A massive foreclosure fraud scandal is rocking the U.S. mortgage market. Wall Street banks and their lawyers are fabricating documents, forging signatures and lying to judges-all to exploit troubled borrowers with enormous, illegal fees, and in some cases, improperly foreclose on borrowers who haven't missed any payments.
The fraud is so widespread that it could put some big banks out of business and even spark another financial collapse. Fortunately, things haven't fallen apart just yet. With strong leadership from President Barack Obama and Congress, the government can help keep troubled borrowers in their homes and prevent another meltdown.
One fraud begets another
As Danny Schecter emphasizes in an interview with GRITtv's Laura Flanders, this mess is just one element of a broader, criminal fraud at the heart of the foreclosure fiasco and resulting financial crisis. Banks pushed fraudulent loans onto borrowers during the housing bubble because the loans could be packaged into mortgage-backed securitizations and pawned off on hedge funds and other banks. Banks made a lot of money from this process, until the mortgages went bad and the fraud-packed securities plummeted in value.
Document drama
At the heart of any mortgage is a document called "The Note", which lays out the terms of the mortgage and the kinds of fees that banks can levy against borrowers if they fall behind on their payments. Owning the note also gives banks the right to foreclose when a borrower stops paying.
The trouble is, in an effort to cut costs and boost bonuses, banks haven't kept actually kept track of the note-in fact, they've actively destroyed the document so they don't have to deal with filing it. Now that mortgages are going bad, banks are taking advantage of the documentation vacuum they created to levy massive, illegal fees on borrowers both before and during the foreclosure process. They do this by manufacturing fake documents, forging signatures, and getting bogus signatures from notaries to approve sham documents.
This is all terribly unfair to borrowers. In some cases, illegal fees push borrowers over the edge into foreclosure, while in others, borrowers get saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in illegal fees after getting kicked out of their home. The situation is a national disgrace.
Failure to produce
But the situation also creates legal liabilities that can push banks into failure. If banks can't pony up the note, they don't have the right to foreclose-not without some serious, expensive legal maneuvering. And what's more, if the banks who created these shoddy securities can't supply notes, investors who bought the securities can force losses back on the banks that created them. Given that there are $2.6 trillion in mortgage-backed securities out there, banks are very worried that losses and lawsuits stemming from shoddy documentation could spark another round of major financial turmoil.
The sheer lack of documentation makes it very difficult for investors to decipher which banks are exposed to loads of red ink, and which banks are not. That's a recipe for financial panic.
Silencing whistleblowers
The banks know they're in serious trouble. That's why, as Andy Kroll notes for Mother Jones, mortgage servicers like GMAC are trying to silence whistleblowers who can explain the extent of these frauds. GMAC employee Jeffrey Stephan confessed to robo-signing 10,000 foreclosure documents every month without actually examining them. His acknowledgment sparked the current public scrutiny of foreclosure fraud, which has expanded to banks including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.
Kroll was one of the first to report on these fraudulent foreclosure mills and their illegal fees, and his coverage of the issue is essential reading for anybody following the unfolding crisis. Kroll also highlights the wave of new investigations and inquiries being launched by attorneys general in eight states, a phenomenon that is likely to expand as the crisis widens.
As Annie Lowrey details for The Washington Independent, one of those states is Ohio, where Attorney General Richard Cordray is suing GMAC, seeking $25,000 in damages for every fraudulent document the company has filed. In Ohio alone, there have been 190,000 foreclosures over the past two years. Cordray hasn't won his suit, and not every foreclosure will include fraud, but that's a potential loss of over $7 billion to GMAC from foreclosures in Ohio alone over the past two years. And that doesn't include what would be much higher losses to banks who packaged the mortgage securities, who are forced to repurchase them by burned investors.
Banks are doing their best to minimize the appearance of scandal, but the scope of potential losses from outright fraud is quite clearly a threat to the viability of the financial system. It's easy to imagine a disaster scenario in which the government has no choice but to take major action to prevent the economy from imploding (yes, it can actually get worse).
Obama needs to pick up the slack
So far, President Obama is sending mixed signals about his intentions. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama vetoed a bill that would have made it harder for borrowers to show that banks were engaging in fraud during the foreclosure process. That was on Friday-but by Sunday, top Obama adviser David Axelrod was telling the press that the administration was not ready to support a foreclosure moratorium, dismissing the fraud crisis as a set of "mistakes" with lender "paperwork."
As I note for AlterNet, Axelrod's comments are a complete mischaracterization of what's going on in the foreclosure process, and of what can be done. The housing market is a mess because banks have been systematically committing fraud. We cannot rely on such fraudsters to fix the mess-- some kind of government action is going to be necessary. Whatever the solution, the administration cannot stand with big Wall Street banks against the borrowers and investors that are being defrauded. Any solution must take the interest of troubled borrowers as paramount. We've already tried saving the banks without saving homeowners, and as the unfolding foreclosure fraud crisis illustrates, it didn't work.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
While some establishment pundits and think tanks don't think populism is a good idea, check out what some candidates out in the field are doing:
1. This Andrew Romanoff ad kicks ass. People tell me he wasn't exactly a raving populist as a legislator, but he sure is a candidate.
