4closurefraud.org has compiled an interesting list of the “Cost of doing business” in the fraudulent corrupt world of falsely securitized loans. To date, according to this list Chase has paid $33,318,000.50. And they are considered to be a strong bank because they have, so far, gotten away with financial murder. But as the new film, “The Big Short” will show, fraud “Always goes south.”
The big question is when people actually come to understand that there was no loan what will happen? It wasn’t a gift and it wasn’t loan, so what is it? The fact is that the banks stole investors money and then put some of it use for the benefit of the banks and not the investors. They trapped investors into deals they never wanted and did the same to borrowers. The rest of the money they kept as “trading profits.”
If the banks were to prevail the new law would be that you can steal money, make a deal, and enforce it against both the person from whom you stole the money and the person who thought they were getting a loan when in fact they were being used as a pawn in fraudulent scheme to steal the identity of the borrowers. What a ride!
And the next question is how much should be awarded as a punitive damage award? $33 Billion has not been enough to even make Chase blink.
Also see http://4closurefraud.org/2015/09/22/the-big-short-trailer-2015-thebigshort/
JPMorgan’s Fines To Date: The Cost of Doing Business
http://4closurefraud.org/2015/06/03/jp-morgans-fines-to-date-the-cost-of-doing-business/
Filed under: foreclosure | Tagged: 4foreclosurefraud, Chase, The Big Short |
elex: judges like these are everywhere. Protecting their own investments, I’m sure.
Tolle: Bernanke was a total douche. Sorry, too nice? How about totally corrupt and a NWO kinda guy you would run over with your car if he EVER stepped in front of it?
Big Ninth Circuit Win for ‘Chapter 20′ Debtors
By JUNE WILLIAMS
ShareThis
(CN) – The ability to permanently dismiss foreclosure proceedings is still available to debtors who seek Chapter 7 bankruptcy immediately followed by Chapter 13 relief, the Ninth Circuit ruled Thursday.
Though the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCA) of 2005 prevents these so-called “Chapter 20” debtors from successive discharges, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit said Thursday that “nothing prevents a debtor from taking advantage of the other Chapter 13 tools available to him.”
Even lien-voidance provisions that can permanently bar creditors from foreclosing are not applicable, the court found.
The ruling affirms the decision of a bankruptcy judge and a federal district judge in Washington to disallow HSBC’s lien on the home of Chapter 20 debtors Robert and Darlene Blendheim.
The last judge to deny HSBC relief had said that enforcing the bank’s lien against the Blendheims “creates an extremely harsh result: a debtor who successfully completed a Chapter 13 plan, obeying all the requirements approved by the court, would see many of his debts spring back to life.”
Affirming this decision Thursday, the three-judge panel in Seattle called it “undisputed that HSBC’s claim was not allowed.”
HSBC timely filed the lien claim, but failed to timely respond when the bankruptcy court denied the claim, according to the 47-page opinion.
“Where a claim is timely filed and objected to, on the other hand, disallowance is not automatic,” Judge Jay Bybee wrote for the court. “This case is a good example: HSBC timely filed its proof of claim, received service of the Blendheims’ objection, and then had a full and fair opportunity to contest the disallowance of its claim – it simply chose not to.”
The Bankruptcy Code allows some previously voided liens to be reinstated at the conclusion of a Chapter 13 proceeding, but the panel rejected HSBC’s argument that a discharge is the only way to avoid this.
“If correct, this would create an insurmountable obstacle for ‘Chapter 20′ debtors, like the Blendheims, who are statutorily ineligible to obtain a discharge, having filed for Chapter 13 reorganization within four years of obtaining a discharge under Chapter 7,” Bybee wrote.
Since the closure of Chapter 13 proceedings void liens as well, the panel found that HSBC’s theory rests upon a “fatal flaw” that a Chapter 13 case must end in conversion, dismissal or discharge.
The panel also denied HSBC’s claim that permitting the Blendheims to void the bank’s lien would subvert Congress’ intention with the BAPCPA.
