Citigroup Mortgage Division Agrees to Pay $158.3 Million in HUD Settlement. Citigroup Inc.
(C) agreed to pay $158 million to settle a whistle-blower’s claims that a unit of the third-biggest U.S. lender deliberately reduced oversight of its loan origination process, causing a surge in borrower defaults. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara today said the federal government had joined and resolved a civil lawsuit alleging that the unit, CitiMortgage, violated the requirements of a Federal Housing Administration program that allowed the lenders to decide for which of their home loans they would be federally insured against loss. CitiMortgage admitted to falsely stating that some loans met FHA and U.S. Housing and Urban Development agency standards for mortgage eligibility, the prosecutor said. “For far too long, lenders treated HUD’s insurance of their mortgages like they were playing with house money,” Bharara said in the statement.
U.S. Citigroup. Citi to Pay $158 Million in Mortgage Settlement. John O’Brien: Mortgage Settlement Fails to Address Banking Criminal Enterprise. “Mortgage Fraud is a Top Priority for This Administration” By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep.
Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Since the President is now establishing yet another committee to look into the mortgage fraud crisis, I figured it would be useful to look into the history of the Obama and Bush administrations’ approaches to the problem of vast financial fraud. As with most Obama government activities, it’s largely a story of policy continuity with the last administration, though the boom-bust cycle meant that there was not a huge amount of public pressure on the Bush administration to act, so their PR apparatus was less visible.
In 2009, President Obama established the Financial Fraud Enforcement Network, whose purpose was “to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis, and to prevent another crisis from happening.” The Big Picture » How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis » Print. I am in New York this afternoon attending and speaking at the Bank Credit Analyst Conference.
The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement. As readers may know by now, 49 of 50 states have agreed to join the so-called mortgage settlement, with Oklahoma the lone refusenik.
Although the fine points are still being hammered out, various news outlets (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal) have details, with Dave Dayen’s overview at Firedoglake the best thus far. The Wall Street Journal is also reporting that the SEC is about to launch some securities litigation against major banks. Fed Independence 2025. Headline: The Fed just forced mortgage servicers that got caught submitting "documents that were not properly notarized," among other sins, to cough up money towards principal reduction, for people unaffected by the notarization scandal, as well as to fund "nonprofit housing counseling organizations" and other policy objectives.
Deeper question: What will the Fed look like in 2025? How long can it stay independent as it takes on more and more power, and uses that power for these kinds of political policy actions? Act 1: Three recent news items add up to a scary picture.Item 1: Led by the White House, the state Attorneys General announced their "settlement" with banks. Cochrane Sees Moral Hazard Only in One Direction. Great Leap Forward » State AGs Cave to Banksters. Author: L.
Randall Wray · · Share This Print. Why the Foreclosure Deal May Not Be So Hot After All. Why Millions Won’t Get Help From Big Mortgage Settlement. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s opposition to principal reductions on mortgages means about half of homeowners in the U.S. couldn’t qualify for the most significant help from banks’ settlement today with states.
Quelle Surprise! Taxpayers Will Be Paying for Part of Mortgage Settlement. The Belated Mortgage Fraud/Crisis Investigation. The most interesting news from the SOTU address was the very belated appointment of a mortgage investigation task force, the Office 0f Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses.
You may recall that back in April of 2011, I presented to the National Association of Attorneys General a short keynote speech. It was titled “How Systemic Bank Fraud Contributed to the Financial Crisis.”In particular, you should review pages 14-17, and 22-30. Bank of America Settlements Impede Fraud Probe, Arizona Says. (Adds Arizona’s participation in multistate settlement in 13th paragraph.)
Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. is impeding an investigation of its loan modification practices by negotiating settlements with borrowers who must agree to keep them secret and not criticize the bank in exchange for cash payments and loan relief, Arizona officials say. The Arizona Attorney General’s office is asking a court to block those aspects of the settlements and require the bank to turn over all the agreements.
The bank denies any wrongdoing. One 2011 accord involving a borrower facing foreclosure who defaulted on a $253,142 mortgage included a $5,000 payment, plus $7,500 for legal fees, and the defaulted payments were waived and the loan was modified to a 40-year term with a 2 percent interest rate, court documents show. Senate Report details elaborate Wall Street Mortgage Fraud. A report released by the U.S. Senate paints a scathing picture of mortgage fraud on Wall Street enabled by the malfeasance and blatant disregard for oversight by Federal agencies that regulated them. A 650-page report (PDF), titled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,” released by the U.S.
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich) cites 5,800 internal documents and the private communications of bank executives, credit rating agencies, investors and regulators and details Wall Street's fraudulent business practices and conflicts of interest that fueled the mortgage meltdown, undermined public trust in the U.S. markets in the months leading to the financial crisis, and reveals reckless activities that were ignored by the banks and their federal regulators.