2. Senate candidates like Roxanne Conlin and Robin Carnahan are banging away at their corporate backed opponents on the TARP issue.
3. Alexi Giannoulias just came out with this great campaign document which echoes the Moveon campaign's themes and message.
4. Look at what Tom Perriello is doing in a conservative district in Virginia.
5. More and more candidates are signing up for Moveon's anti-Washington corruption campaign, including Chris Murphy, Donna Edwards, Romanoff, Conlin, Perriello, Gian..., Mac D'allesandro, Raul Grijalva, and many more.
I could actually go on and on, but you get the idea. Progressive populism is spreading like wild fire because candidates are figuring out that it is the only message that can save them.
With the Wall Street reform bill finally cleared through Congress, activists and intellectuals are pushing hard to make sure that this bill isn't the last word Congress utters about Big Finance. We need deeper and more robust reforms, but it's also critical to ensure that the new bill is implemented as effectively as possible. Part of that means appointing officials with a proven record as robust reformers-people like Elizabeth Warren.
Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a plan that would have broken up the nation's six largest banks firms into firms that could fail without wreaking havoc on the economy. Even though the defeat reinforces Wall Street's political dominance, there is still room for a handful of other useful reforms, like banning banks from gambling with taxpayer money and protecting consumers from banker abuses. After looting our houses, banks are now pushing for the ability to bet on movie box-office receipts, and will keep trying to financialize anything they can unless Congress acts.
Wall Street calls the shots
Writing for The Nation, John Nichols details last week's Capitol Hill damage. Today's financial oligarchy, in which a handful of bigwig bankers and their lobbyists are able to write regulations and evade rules they don't like, will still be in place after the Wall Street reform bill is passed. The lesson is clear, as Nichols notes:
Whatever the final form of federal financial services reform legislation, one thing is now certain: The biggest of the big banks will still be calling the shots.
Still worth fighting for
As I emphasize for AlterNet, Congress has made a terrible mistake here, but there is still room for reform. It took President Franklin Delano Roosevelt seven years to enact his New Deal banking laws. It took even longer to reshape public opinion of monopolies when President Theodore Roosevelt took on Corporate America in the early 1900s.
What's still worth fighting for? We have to curb the derivatives market-the multi-trillion-dollar casino that destroyed AIG. We have to impose a strong version of the Volcker Rule, which would ban banks from engaging in speculative trading for their own accounts. We have to change the way the Federal Reserve does business and force the government's most secretive bailout engine to operate in the open. And we have to establish a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency to ensure that the horrific subprime mortgage abuses are not repeated.
As Nomi Prins details for The American Prospect, the current reform bill will not effectively deal with the dangers posed by hedge funds and private equity firms-companies that partnered with banks to blow up the economy through investments in subprime mortgages. That means that whatever happens with the current bill, Congress must again take action next year to rein in other financial sector excesses.
The derivatives casino at the movies
As Nick Baumann demonstrates for Mother Jones, banks are doing everything they can to gobble up other productive elements of the economy. The economy crashed in 2008 in large part because banks had used the derivatives market to place trillions of dollars in speculative bets on the housing market. This wasn't lending, it was pure gambling: Instead of using poker chips, bankers placed their bets with derivatives. But, as Baumann emphasizes, banks are now looking to expand the sort of thing they can make derivatives gambles with. The latest proposal is to allow banks to bet on the box office success of movies. That's right, banks would be gambling on movies.
Hollywood may be shallow, but it isn't stupid. It doesn't want to see the banking industry repeat its destructive looting of the housing industry on the movie business, and is pushing hard to ban banks from betting on movies. But we can't count on every industry having a powerful lobby group to counter every assault from the banking system.
Taking stock in schools
Consider the unsettling report by Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now!. Gonzales details how big banks gamed the charter school system to score huge profits while simultaneously saddling taxpayers with massive debts that make teaching kids supremely difficult. By exploiting multiple federal tax credits, banks that invest in charter schools have been able to double their money in seven years-no small feat in the investing world-while schools have seen their rents skyrocket. One school in Albany, N.Y. saw its rent jump from $170,000 to $500,000 in a single year.
About that unemployment rate...
It's not like public schools are flush with cash right now. The $330,000 increase in rent could pay the salaries of more than a few teachers. As the recession sparked by big bank excess grinds on, even the good news is pretty hard to swallow. As David Moberg emphasizes for Working In These Times, the economy added 290,000 jobs in April, but the unemployment rate actually climbed from 9.7 percent to 9.9 percent in March. That's because the unemployment rate only counts workers who are actively seeking a job-if you want a job but haven't found one for so long that you give up, you're not technically "unemployed." All of those "new" workers are driving the official figures up.
