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BEIJING—Chinese banks are facing the threat of rising bad loans in the future as the current economic recovery is unbalanced and lacks a solid foundation, the country’s top banking and insurance watchdog said on Wednesday. Outstanding non-performing loans in the banking sector stood at 3.5 trillion yuan ($540.79 billion) by end of June, an increase of 108.3 billion yuan ($16.7 billion) from the beginning of the year, while the bad loan ratio declined to 1.86 percent, Liu Zhongrui, an official at the statistics department of China Banking and Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), told reporters in Beijing. China has implemented monetary and...

If you were president of the United States, would you hire an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro to be ambassador to El Salvador, a country teetering on the brink of hard-core socialism? President Obama just did. On Dec. 9, Obama nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte to be ambassador to El Salvador, despite the fact that in the late 1990s, the FBI discovered that she was working with Cuban intelligence officers. According to Insight Magazine, "When the FBI eventually questioned her about her involvement with Cuban intelligence, she reportedly refused to cooperate." Why would Aponte escape the Obama administration's scrutiny?...

The Export-Import Bank – the poster child for corporate welfare – was due to expire at the end of September. But it has been given a temporary reprieve while congressional leaders plot to renew it on the sly by attaching it to a must-pass spending bill, meaning the bank will never get the scrutiny taxpayers deserve. Ex-Im subsidizes export transactions using sweetheart terms – including below-market-rate loans – that are backed by the American taxpayer. According to the bank’s website, the agency provides financing when “private sector lenders are unable or unwilling to” and “assumes credit and country risks that...

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has a habit of redoubling her efforts when her ideas fail. That’s especially true given that she now chairs the House Financial Services Committee. One of her top priorities is bullying banks into boosting mortgage lending to marginally qualified borrowers based on race or ethnicity. And her main vehicle for that now is a proposed subcommittee on diversity and inclusion. In a prepared statement on January 30, she declared, “I am proud to say that this will be the first Subcommittee of its kind in Congress.” One hopes it will be the last. For if she...

In covering the hearing of the nine bank chief executives on Capitol Hill, it didn’t take long for me to see that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was having a hard time of it, valiant effort though he did make to defend his bank’s lending practices. Because to look inside Wells Fargo, you will find the worst of the mortgage lenders housed in this bank, Wachovia, which Wells Fargo bought last fall for $15.4 bn, and housed within Wachovia is Golden West Financial, which Wachovia bought for a stupefying $25 bn, Golden West, the purveyor of some of the worst...

In front of a ballroom full of N.C. bankers in January 2006, Wachovia chief executive Ken Thompson warned of the dangers of “toxic” home loans. A problem with so-called option adjustable-rate mortgages, he told the group, was that homeowners can end up owing more at the end of the month than the beginning, which can be a “tough situation” for customers and lenders. “I have literally been amazed at the terms offered by some mortgage lenders, thankfully not at Wachovia and thankfully not so much in North Carolina,” he said. Four months later in May 2006, Thompson took a $24...

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 1:09 p.m. EDT Billionaires Secretly Met in Aspen to Defeat Bush In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado. The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition. Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the...

My new special – Politicians’ Top 10 Promises Gone Wrong – airs again tonight. One of their failed promises is that if government fosters home ownership, that will benefit most everyone. President Clinton even claimed: “Our homeownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers one extra cent.” Bush was on board: “We want more people owning their own home. It is in our national interest.” Most politicians agreed. But those conceits, like so many others, went horribly wrong. When the housing bubble popped and millions lost their homes many blamed greedy bankers. Senator Bernie Sanders complained that: “Outrageous greed, recklessness and...

Last week, the Senate Banking Committee approved Sen. Christopher J. Dodd's financial reform bill on a party-line vote, moving the bill to the full Senate. Without a doubt, the most important question about the bill is whether it will end massive Wall Street bailouts. Republicans such as Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama want to change the bill to guarantee that it really does end "too big to fail." That's just what he and his colleagues should be doing:Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo - the four largest bank holding companies in America - required massive government aid...

CALABASAS, Calif. — Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering. So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess. Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other...

The banks must be forced to disclose their "toxic" assets.... In effect, this function can be executed by the setting up of a "bad bank," as the Swedes did in the early 1990s. The bad bank clears the toxic assets off the books of banking systems by buying them at market prices and forcing write downs by the banks. A good bad bank forces banks to write down their bad assets and cleanse their balance sheets with those made insolvent being recapitalized, nationalized or liquidated by the state. But it is equally possible to use a bad bank to buy...

This time, I suppose, it's probably a good idea.After all, nothing brings a recession to its knees like offering more bad loans to borrowers who can't afford them, right?Just when you thought the vaults had been depleted of its stupidity reserve, here comes the latest bird-brained financier - GMAC - to tackle the cancer with a shot of typhoid.From Yahoo News: A $5 billion government bailout aimed at reviving General Motors Corp.'s ability to make car and truck loans has dealers hopeful that cash-strapped consumers will return to their showrooms.GMAC Financial Services, the automaker's troubled financing arm, on Tuesday loosened...

There is a rush on in some quarters of the liberal mainstream press to blame President Bush for anything and everything that could cause grief to the incoming Obama Administration. The New York Times, one of the usual suspects, takes its turn today with an article that attempts to lay blame at the feet of Bush for a chain of events that has it's root in the decisions of President Bill Clinton.

Plaintiffs filed their class action lawsuit on July 6, 1994, alleging that Citibank had engaged in redlining practices in the Chicago metropolitan area in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), 15 U.S.C. 1691; the Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3601-3619; the Thirteenth Amendment to the ... read more >

NEW REPORTS DOCUMENT DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MINORITIES BY MORTGAGE LENDING INSTITUTIONS en Español Full report: What We Know about Mortgage Lending Discrimination Executive summary of report Comments on lending discrimination studies WASHINGTON - Minorities trying to buy homes continue to face discrimination from mortgage lending institutions, according to a new report prepared by the Urban Institute for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Urban Institute report issued today says that "not all Americans enjoy equal access to the benefits of homeownership, in part because of unequal access to capital." It also says that "minorities are less likely than...

December 27, 2002 Bad debts put strain on Chinese bank system From Oliver August in Beijing WHEN Larry Long visits the imposing marble-tiled office of his local bank, he sees what many regard as the biggest threat to China’s Communist leadership. The white-haired property developer tried recently to withdraw £8,000 from his account at the Beijing branch of the Everbright Bank. The embarrassed bank manager confirmed that Mr Long had enough money in the account but was adamant that he could withdraw no more than £800. Overnight, and without informing customers, China’s largest semi-privatised bank had introduced a rule allowing...

Demand deposit refund cap to be delayed by two years Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Monday the government has decided to postpone the full-scale introduction of a refund cap on bank deposits for two years to avoid raising "unnecessary anxieties about the country's financial system."As a result, the government will freeze until April 2005 a plan to create new settlement-specific bank accounts that would be fully and permanently protected by the government even after the cap is placed on all other types of deposits.Koizumi expressed his intention to take the step at the day's meeting of the Council on Economic...

Citigroup chairman Sanford I. Weill hasn't had much to say about Enron since the scandal broke. But in late July he made a remark that pretty well summed up his feelings: "I wish I'd never heard of Enron." In fact, Weill would probably love to erase WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco, Qwest, and a number of other financial train wrecks from his short-term memory too. So, no doubt, would William Harrison, chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup's No. 1 competitor. Let's face it: It has been a long, uncomfortable summer for the two banking behemoths, which seem to be in the hot...