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U.S. prosecutors could make Bank of America Corp. pay more than $13 billion to resolve probes into the lender's sale of bonds backed by home loans in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, Bloomberg reported on Friday. Last month, the bank agreed to pay $9.5 billion to resolve Federal Housing Finance Agency claims, and the new settlement would come on top of that, according to Bloomberg.

Do you know Ally Financial Inc.? You've no doubt seen their commercials. They used to be all over the tube hawking their high-yielding certificates of deposit. Now they're all over the tube with their "no hidden fees" campaign. . . . But Ally isn't funny. It recently announced that it's launching an initial public offering (IPO) of its stock at a price per share of $25 to $28. The shares will be offered by the U.S. Treasury as part of its planned exit of its investment in Ally during the subprime crisis in 2008. I've heard some analysts say this...

We know the pattern by now. A crisis arises. As my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Chris Horner puts it, this administration says, “There’s no time to waste, we must do something now, sign here, details to follow.” And every time, we discover that we have signed up for more than we bargained for. That was the case with the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010 supposedly to solve the problems that caused the financial crisis. Only now are we seeing the details to follow. They amount to a government takeover of the financial industry and increased government control over our behavior,...

The U.S. Justice Department plans to bring mortgage fraud cases against several financial institutions early in 2014, using as a template the case that ended last month in JPMorgan Chase & Co's $13 billion settlement, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday. In an interview with Reuters, Holder would not say which companies or how many could face lawsuits but said the Justice Department was in contact with them and it was hard to say whether the talks would lead to settlements. "We have a number of investigations that are coming to a head at the same time," he...

Radical in-your-face pressure groups that are part of President Obama’s political machine may soon reap a $4 billion windfall thanks to a huge cash settlement the administration extracted from lending giant JPMorgan. The settlement, which weighs in at a total of $13 billion, was unveiled last week by the Justice Department. In it JPMorgan acknowledged what DoJ called “serious misrepresentations to the public” about the mortgage securities transactions. The $4 billion is supposed to be used to provide relief to underwater homeowners and potential homebuyers. But there’s a catch. According to the Department of Justice, if JPMorgan fails to shell...

lmost exactly one year ago we wrote "The Next Subprime Crisis Is Here: Over $120 Billion In Federal Student Loans In Default" in which we took the latest (2009 three year cohort) loan default data on Federal Student Loans released by the Department of Education and applied it to the total amount of student loans outstanding, which back then was $914 billion. Yesterday, ED.gov provided its annual update - this time to the 2010 three year and 2011 two year cohorts - and to nobody's major surprise, learned that things just got even worse. To wit: "The national two-year cohort...

Fannie and Freddie have been in operation for decades without problems until recently. Fannie began in 1938 as a quasi-governmental agency making affordable homes available to people by making the financing easier and funds more readily available by establishing a secondary market for mortgages. Previously banks had held onto their mortgages in a system called portfolio mortgages and were made mostly to their own account holders. With the homes as collateral, the banks then lent out that same money again to other local borrowers. If you remember the scene from It's a Wonderful Life when there is a run on...

Mel Watt, President Obama’s nominee for director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, pushed government programs to help welfare recipients buy homes during the creation of the subprime mortgage bubble. Watt, a 20-year Member of Congress from North Carolina’s 12th district, also had a hand in programs allowing borrowers with poor credit to buy homes with no down payment. The American financial system was subsequently destroyed when millions of bad borrowers defaulted on their loans, setting off a market crash that wiped out nearly 40 percent of the net worth of Americans. In 2002, Watt teamed up with Freddie Mac...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog_post/beyond_the_echo_chamber/ Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm Advice from "beyond the echo chamber" We just learned the economy lost another 600,000 jobs last month. It's a staggering number, and it underscores just how deep this crisis is – and, as the President pointed out this morning, it’s accelerating. That's why he created the Economic Recovery Advisory Board -- to solicit ideas from "beyond the echo chamber of Washington, DC." "I’m not interested in groupthink, which is why the Board reflects a broad cross-section of experience, expertise, and ideology," he said. "We’ve recruited...

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Thursday will nominate a longtime fundraiser to run the Commerce Department and a top economic adviser as the next U.S. Trade Representative, a White House official said. Commerce nominee Penny Pritzker, a businesswoman, philanthropist and Hyatt hotel heiress, is Obama's final pick to fill vacancies among Cabinet secretaries in his second term. The Commerce post has been vacant since last summer, when former Secretary John Bryson resigned after he said he suffered a seizure that led to a series of traffic collisions. USTR nominee Michael Froman is one of Obama's senior economic advisers and a former...