In other words, it's still rough out there. And likely to stay rough as state governments try to deal with the lost tax revenue from plunging home values and mass layoffs. Nearly half of all unemployed people in the U.S. have been out of a job for six months or more. And while we'd be much worse off without Obama's economic stimulus package, that percentage is likely to grow this year, Moberg notes.
This is what unrestrained banking behemoths do. They book big profits and bonuses for themselves, regardless of the consequences for the rest of the economy. Congress absolutely must impose serious financial reform this year. After the November election, breaking up the banks must once again be on the agenda when Congress considers the future fate of hedge funds, private equity firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If we don't rein in Wall Street, banks will continue to wreak havoc on our homes, our jobs and even our schools. Congress must act.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Next week, the debate over financial reform will begin in earnest when Congress returns from its Easter break. Both political parties are gearing up for a major fight, and the stakes couldn't be higher. An out-of-control banking sector has cost the economy over 7 million jobs since 2007, and without major reforms, Wall Street could repeat this disaster in just a few years' time. But thanks to Wall Street's lobbying might, all of the necessary reforms are currently in jeopardy.
Key Reforms
Writing for The Nation, Christopher Hayes offers a useful primer on financial regulation, highlighting three reforms that are crucial to any bill.
With no effective regulation of consumer protection issues for years, the existing banking regulators were more focused on preserving bank profitability than on going to bat for ordinary citizens. If banks could make big profits with unfair gimmicks (or even fraud), regulators usually looked the other way. The solution is a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) charged with nothing but protecting consumers from banker abuses, an agency with the broad authority to both write rules and enforce them.
We need to rein in the $300 trillion market for derivatives, the complex financial contracts brought down AIG. Unlike ordinary stocks and bonds, derivatives are not traded on exchanges, so nobody really knows what is going on in this tremendous market. When something goes wrong, like with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, nobody can tell who the problem will effect. Without information, markets panic, and the entire financial system can collapse within a matter of days. Fortunately, this problem has a simple solution: require all derivatives to be traded on exchanges.
Too-big-to-fail is too big to exist. The U.S. has never had banks as large as those that exist today, and their size gives them enormous political clout. It's part of the reason why regulators didn't make banks obey consumer protection laws, and why banks have been so effective in derailing reform. It's been almost two years since the Big Crash, yet we are still wrangling over reform because giant banks deploy giant lobbying teams, and have almost unlimited resources to devote to their lobbying efforts. If we can't scale back the banks' power by breaking them up into smaller institutions, it's unlikely that other reforms will be effective.
As Margaret Dorfman emphasizes for American Forum, a strong CFPA would help protect small businesses, since a huge proportion of them are financed with credit cards and home equity loans (Dorfman is CEO of the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce, an advocacy group for women that should not be confused with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-a nasty lobbying front for a few hundred high-flying executives). As Dorfman notes, small businesses are where most new jobs come from-- if a regulator can ensure that these businesses are not pushed around by abusive banks, they can help repair our jobs.
Unfortunately, all three reforms are in real jeopardy as the bill moves to the Senate floor for a vote, as Simon Johnson notes in his Baseline Scenario blog carried at AlterNet. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) hasn't included any language on breaking up the banks, he has significantly watered down the CFPA proposal President Obama put forward, and derivatives reform was almost entirely gutted in the House.
What's at stake
So what's at stake? For some perspective, consider last week's jobs report. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, the U.S. economy added 160,000 jobs in March, the first significant monthly gain since the start of the recession, and the best jobs report in three years. But while it's good to see the economy actually adding jobs, at the March rate, it would take more than three-and-a-half years to win back the 7 million jobs lost since 2007.
This jobs disaster was not caused by faceless and unpreventable forces-it was the direct result of a reckless and unregulated banking system. Without major reforms, banks will always have this economic leverage when that recklessness overpowers them: bail us out, or watch your economy collapse.
This is an issue of basic democratic fairness, as Noam Chomsky explains for In These Times. Wall Street has purchased the right to bend public policy to anything that benefits banks-the rest of society is not their concern. The bailouts of 2008 and 2009 make that clear. After wrecking the economy to enrich themselves, bank executives then looted the public coffers with the threat of still further economic havoc.
And the political clout of America's largest banks insulates them from criticism when they profit from abuses-particularly when those activities don't spark wider economic crises. As Andy Kroll highlights for Mother Jones, J.P. Morgan Chase is currently making a killing by financing mountaintop removal mining (MTR). MTR is an ecological nightmare-literally a bombing campaign in which entire mountains in Appalachia are destroyed to make way for cheap coal. That's meant billions in profits for J.P. Morgan, and an environmental catastrophe for the United States.