“Had Congress wished to prevent Chapter 7 debtors from having a second bite at the bankruptcy apple, then it could have prohibited Chapter 7 debtors from filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy entirely,” Bybee wrote.
“Our interpretation gives full effect to Congress’s intent to prevent abusive serial filings and successive discharges through BAPCPA,” he added. “Prohibiting successive discharges helps curb abuse of the bankruptcy system by ensuring that a debtor once granted a discharge of debt is not granted yet a second discharge just a few years later. A debtor who has racked up significant credit card debt and received a Chapter 7 discharge, for example, will not obtain a second clean slate upon the filing of a Chapter 13 petition. Further, we agree with the district court that reaching the contrary conclusion would create ‘an extremely harsh result’ that is inconsistent with the Bankruptcy Code’s text and purpose.”
As for HSBC’s due-process claim, Bybee said the record showed “HSBC’s rights were honored at every turn.”
The panel also found the Blendheims did not abuse the bankruptcy system and filed the petitions in good faith.
For good measure, the court tucked in another win for the Blendheims into the decision. Though Chief U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman denied the couple attorneys’ fees, the Ninth Circuit said this issue should first have gone before the bankruptcy court.
Comment: Excellent outcome here. Pay attention to these cases. The bankster friendly EDWI will be squirming over this one……
And succinctly said in a blast from the past
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2009/12/13/obamas-big-sellout-president-has-packed-his-economic-team-wall-street-insiders
yes business as usual
This is old but as above
Will J.P. Morgan Chase Be Torn A New One?
By Matt Taibbi
Beginning at 9:30 a.m. Friday, I’m going to be live-blogging a hearing held by Senator Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations – the best crew of high-end detectives this side of The Wire, in my opinion – who will be grilling J.P. Morgan Chase executives and high-ranking federal regulators in a get-together entitled, “J.P. Morgan Chase “Whale” Trades: A Case History Of Derivatives Risks And Abuses.” This follows this afternoon’s release of a brutal 301-page report commissioned by Levin and Republican John McCain by the same name.
The Subcommittee investigators, largely the same crew who unraveled financial scandals surrounding infamous Goldman Sachs trades like Abacus and Timberwolf, and also took on HSBC’s trans-global money-laundering activities in an extraordinarily detailed report issued last summer, have now taken aim at the heart of the Too-Big-To-Fail issue through its examination of the much-publicized catastrophic derivative trades made by its amusingly-nicknamed “London Whale” trader, Bruno Iksil, last year.
Most ordinary people dimly remember the London Whale episode now, and even at the time struggled to understand even the vaguest contours of the story while mainstream reporters (including people like myself) were trying with all their might to make sense of it from afar. What most people got out of that story was that J.P. Morgan Chase somehow lost buttloads of money through some sort of impossibly complex derivative trade – billions, though nobody could ever settle on an exact number – and that this was somehow a very bad thing that required the attention of the federal government, although even that part of it was a bit of a mystery to most ordinary people.
Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail Why should we care if a private bank, or more to the point a private banker like Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, loses a few billion here and there? What business is it of ours? And why did we have to have congressional hearings about it last year? The whole thing certainly seemed a big mystery to Dimon himself, who dragged himself to Washington and spent the entire time rolling his eyes and snorting at Senators’ questions, clearly put out that he even had to be there.
This new report by the Permanent Subcommittee answers the question of why the public needed to be involved in that episode. What the report describes is an epic breakdown in the supervision of so-called “Too Big to Fail” banks. The report confirms everyone’s worst fears about what goes on behind closed doors at such companies, in the various financial sausage-factories that comprise their profit-making operations.
If the information in the report is correct, Chase followed the behavioral model of every corrupt/failing hedge fund this side of Bernie Madoff and Sam Israel, only it did it on a much more enormous scale and did it with federally-insured deposits. The fund used (in part) federally-insured money to create, in essence, a kind of super high-risk hedge fund that gambled on credit derivatives, and just like Sam Israel did with his Bayou fund, when it got in trouble, it resorted to fudging its numbers in order to disguise the fact that it was losing money hand over fist.