Sub-prime finance has attracted a bit of interest (no pun intended) over at TTAC lately, and the segment itself has experienced phenomenal growth in the post-bailout era. Auto lending site www.carfinance.com released a list of the top 10 most popular new and used vehicles as purchased by sub-prime buyers over the last six months. While it’s not the most complete list by any means, it does give us a glimpse into the choices of sub-prime buyers. As far as we know, no such list has ever been compiled prior to this.

There’s something macabre about an imminent train wreck, you know exactly what is coming but you can’t help but watching. Now imagine that instead of watching that train wreck from atop a building a safe distance away, you’re standing right between the train and the tanker truck that has stalled on the tracks. That’s a different story all together. At that point, rather than being a mere fascination it’s a matter of life or death. You’ve seen the damage a train wreck can do. That’s why it was fascinating in the first place. The difference now of courses is that...

Hey, who's up for burying consumers in ridiculous loans and selling them off as securities on Wall Street? I mean, it's not as is this has worked out badly in the past, is it? Well, okay, it didn't work out so well when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pulled this stunt with home loans, but it should work out wonderfully for automobiles. After all, they never lose value on the market. My dad’s 1978 green Pinto station wagon would be worth around $123,000 today, I’m sure, so at least the collateral would be worth it (via Ed Driscoll and Jim...

On one level, it’s almost unbelievable that anyone would ask this less than five years after the housing-bubble crash and the near-wipeout of Western financial institutions. On another, it’s almost inevitable, given the efforts by the governing class and the media to ignore the central failure in that bubble, which was incentivizing increasingly risky loans with government cash and coercion, which created a false-equity trajectory that nearly ruined us. If that core cancer gets overlooked, it simply keeps coming back: The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit,...

In his early activist days, Barack Obama the community organizer sued banks to ease lending practices... During his time as a community organizer Barack Obama led several protests against banks to make loans to high risk individuals. ... A new study by the respected National Bureau of Economic Research found that Democrats are to blame for the subprime mortgage crisis. ... Republicans warned Democrats of the impending doom in 2004.

For a number of years now, a number of critics of the American system of higher education have rightly insisted that there is a "bubble" in the system, with more and more students running up loans in amounts they will find difficult to pay back. This bubble has been fueled by the federal government's lavish subsidization of the student loan program (which was nationalized four years ago), in a way similar to how the housing bubble was fueled by government agencies pushing subprime mortgages. This extensive government largess has produced a number of unintended -- though not necessarily unforeseeable --...

The American Civil Liberties Union Monday filed a class action lawsuit against investment bank Morgan Stanley alleging racial discrimination in subprime mortgage practices. “The class-action lawsuit, submitted in a federal court a stones throw from the New York Stock Exchange, alleges that Morgan Stanley [via now-bankrupt financial agent, New Century Mortgage Company] intentionally steered blacks in the Detroit metropolitan region into subprime loans. Blacks who were credit-worthy and qualified for traditional mortgages were caught up in Morgan Stanley’s biased dragnet.” Of the 9 million foreclosures since 2007, four out of 10 have been against people of color. Both Bank of America...

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Morgan Stanley on Monday, charging the Wall Street firm discriminated against African-American homeowners and violated federal civil rights laws by providing funding for risky mortgages. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, is the first that connects racial discrimination to the process of bundling subprime loans into mortgage-backed bonds that were then sold to institutional investors and pension funds. The lawsuit was filed behalf of five Detroit residents, and asks the court to certify the case as a class action. It argues as many as 6,000 black homeowners in the Detroit...

September 10, 2012, 9:13 AM Vital Signs Chart: More Auto Loans Going to Subprime Borrowers By Ben Casselman More car loans are going to risky borrowers. Nearly 12% of new auto loans went to subprime borrowers — those with credit scores below 620 — in the second quarter, the most since the market for risky loans dried up in 2008. Somewhat safer “outside of prime” loans — those to borrowers with scores below 680 — rose to 25.4% in the second quarter, up from under 17% in 2009.

"Democrats pumped subprime mortgage market, triggering banking collapse"In the current narrative presented by Democratic Party operatives, the banking industry collapse of September 2008 was caused by tax cuts under George W. Bush and supply-side economics tracing back to the era of Ronald Reagan. The narrative, however, ignores the personal responsibility Barack Obama and Democratic Party operatives played in creating the subprime mortgage market, beginning with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The 2008 banking collapse was triggered by a series of failures in the mortgage-backed securities market resulting from massive defaults in the subprime mortgage market and...