Obama and Congress have a choice. They can play financial reform for campaign contributions, pushing a watered-down bill that will function as a set of reforms-in-name-only. Alternatively, they can do their jobs, confront a dangerous financial oligarchy head-on, and help build an economy that works for everyone.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
President Obama faced a remarkable political challenge in his recent State of the Union. Beset on all sides—by populists on the left and right who are highly suspicious of him and all of institutional Washington, by an economy that can produce GDP growth but not jobs, by an increasing consensus that he has failed to connect his legislative priorities to core values since the election—he succeeded in, if nothing else, reminding us of the energy and passion that helped him build a network of committed volunteers, grassroots campaign staff, and small dollar donors. In the speech he offered a litany of new financial policy prescriptions, including one—rolling $30 billion of TARP funds that big banks have already repaid into smaller, local banks—that has not garnered many headlines, but which represents an affirmation of the critical role that our communities play in our economic vibrancy.
In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.
The editors of The Nation lay out the High Court's hubris in no uncertain terms:
The Citizens United campaign finance decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and a Supreme Court majority of conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy, overturning more than a century of precedent in order to give corporations the ultimate authority over elections and governing. This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation's most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.
Citizens United and the financial crisis
How does this ruling have any bearing on the economy? Markets are not simply the product of random interactions between consumers and producers. Even under the most radical, laissez-faire economic theories, markets are defined, coordinated and policed by the government. For the economy to function at all, we need the government to define what constitutes fair play.
But over the past few decades, we've watched Congress and the executive branch rewrite those rules of the game under heavy corporate influence, creating artificial profits for a set of favored companies with very bad consequences for the broader economy.
The U.S. banking industry serves as a prime example. Since the 1980s, banks have been spending like crazy in all kinds of elections, and getting just about anything they want in return. I interviewed Harvard University Law Professor and TARP Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren for AlterNet, and she presented a concise but unsettling economic history of consumer protection law:
Thirty years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way.
The bank lobby and the AIG bailout
In Mother Jones, Corbin Hiar reveals how even a bank that engineered a massive tax fraud scheme was able to benefit from the AIG bailout. Major financial institutions convinced Congress to block any regulation of credit default swaps (CDS) all the way back in 2000. CDS contracts were essentially insurance on the value of financial assets-if the assets lost value, banks would still get paid as if they were highly profitable.
CDS insurance encouraged banks to engage in risky mortgage lending, and allowed them to book huge profits on those risky mortgages during the housing boom, even though many of those mortgages were doomed from the get-go. AIG binged so heavily on CDS that the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in the fall of 2008. But an AIG bankruptcy would have hammered the major banks who served as AIG's betting partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. Those banks would have received just pennies on the dollar from a bankrupt AIG. But under the bailout, the New York Federal Reserve paid the banks off at full value, without demanding any concessions whatsoever.
"The credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What's most shocking about the AIG bailout ... is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government," Hiar writes. "The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG-including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing."
The only AIG counterparty to even consider taking CDS losses was Swiss banking giant UBS, which was negotiating a separate settlement with the U.S. government over a massive tax evasion scheme. But even the tax fraudsters at UBS ultimately received full payment on their CDS exposure, and it now appears that the Swiss bank will be able to protect its wealthy tax-evading clients.
With the AIG bailout, the corporate takeover came full-circle. The banks purchased radical deregulation in Congress, and when the deregulated banks destroyed themselves, the government paid out billions to save them. The rest of the economy was ravaged by predatory lending, and taxpayers, not bankers, footed the bill for bank losses.
Redefining corruption
So the Citizens United decision will not introduce corporate influence in elections. Instead, it takes an uneven playing field and tilts it further in the favor of corporate executives. The Roberts court didn't just open the floodgates for corporate cash in U.S. elections and call it a day. It also explicitly redefined "corruption" to give corporations-and anyone else-greater leeway to financially curry favor with politicians. Heather K. Gerken details the new definition for The American Prospect:
The most important line in the decision ... was this one: "ingratiation and access ... are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned.
Most of us would consider the key lawmakers ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal as fundamentally corrupt-Abramoff flew former Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas to Scotland for golfing vacations in an effort to win greater leverage over DeLay's legislative agenda. The court's ruling claims that this kind of activity is not corrupt, and bars Congress from passing any laws to counteract it. As filmmaker Alex Gibney emphasizes in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the court has essentially taken Tom DeLay's corporatist philosophy and made it a piece of constitutional law.
"Tom DeLay's view is, we spend more money on potato chips than we do on political campaigns. His view would be, let the money rush down like great waters,," Gibney says. "I think the court was channeling Tom DeLay when they issued their recent decision."
Why citizens need to speak out now
So what can we do about this? As GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses in a roundtable discussion with several progressive leaders, there will be a long fight for a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate influence in politics. Until then, as progressive strategist Mike Lux explains, citizens will have to take an aggressive stance against Corporate America as shareholders. Corporate power is exercised by a handful of executives, but the resources that support that power come from ordinary Americans who own stock in those companies, primarily through retirement plans. By demanding that the giant firms we own do not highjack our democracy with lobbying, we can limit some of the damage from the court's recent decision.
