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GFC Act I - Bank Credit Crisis

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What's Behind the Foreclosure Crisis. By Numerian "MERS acts as nominee in the county land records for the lender and servicer. Any loan registered on the MERS® System is inoculated against future assignments because MERS remains the nominal mortgagee no matter how many times servicing is traded.

MERS as original mortgagee (MOM) is approved by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, FHA and VA, California and Utah Housing Finance Agencies, as well as all of the major Wall Street rating agencies. " About theMortgage Electronic Registration System, MERS The foreclosure scandal surrounding the US financial industry is being portrayed by the banks as a technical problem which requires that some documentation errors be fixed.

Terms like “technicalities” and “document flaws” are meant to sound innocent and minor, when the truth is that the foreclosure problem is just one part of a much bigger crisis that is still out of sight for the media, and apparently being downplayed by the industry and its political apologists. Wall Street bankers at front of queue for scarce swine flu vacci. Wall Street. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA Just when you thought the popularity of Wall Street bankers had hit rock bottom, top US financial institutions have caused uproar for allegedly muscling their way to the front of the queue to get hold of scarce swine flu vaccines. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were among the first employers in New York to receive shipments of the widely sought after H1N1 antidote from public health authorities this week, prompting furious attacks from political critics who claim bankers are getting privileged treatment.

Christopher Dodd, Democratic senator from Connecticut, declared himself "stunned" that top banks had received vaccines when a shortage of doses has led to lengthy queues at clinics and hospitals across the US. "Vaccines should go to people who need them most, not people who happen to work on Wall Street," said Dodd, who wrote a letter of protest to the US health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius. Banks brace for Latvia collapse. A GFC Trilogy {PBS Fontline} The gang of five, and how they nearly ruined us - Viewsflow. Running in the Shadows - Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaway. The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Indepen. The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region.

He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history. But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. I. Karen Andrews can't speak. Her story comes out in stutters, over four hours. II. III. IV. V. Rudd Monthly GFC. There is a sense that we are now living through just such a time: barely a decade into the new millennium, barely 20 years since the end of the Cold War and barely 30 years since the triumph of neo-liberalism - that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time. The agent for this change is what we now call the global financial crisis.

In the space of just 18 months, this crisis has become one of the greatest assaults on global economic stability to have occurred in three-quarters of a century. As others have written, it "reflects the greatest regulatory failure in modern history". It is not simply a crisis facing the world's largest private financial institutions - systemically serious as that is in its own right. It is more than a crisis in credit markets, debt markets, derivatives markets, property markets and equity markets - notwithstanding the importance of each of these. Wall Street on the Tundra | vanityfair.com.

Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjavík to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He’d never been to Iceland, knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another. Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history.

“You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”

#GFC snapshots

The Credit Crisis Is Going to Get Worse. The Mess That Greenspan Made. Hero with 1000 faces. The Fed’s Exit Strategy - CBS MoneyWatch.com. Give China a break... its economy is saving the rest of us from. Stocks Plunge as Investors Fear Spread of Greece Crisis. Citigroup’s total E-mini volume for the entire day was only 9 billion, suggesting that the origin of the trades was elsewhere, according to someone close to Citigroup’s own probe of the situation. The E-minis trade on the CME. A CME spokesman said it found no problems with its systems. The Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange took the unusual step of declaring that they would cancel some trades that took place during the height of the selloff. Both markets said they will cancel all trades more than 60 percent above or below market that occurred between 2:40 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.

New York time. Other market sources said the erroneous trading involved the IWD exchange-traded fund or the S&P 500 Mini, according to Reuters. Amid the sell-off, Procter & Gamble shares plummeted nearly 37 percent to $39.37 at 2:47 p.m. The shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but the significantly lower share price was recorded on a different electronic trading venue.

—Reuters contributed to this report.