Chase for years hid the very existence of this operation from banking regulators and lied about the purpose of the fund (saying it was purely a hedging operation when it stopped being a hedge and instead became a wild directional gamble), and it also changed the way it calculated the fund’s value once it started to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Even worse, the bank’s own internal auditors signed off on the phoney-baloney accounting of this Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP), at one point allowing it to claim $719 million in losses when the real number was closer to $1.2 billion.
How did they do this? In the years leading up to January of 2012, Chase used a standard, plain-vanilla method to price the derivative instruments in its portfolio. The method was known as “mid-market pricing”: if on any given day you had a range of offers for a certain instrument – the “bid-ask” range – “mid-market pricing” just meant splitting the difference and calling the value the numerical middle in that range.
But in the beginning of 2012, Chase started to lose lots of money on the derivatives in its SCP, and just decided to change its valuations, that they weren’t in the business of doing “mids” anymore. One executive thought the “market was irrational.” As the Subcommittee concluded:
By the end of January, the CIO had stopped valuing two sets of credit index instruments on the SCP’s books, the CDX IG9 7-year and the CDX IG9 10-year, near the midpoint price and had substituted instead noticeably more favorable prices.
If you can fight through the jargon, what this basically means is that Chase decided to go into the fiction business and invent a new way to value its crazy-ass derivative bets, using, among other things, a computerized model the company designed itself called “P&L predict” which subjectively calculated the value of the entire fund toward the end of every business day.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same story we’ve heard over and over again in the financial-scandal era, from Enron to WorldCom to Lehman Brothers – when the going gets tough, and huge companies start to lose money, they change their own accounting methodologies to hide their screw-ups, passing the buck over and over again until the mess explodes into the public’s lap. The difference is that Chase is a much bigger and more dangerous company to be engaging in this kind of behavior.
An even scarier section of the report regards the reaction of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, the primary government regulator of Chase. The report exposes two huge problems here. One, Chase consistently hid crucial information from the OCC, including the sort of massive increases in risk the OCC was created precisely to monitor. Two, even when the bank didn’t hide stuff, the OCC was either too slow or too disinterested to take notice of potential problems. From the report:
During 2011, for example, the notional size of the SCP grew tenfold from about $4 billion to $51 billion, but the bank never informed the OCC of the increase. At the same time, the bank did file risk reports
with the OCC disclosing that the CIO repeatedly breached the its stress limits in the first half of 2011, triggering them eight times, on occasion for weeks at a stretch, but the OCC failed to follow up with the bank.
In other words, Chase added nearly $50 billion in risk and failed to mention the fact to the OCC – but the OCC also failed to bat an eyelid when Chase breached its stress limits eight times in a space of six months, often for weeks at a time. Do you feel safer now?
This episode proves what everyone already implicitly understands about these gigantic banking institutions: that their accounting is often little more than a monstrous black box within which any sort of mischief can and probably is being hidden from shareholders, counterparties, and the public, which has a direct interest in the health of these banks because (a) their enormous size makes them systemically important, i.e. we’d all be screwed if any of them collapsed, and (b) they are the supposedly cautious and conservative guardians of billions in federally-insured deposits.
The Senate investigators highlighted a frightening metaphor to explain what they found out about Chase’s response to its burgeoning accounting disaster last winter and spring:
The head of the CIO’s London office, Achilles Macris, once compared managing the Synthetic Credit Portfolio, with its massive, complex, moving parts, to flying an airplane. The OCC Examiner-in-Charge at JPMorgan Chase told the Subcommittee that if the Synthetic Credit Portfolio were an airplane, then the risk metrics were the flight instruments. In the first quarter of 2012, those flight instruments began flashing red and sounding alarms, but rather than change course, JPMorgan Chase personnel disregarded, discounted, or questioned the accuracy of the instruments instead.