If you liked the bank bailouts, then there's plenty for you to love about the Citizens United decision. If you didn't, then it's time to speak up.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Bailouts and political connections go hand in hand according to a just released academic study. The study, which was conducted by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan researchers, shows concretely that lobbying, campaign contributions, and the finance/federal government revolving door has helped the most damaging banks despite the dangers they pose to our economy.
In the age of the bailout, blaming the revolving door between corporate lobbying and politics is so obvious that it has become almost cliche. But the reason why it is one of the greatest handicaps to our political system is critically important. The revolving door turns "survival of the fittest" on its head by masking failure, propping up underperforming companies, and hiding inefficiencies in the markets. The new study shows the extent to which political connections influenced how TARP bailout funds were paid out.
The researchers found that there was a 31% increase in the likelihood of receiving bailout funds at financial companies whose executives had served on the board of the Federal Reserve. Banks that had connections with members of Congress who serve on key finance committees were found to be 26% more likely to receive bailout funds than banks without those kinds of connections. It is the revolving door between lobbyists and politicians that undermine a fair and accurate system for determining healthy policy.
But the research hits just the tip of the iceberg. Zach Carter at The Nation recently reported on a much deeper case of how the revolving door shapes U.S. policy. Our "too-big-to-fail economy" was developed in large part by one of the country's current top bank regulators; someone who has major conflict of interest with the banks he is supposed to regulate, Carter reports. John Dugan is now chief regulator of the largest US banks at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In one of his former positions at the Treasury, he was a chief architect of the three most influential pillars of banking deregulation that have been blamed for causing the financial meltdown last year (hat tip The Big Picture). In 1991, Dugan published a 750-page book where he successfully pushed for policies allowing banks to operate in multiple states without additional regulatory oversight, to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act allowing safe commercial banks to merge with risky investment and insurance companies, and to allow corporations like General Electric and Sears to own banks.
"[Dugan's book] was unquestionably the blueprint for the major Clinton-era deregulation," says Arthur Wilmarth Jr., a longtime banking scholar at George Washington University Law School. "It was the first real recipe for too big to fail."
A few years after publishing his book, Dugan was out of government and in a new job as a lobbyist with the American Bankers Association working his political connections to help pass the financial deregulatations he described in his book. From his earlier years in government, he had enough pals in Congress and the Clinton administration to get many of his policies enacted. Now he's back playing the game from the government side as one of the country's chief regulators. Same guy, same mind, same mission; just working from the inside at the moment. Indeed, "as head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Dugan played a leading role in gutting the consumer protection system, allowing big banks to take outrageous risks on the predatory mortgages that led to millions of foreclosures," Carter reports.
The revolving door actively hurts our economy because it puts our country on a path of survival of the richest, most connected lobbyists with cover-ups of market inefficiencies and bad consumer products. Dugan helped dangerous-for-the-consumer, highly-profitable-for-the-bank consumer products pop up throughout the 90's as subprime and adjusted rate loans. The Ross researchers agree that "the effects of political ties on federal capital investment are strongest for companies with weaker fundamentals, lower liquidity and poorer performance - which suggests that political ties shift capital allocation towards underperforming institutions." When money determines political power, the political system itself encourages corporations to put profit and lobbying above developing consumer products people actually need.
Dugan's role in aiding the creation of too-big-to-fail banks was born out of industry. Because Dugan has a highly influential political position, his weaving of politics and private interests which has spanned a career is problematic: "Over the course of nearly a quarter-century, Dugan has proved himself a staunch ally of the American financial elite as a Senate staffer (1985-89), a Treasury official (1989-93) and a lobbyist (1993-2005), building a career that culminated in 2005 when George W. Bush appointed him comptroller of the currency. When the financial system finally succumbed to its own excesses in September 2008, Dugan's fingerprints were all over the economic wreckage, but almost nobody noticed." Dugan's work is exemplary of the phenomena of policy being determined by webs of influence.
To be fair, lobbying presents opportunities for busy politicians to learn about issues. But, unfortunately the weaving of long tentacles in private and public sectors is a prerequisite to effective lobbying. Last week in DC, I met young career politicos who saw Capitol Hill jobs as a first stop on the road to high-paying lobbying jobs later on. Their political connections are golden resume nuggets. This complicated climb to the top is bearing down on policies we see today - President Obama made a campaign promise to keep out the lobbyists in his administration and failed, but the disheartening part is the bottom to top entrenchment of Citigroup executives and lobbyists and their work on financial reform policy.
At its inception, corporations were allowed to exist when they served the public's interest; the Supreme court ended that in the 1800-1900's . No longer bound by public duty, shareholders' returns have become a singular goal in the free market and politics race to the top - Congress seems to have understood less and less the impact these policies have on the economy at large. The money and secret inner circle of influence in DC is unfair because it creates a snowball effect of making the powerful more powerful and policy less about policy. Thus lobbying and its powerful cousin, the revolving door serve to prop up companies that may be weak or have bad products, leading to an economy that is more likely than not to become fractured or in other words, too big to fail.
