors of the American economy are showing signs of life, but the housing market sure isn’t one of them, especially considering the news expected to surface Tuesday that prices have now dipped below the previous lowest point recorded since this recession kicked in three years ago. The recession’s earlier bottom for housing prices occurred in 2009.
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Adzookie.com
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Here’s one solution to the foreclosure crisis, albeit an ugly one. In what Gizmodo points out could very well be a publicity stunt, mobile ad company Adzookie says it will pay your mortgage if you let it turn your house into a giant billboard. Take it away, Chris Hedges.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The hacktivist group Anonymous has thus far distinguished itself primarily with its public grapplings with Scientology, but now the network of online provocateurs has edged into WikiLeaks territory with its first release of potentially compromising information about a Bank of America subsidiary.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — A most dastardly deed occurred last Friday when the Obama administration issued a 29-page policy statement totally abandoning the federal government’s time-honored role in helping Americans achieve the goal of homeownership.
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Flickr / Michael Gray (CC-BY-SA)
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Bank of America has reported its second straight quarterly loss, $1.2 billion for the last three months of 2010 after a devaluation of its mortgage business.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Here we go again. When Bill Clinton suffered an electoral reversal after his first two years in office, he abruptly embraced the corporate money guys who had financed his congressional opposition in an effort to purchase a second term.
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AP / J Pat Carter
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October wasn’t a good month for sales of single-family homes in the U.S.—in fact, it was pretty dismal—and you know it’s bad when number-crunching economist types say there’s nothing good to say about not only the current moment but the foreseeable future as well.
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Flickr / Håkan Dahlström (CC-BY)
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More than half of the state's homeowners with a mortgage—51.4 percent—spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing costs, according to 2005-2009 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. ... (more)
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AP / Louis Lanzano
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By Robert Scheer — Rejoice, the housing market is back. Sandy Weill just picked up a humdinger of a wine vineyard estate in Sonoma, Calif., for a record $31 million, so the foreclosure crisis must be over.
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AP / Ann Heisenfelt
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama deserved the rebuke he received at the polls for a failed economic policy that consisted of throwing trillions at Wall Street but getting nothing in return. His amen chorus in the media is quick to blame everyone but the president for his sharp reversal of fortunes.
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AP / Scott Sady
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By Scott Tucker — Career politicians depend upon the biggest protection racket in this country, which is often called “our two-party system.” Ours? Really? Certainly that system has no foundation whatsoever in the Constitution of the United States.
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Flickr / Casey Serin (CC-BY)
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At long last, a little good news from the real estate market: The National Association of Realtors reported a 10 percent rise in existing home sales in September, but buyers are still skittish about foreclosures and the country’s job problems figure into the long-term prognosis as well.
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Flickr / futureatlas.com (CC-BY)
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So, remember that whole bailout thing that began a couple of years ago? It’s not over yet, at least not when it comes to those delinquent housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to new government projections, the Fannie and Freddie bailout fiasco could ... (continued)
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We here at Truthdig know that our own Robert Scheer really wishes that he didn’t have to write his latest book “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street,” but ... (continued)
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Behind the wonderfully engaging smile of this president there is the increasingly disturbing suggestion of a cynical power-grabbing politician whose swift rise in power reflects less the earnestness of his message and far more the skills of a traditional political hack.
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Flickr / Torley(CC-BY-SA)
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In a welcome and much-needed turn of events for struggling American homeowners, all 50 state attorneys general are banding together to crack down on such sketchy foreclosure practices as “robo-signing,” as Forbes reported Wednesday.
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AP / Paul Sakuma
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By Robert Scheer — How do you foreclose on a home when you can’t figure out who owns it because the original mortgage is part of a derivatives package that has been sliced and diced so many ways that its legal ownership is often unrecognizable?
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Flickr / respres
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The Obama administration isn’t ready to help homeowners stay in their homes by imposing a moratorium on repossessions, even though some banks are stopping foreclosures and resales of foreclosed homes and concerns about mortgage fraud are growing.
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AP / J Pat Carter
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“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” as one wise troubadour put it, and luckily for struggling homeowners, President Obama took a good look at a bill that had cleared Congress and flexed his executive powers to send it back Thursday.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — On Tuesday, I received yet another deceptively personal e-mail addressed to “Robert” from Michelle Obama asking me once again to contribute to the “amazing journey” toward “progress” that her husband has led.
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AP / Cliff Owen
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By Robert Scheer — Paul Volcker, or the “big guy,” as President Barack Obama refers to the former Federal Reserve chair who heads his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, nailed it in a series of blistering remarks on the sorry state of our economy.
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By Robert Scheer — The big cop-out in much of what has been written about the banking meltdown has been the argument by those most complicit that there was “enough blame to go around” and that no institution or individual should be singled out for accountability. “How could we have known?” is the refrain of those who continue to pose as all-knowing experts.
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Goldman Sachs hasn’t been the most popular name in finance lately on this side of the Atlantic, and now the Brits have jumped into the fray, hitting the banking behemoth with a $31 million fine for keeping its stateside troubles secret from U.K. authorities.
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AP / J Pat Carter
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By Robert Scheer — This week’s proposals by the Obama administration to deal with the persistent economic crisis will be, as with previous plans that involved trillions of taxpayer dollars, little more than salt in the wounds.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve.
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Reuters
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More evidence that the economy is still very shaky came Tuesday in the form of news about a startling dip in sales of existing single-family homes during July, which marked the lowest point in that market in 15 years.
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