Investigators took note of this and then, sensibly, wondered if Chase was the only bank ignoring all those flashy lights:
The bank’s actions not only exposed the many risk management deficiencies at JPMorgan Chase, but also raise systemic concerns about how many other financial institutions may be disregarding risk indicators and manipulating models to artificially lower risk results and capital requirements.
Anyway, officials from Chase and the OCC are being dragged in tomorrow to answer some heavy questions about all of this. Expect a lot of double-talk, sweaty foreheads, pompous “You just don’t understand because you don’t make enough money” excuses, and other sordid behaviors. Tune in here for updates.
In the meantime, kudos to Senator Levin and to his Republican partner in this investigation, John McCain, for taking on this topic. Increasingly, key voices in the upper chamber like these two, plus Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and others are starting to act genuinely worried about the Too Big to Fail issue. Their determination to keep it in the public eye is, to me, a signal that a consensus is forming behind the scenes on the Hill.
(c) 2013 Matt Taibbi
We have justices of the CA Appellate and Supreme Court, like Justice McIntyre, turning a blind eye to bankster shenanigans. In Kalicki v Chase, both trial and appellate court noted Chase forged, wrongfully filed, and presented false documents as a fraud upon the court. In Kalicki v eTrade he mentions Chase, who has rendered a cloud upon the title of Kalicki’s property, and that eTrade is a holder in due course (without using that term) because the borrower has no right to challenge, and thereby protect, the chain of title to the property. Then he spikes the Kalicki’s Complaint by demurrer on the grounds that the Complaint did not provide specific facts (known only to defendants) to support the Complaint’s allegations. In doing so, he prevents discovery of those very facts. To wrap it up, he renders the decision as UNPUBLISHED to hide this travesty of justice.
test
Another “Let them eat cake” moment.
“….several Congressional members have alluded to a private meeting with Paulson and Bernanke in which vague economic Armageddon was threatened if Congress did not immediately hand Hank $700 billion, with no oversight. As the political debate raged over the next 15 days, several members expressed a sense of shock over the severity of the secret warnings, while refusing to divulge the details to a concerned public. Representative Sherman of California later accidentally revealed that members were warned that Martial Law would follow if the $700 bailout plan were not approved quickly. Days later it was confirmed that the warning was delivered by Treasury Secretary Paulson. Listen while Kanjorski relates the fear about an electronic run on the banks that was apparently part of the Congressional scare tactics employed by Paulson and staff. You will notice that he says members were told that within 24 hours, the entire political structure of the United States would collapse. Talk about hitting a Congressman where it hurts, Paulson went straight for their political testes.”
I’d like to know… if in fact the tanks had hit the streets like Paulson threatened….would the turrets have been aimed at the criminal class on Wall Street, or the hapless citizens of Main Street? Because I’d vote for the former in a heartbeat.
This question needs to be answered, as we continue to allow the propping up of a criminal cabal greater than any the earth has ever known.
“NEW YORK (MarketWatch) – Former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson filed to sell about $500 million worth of Goldman Sachs stock late Thursday shortly after the U.S. Senate voted to confirm his appointment as U.S. Treasury Secretary. Paulson filed to sell 3.23 million shares in a shelf offering of Goldman Sachs stock according to a prospectus filed with regulators. Based on the bank’s closing price of $152.50 on Thursday, the stock is worth about $492 million. The banking chieftain is unloading the shares to adhere to conflict-of-interest rules.”
So….he takes $492 million and then gives an initial $700 billion to his cronies.
Unfuckingbelievable.
As to the Bernank, on the eve of his book signing, he’s decided to complain about the fact that more bankers should have been prosecuted. More? As in….more than none?
Only in America.
And all of this under obama’s lawlessness reign. I don’t know if that man just has no backbone or he is the anti Christ. Either way it’s not good for our deteriorating country.