The U.S. economy has diverged: Wall Street is living high on the hog, while everyone else is struggling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average eclipsed 10,000 for the first time since last October this week, even as unemployment continues to spiral out of control. And while President Barack Obama has taken some very real steps to help ordinary people, his administration's efforts to save Wall Street have far outstripped their support of workers.
Matthew Rothschild details these disparities for The Progressive. Regulatory reforms are moving through Congress at a snail's pace and the wreckage from the mortgage bubble is increasing. Wage cuts are more widespread today than in any era since the Great Depression, even as bankers capitalize on taxpayer bailouts to score epic profits and outsized bonuses.
"One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class," Rothschild writes. "The other economy is for everybody else."
So how can a few big banks make so much money while the rest of the economy suffers? As Kevin Drum explains for Mother Jones, the kind of banking that helps the economy is a pretty simple business of taking deposits and making loans. But a lot of what we now call "banking" really just consists of making bets on just about anything you can dream up.
"Banks aren't using all this cheap money to increase lending. They're using it to fund bigger and bigger bets in the fixed-income sector - the same sector that brought us junk bonds, credit default swaps, subprime loan securitization, interest rate carries, collateralized debt obligations, and all the rest of Warren Buffett's 'financial weapons of mass destruction.'"
The banks, in other words, are gambling with taxpayer money. A host of big finance companies have reported earnings in the past week, and the numbers are ugly: JPMorgan Chase reaped $3.59 billion in third-quarter profits and Goldman Sachs is planning to payout $23 billion in bonuses from speculative trading, while Bank of America and Citigroup are hemorraging money on mortgages and credit cards. The Wall Street casino is alive and well, but anything that is actually tied to the real economy is a disaster.
According to a new report from the U.S. Treasury, lending among the largest recipients of the Troubled Asset Relief Program fell by 17% from July to August. Small businesses can't cope with the cutoff in financing. A lot of businesses stay profitable over the long-term by borrowing money to meet short-term expenses. A baker can borrow money to buy flour and pay the bank back when she sells her bread. With bank lending on ice and consumers cutting back on spending, many small businesses are failing. Thousands more will be at risk in the next couple of years while unemployment remains elevated.
Writing for Salon, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes that these economic struggles are not reflected in major stock indices. Stock are soaring as big corporations who don't need bank loans score short-term profits from cost-cutting, i.e., mass layoffs. Obviously, this strategy can't work for very long. When millions of Americans are out of work, they can't afford to buy the things companies make.
There's an important lesson in our current economic state-of-affairs, as Katrina vanden Heuvel emphasizes for The Nation. The bailout has not done what Henry Paulson told us it would do. To be sure, it saved the banks-- even the strongest banks would have failed last fall without extraordinary government support. But it has not increased lending and kept the economy from disaster. The Obama administration, which has extended the Bush administration's support for bank balance sheets and bonus checks, is facing a political nightmare if it doesn't show produce some stronger economic results for ordinary citizens.
"Heading into 2010, the Obama administration must put itself back on the side of working people," vanden Heuvel writes.
The administration must address two critical problems in order to restore the nation's economic credibility. Putting the unemployed back to work is at the top of the list. Anything that saves jobs will help, including aid to states to keep teachers and cops on government payrolls and tax credits for companies that hire new full-time workers.
Something must also be done about the foreclosure epidemic. Nothing underscores our economic disparity like continuing housing mess, which has been in full-blown crisis mode since 2006. Despite a multi-trillion-dollar bank bailout, foreclosures are surging to all-time highs. Writing for The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz details the prolonged problems with the Obama administration's current foreclosure relief program.
While millions of troubled borrowers are eligible for the plan, which reduces monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, foreclosures are still outpacing loan relief efforts by more than two-to-one.
Banks are dragging their feet and the administration has imposed no penalties on lenders who don't live up to the program's standards. Instead, the Treasury Department is offering banks cash incentives to keep people in their homes. Bank of America, which has received $45 billion in direct government bailout funds, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees and other perks, has modified merely 11% of the mortgages it controls that are eligible for the plan.
Fernholz offers several potential improvements to Obama's foreclosure relief plan, including more aggressive government policing of the current plan and allowing foreclosed homeowners to continue to live in their homes as renters. With up to 12 million foreclosures projected by the end of 2012, just about anything the administration does will help.
The economy is a measure of social well-being, not a stock market index or a corporate earnings statement. Policymakers need to prove they can respond to the very real needs of all their citizens, not just those with financial clout.
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The economic free-fall is finally slowing down, although nobody expects the recovery to be very pleasant. Job losses and foreclosures are expected to increase well into next year. But even if our economic system gets back to normal, it's important to remember that gross inequalities are embedded in the global order. At home, minorities face significant barriers to economic security, while abroad, children in poor countries are denied access to basic nutrition. This is especially disheartening in the wake of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, which demonstrated that the world's economic leaders are more focused on bailing out banks than eradicating global poverty.
