The Vicious New Bank Shakedown That Could Seriously Ruin Your Life. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com It’s hard to imagine a more loathsome figure than the mob debt collector, a.k.a the “hired muscle.” It was this bruiser’s job to get the money owed to the Boss, by whatever methods he saw fit. That might include coming to your house in the dead of night to break your kneecaps. Whatever it took. The collector was promised a cut of that money, and he was going to get it. Shop ▾ Gangsta-style big banks have taken up where this character left off. Here’s the skinny: After widespread outrage over the big banks’ last crime wave against the American consumer – the “robo-signing” scam in which homeowners were hustled out of their houses by banks that sent fraudulent paperwork through the courts, they are at it again.
Another nasty trick Chase is accused of deploying is what’s known, appropriately, as “sewer service.” All of this, of course, is unlawful. It’s interesting to hear what President Obama has to say about this. Of course it’s not just JPMorgan Chase. The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever | Politics News. Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments.
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia Why? The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. "You name it," says Frenk. It’s Good to Be a Goldman. Here’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, and while we’re at it, take this obscenely huge bonus for having wrecked the economy. As the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program pointed out in a devastating report this week, “excessive” compensation was approved by the Treasury Department for the executives of the three companies that required the largest taxpayer bailouts to survive. Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Wall Street investment banks and the financial crisis. (Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak) In a stinging rebuke of Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department, the report “found that once again, in 2012, Treasury failed to rein in excessive pay.”
Whopping pay packages of $5 million or more were allowed by the Treasury Department for a quarter of the top executives at AIG, General Motors and Ally Financial, the former financial arm of GM. © 2012 TruthDig.com. 'Sack Of S**t': 10 Of Corporate America's Most Infamous Emails. Get Business Newsletters: It’s one thing to mislead clients about the health of an investment. It’s another to then admit it in an email. Apparently many on Wall Street will never learn the difference. The latest example of powerful people putting incriminating thoughts in writing comes via Eric Schneiderman, New York’s Attorney General, who filed a suit against JPMorgan Chase Monday accusing Bear Stearns (now owned by JPMorgan) of not telling investors the quality of the mortgage bonds it was selling was starting to deteriorate. As part of the suit, Schneiderman’s team turned up some emails from a Bear Stearns executive, describing the bonds as “shit breather” and “sack of shit” among other terms of endearment.
Bear Stearns is certainly not the first company to get caught up in an email scandal. Loading Slideshow Also on HuffPost: Filed by Jillian Berman | Chase Bank Targeted in Probe Over Allegations of Robosigning in Credit Card Collections. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is reportedly taking a good, hard look at the practices that credit card giant JP Morgan Chase used in its credit card collections business.
American Banker has reported at length on this new “robosigning” bombshell. “The bank’s errors could call into question the legitimacy of billions of dollars in outstanding claims against debtors and of legal judgments Chase has already won,” it says in an article published earlier this week. This was big business for Chase; the article says in 2009 alone, it earned more than $1.2 billion off old credit card debt. The problem was that the numbers didn’t always add up. The magazine talked to current and former employees who say they were pressured to sign off on documents verifying the debts even when the amounts couldn’t be confirmed.
(MORE: J.P. American Banker also cites whistleblower complaints that describe an ongoing, deliberate practice of destroying documents that favored debtors.