Robert Reich sums up the domestic economic scenario succinctly for Salon. The stock market is humming along, even as most Americans are tightening their belts. It's a counterintuitive situation: Wall Street is celebrating an economic recovery, but the consumers that drive our economy are still cutting back. Reich explains that the government has stepped in to fill the hole caused by consumer spending. Business executives may scream "Socialism!" when the tax man comes around, but without massive government help, those same CEOs would be watching their earnings and companies collapse.
Without the jobs and tax cuts created by President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package, we'd see more red ink from just about every industry. The entire U.S. mortgage market is currently supported by the federal government via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while other special initiatives like the Cash for Clunkers program brought the auto industry out of its recession-induced coma this summer.
The trouble is, while a few programs have been good for ordinary citizens, most of the government's economic salvage operations are aimed at giant corporations. Of all the paradoxes in today's economy, the most significant can be found in the financial sector. Bank stocks are up, even though banks are in serious trouble. Their customers are broke, foreclosures are soaring, and analysts are predicting a fresh round of multi-billion-dollar losses on commercial real estate loans soon. So what makes an investor want to buy a bank stock right now? Nothing but the government's limitless willingness to bail out banks.
How much bailout money did the government actually spend? We've all heard about the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), but the real haul for bankers is much, much bigger, as Nomi Prins and Christopher Hayes detail in a piece for The Nation. A whopping $17.5 trillion has been dedicated to subsidies, guarantees, below-market-rate loans, and other special perks for the financial industry. That's roughly one-fourth of the entire global economic output for a full year, and more than the entire annual productivity of the U.S.
Prins and Hayes make use of a clever thought experiment: What if, instead of spending the money on big institutions, the money had gone to a small-time gambler? It's an apt comparison. Taxpayer money went to financial speculators who used our homes and neighborhoods as poker chips in a global casino. The dozen or so bailouts the government has enacted seem absurd when we think of them as cheap financing for bets on the craps table. The number of programs is staggering. Bank executives love to proclaim that their banks didn't really need TARP money, they just accepted it because the government wanted them to. Next time you hear that boast (sometimes it sounds more like a whine), remember that every big bank in the country issued debt guaranteed by the government, then scored ridiculously cheap loans from the Federal Reserve while others got federal help through AIG, Fannie and Freddie.
"A fraction of the $17.5 trillion bailout could have been used to cut the principal of homeowners' mortgages (using homes, even devalued ones, as collateral) and cover student loans at zero percent interest," Prins and Hayes write. "Rather than pouring it into the top layers-the banks-a people's bailout would have cost less and been more humane. And it likely would have prevented the ongoing increase in defaults, foreclosures and general economic anxiety."
There are very good reasons to maintain a healthy financial sector, but only if banks actually do something useful. Banks are supposed to lend money to enable socially productive economic activity. This bailout money has not been spent on anything socially productive. Instead, it's covered losses from predatory lending and boneheaded speculation.
The dominant cause of the recession was the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble, which banks helped inflate with all outrageous loans. For decades, the value of a family's house was the foundation of most American middle-class wealth. When home prices took a nosedive, so did the spending power of every homeowner. Even borrowers who had affordable mortgage payments were hit hard. For borrowers stuck with expensive, predatory mortgages, the result was a wave of foreclosures. Writing for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll highlights a hard reality: Recovery in the housing market will not lead to middle-class financial security. It will be at least a decade before home prices reach pre-crash levels.
It's critical to remember how the recession is deepening existing inequalities, particularly along racial lines. In a post for In These Times, Michelle Chen explains how African Americans and Latinos are consistently paid less than whites during boom times, and are pushed even further down the ladder when things go bust. Communities of color are more likely to be targeted by predatory lending, which can devastate entire neighborhoods for generations. That means people of color are more likely to be foreclosed on, more likely to be laid off, and less likely to have access to basic necessities like health insurance.
The statistics are stark. In a story for New America Media, Christina Fernandez-Pereda, notes that while the overall unemployment stands at 9.7%, for minorities, the actual number is much higher. A full 15.1% of Blacks are unemployed, while unemployment among Asian Americans has doubled since early 2007. A full third of Latinos between the ages of 16 and 29 are unemployed.
The bank bailout has done nothing to improve the status of the global poor. The G-20 made grand promises to help those who need it most in developing countries this year, but so far, the talk has resulted in very little action. As Hayley Hathaway explains at Sojourners, only $50 billion has been dedicated to the 78 countries where humanitarian risk is greatest. As Hathaway notes, that's less than 25% of the TARP money received by the 20 largest U.S. banks.
Without major action, between 1.4 million and 2.8 million children will die of malnutrition in the next five years. Instead of pushing major humanitarian aid, the G-20 has promised $750 billion to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF was supposed to act as an international lender of last resort-if a nation's financial woes got really bad, they could get a loan from the IMF while they restructured. But IMF money ends up flowing to private-sector banks, and governments in need are forced to cut spending on programs that help the poor. When the G-20 met in Pittsburgh last week, a major topic of discussion involved giving developing nations a greater voice in IMF policies. But despite this talk, wealthy nations remain committed to the status quo, protecting the interests of their bankers eyeing future international bailouts.
For most people, it will be a long time before our economic recovery is a reality. But as the economy crawls out of the ditch, it's critical to build our future on a stronger foundation, one where we don't allow millions children to starve and where skin color does not determine economic security.
It's enough to make the average taxpayer's head spin. But here's another outrage:the Daily News reported Monday that Goldman-Sachs could soon receive up to $321 million in city and state taxpayer dollars as part of an incentive program to keep their offices near Ground Zero. That's on top of $1.6 billion the investment firm has already received in tax breaks and publicly backed bonds for its shimmering new downtown headquarters.
This is a stickup. Paulson is trying to stampede the Congressional herd into giving him powers and money that he knows they would never give if they had time to think it through carefully. It worked with the Patriot Act. It worked with the AUMF. He's betting it'll work again. Create a crisis (or lie one into existence) then demand dictatorial powers and unlimited spending authority to deal with it.
In effect, that quibble is like you walking into your local bank and saying "I need you to loan me a million bucks. Here are the conditions I must insist are met before I let you lend me the money. First..."
Say what?
He's given his tell, that he's a liar, a thief and a scam artist.
Time for Congress to call his bluff, and to see that the financial crisis is dealt with on their terms, with strict oversight by people they can trust, not by a scam artist and liar like Paulson.
Of course, Congress didn't call his bluff and Congress did fall for it. But let's remember our history. The House voted against. Nancy Pelosi indicated that she would not pass TARP unless Republicans voted for it in the same proportion as Democrats. They weren't going to do that, so TARP was dead.
Then Barack Obama stepped in and started twisting arms. TARP is Obama's baby. If you like it, or don't like it, remember, without Barack Obama it would have died.
This is the fundamental problem right now with Democrats. They passed a lousy stimulus, they made TARP Democratic policy by passing it with majority Democratic votes and they are on their way to passing a lousy healthcare bill which won't even kick in till 2013.
Bad policy leads to bad outcomes. Bad outcomes get blamed on the incumbents (as they should). TARP, the Stimulus, healthcare and the economy become less and less the Republican's problem every month that passed. Even if they screwed it up, Democrats control the House, Congress and the Presidency. It's up to them to fix George Bush's mess, and if they don't they will be judged as failures, and that judgment will be accurate and deserved.
And the outcomes are going to be bad. The stimulus bill was both badly put together (too many tax cuts, not properly targeted) and too small. The healthcare bill should be single payor, because single payor is proven to work and the witch's brew that Congress has put together isn't proven to work and they can't afford to fail. And TARP was, and is, a piece of crap, but the differences between Bush/Paulson financial policy and Obama/Geithner are so thin as to be largely cosmetic.
Policy has consequences. The "compromise" position between "doing it right" and "doing it wrong" may work sometimes, but it doesn't work when a nation is in crisis and has spent 30 years digging itself into a hole.
By the time Obama comes up for reelection, Americans won't have better healthcare and they will have less jobs than before the recession and the stimulus.
That's what he'll be judged on, and all because he signed on for Paulson/Bush financial policies, and compromised his key domestic and economic policies to the point where they wouldn't work.
President Barack Obama is scheduled to unveil his agenda for revamping financial regulation later this week. As the economy struggles though a recession created by the banking industry, it's crucial that Obama and his advisers craft a set of rules ensuring that the financial sector strengthens our economy instead of destroying it.
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
With workers all over the globe trudging through a catastrophic recession, it's almost a given that governments will be battling the economic slide for a long time. Part of the effort to rebuild must involve new rules and regulations, but meaningful systems for economic accountability will be just as essential. If we do not hold the reckless executives who caused this crisis accountable for their actions, we risk regressing into similar turmoil in the near future.
I am very glad that President Obama continues to talk in terms of strong new regulatory system for the financial industry. It is good to have a President, unlike the last one, who actually thinks government playing an oversight role in an industry that could destroy the entire world economy is a useful thing.
The coming legislative battle over the future of banking regulations will be an intense one, with lots of different ideas in the mix. Personally, I am not in favor of one big idea that the White House is floating, which is giving the Federal Reserve- one of our nation's most secretive and least democratic institutions- more power in the regulatory structure, especially given their complete failures to use the regulatory power they already have in constructive ways over the past decade. But, hey, this is going to be a long and involved debate, with lots of ideas floating, and big pros and cons to each of them. It's good we are having the debate right now, with the memory of the abject failures of our past regulatory structure fresh in our memories. What will be urgently important is keeping progressive minded folks engaged in this battle.
There is one hugely important thing that is not being talked about nearly enough, though.
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