2011 Wall Street Fraud Read Just About Any Article in the Financial
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
2011 Wall Street Fraud ―FALSUM IN UNO, FALSUM IN OMNIBUS‖ false in one thing, false in everything Psychopaths gain satisfaction through antisocial behavior, and do not experience shame, guilt, or remorse for their actions. Psychopaths lack a sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright. Psychopaths also lack empathy towards others in general, resulting in tactlessness, insensitivity, and contemptuousness. All of this hampers their tendency to make a likable first impression; psychopaths have a superficial charm about them, enabled by a willingness to say anything to anyone without concern for accuracy or truth. Shallow affect also describes the psychopath's tendency for genuine emotion to be short-lived, glib and egocentric, with an overall cold demeanor. Their behavior is impulsive and irresponsible, often failing to keep a job or defaulting on debts. Psychopaths also have a markedly distorted sense of the potential consequences of their actions, not only for others, but also for themselves. They do not deeply recognize the risk of being caught, disbelieved or injured as a result of their behavior. Read just about any article in the financial press about a Securities and Exchange Commission settlement with some accused fraudster, and you probably will see two lines bound to get a lot of eyes rolling. One is that the “defendant neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s claims”. The other is that the “penalties include a court injunction or SEC order barring the alleged crook from breaking the securities laws in the future”, as if it had been perfectly legal to violate them beforehand. No one, it seems, ever gets nailed for anything!!! They are behaving like hooligans, switching on the printing press and tossing them around the whole world, forgetting their main obligations." What appears to have angered the former KGB spy is the end of QE2. According to RIAN: "Putin's comments came in the wake of the completion of the US' quantitative easing (QE) 2 program on June 30, in which the Federal Reserve bought $600 billion worth of its Treasury bonds Let begin! Year to Date 2011 Bank of America Settles With Thompson's Dynasty Over $5.9 Billion Adviser By Bill Koenig - Jan 24, 2011 4:01 PM ET Dynasty Financial Partners said it has reached an agreement with Bank of America ―resolving all issues‖ related to the departure of Michael C. Brown and some members of his team from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch‘s private wealth management division. Angelo Mozilo Settles Lending Suit for $6.5 Million By Joel Rosenblatt - Feb 2, 2011 7:34 PM ET A woman walks past a Countrywide Home Loan office in Gahanna, Ohio on Jan. 11, 2008. Photographer: Gary Gardiner/Bloomberg News Former Countrywide Financial Corp. Chief Executive Officer Angelo Mozilo and ex- Chief Operating Officer David Sambol agreed to $6.5 million settlement to resolve a predatory lending lawsuit filed by California. Money from the accord will be used for a relief fund to aid foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies, state Attorney General Kamala Harris said today in a statement. Deutsche Bank May Lose Top Court Swap Case, Judge Says By Karin Matussek - Feb 8, 2011 9:33 AM ET inShare.1More Business ExchangeBuzz up!DiggPrint Email . The headquarters of Deutsche Bank AG in Frankfurt. Photographer: Hannelore Foerster/Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s biggest bank, may lose a ruling in the first case heard by the country’s top civil court over an interest-rate swap the lender sold to companies and local governments, a judge said. The bank may have violated its duties when advising Ille Papier Service GmbH on a swap purchase, Federal Court of Justice Presiding Judge Ulrich Wiechers said at a hearing today. The lender may have had the duty to disclose an initial negative market value that covered its fees or even to advise the company not to buy the product, he said. “When advising in financial matters, the bank must guard the interests of its customer alone,” Wiechers said at the hearing in Karlsruhe. The assessment is preliminary and a ruling is scheduled for March 22.“A conflict of interest must be disclosed. That the bank earned money from the initial market value may be such a conflicted interest.” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-08/deutsche-bank-may-lose-case-in-high-german-court- over-swaps-judge-says.html Bank of America to Pay $410 Million to Settle Overdraft Manipulation Claim By David E. Rovella - Feb 5, 2011 10:56 AM ET inShare.15More Business ExchangeBuzz up!DiggPrint Email .Bank of America Corp., the largest U.S. lender by assets, agreed to pay $410 million to settle lawsuits alleging deceptive practices in the management of customer accounts that led to excessive fees for overdrafts. The settlement was dated Jan. 27, according to a court filing by Bank of America and lawyers for consumers. Overdraft class actions, unified in 2009 from across the country in Miami federal court, alleged breach of contract, unjust enrichment and usury by more than two dozen banks. Institutions including Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. were named in related lawsuits. Miami resident Ralph Torres described in his suit against Bank of America how he opened an account in 2000 after seeing advertisements for “free checking.” Torres alleged he was tricked into believing he had more money in his account than was the case, and that Bank of America debited his funds in a way that made it more likely he would incur overdraft fees. “The bank actively provides false or misleading balance information to these customers, including plaintiff, that in turn deceives these customers into making additional transactions that, in turn, will generate even more overdraft fees for the bank,” Torres’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-05/bank-of-america-to-pay-410-million-to-settle-overdraft- case.html SEC files fraud lawsuit against three former former IndyMac executives [Updated] February 11, 2011 | 2:40 pm Targeting executives of the housing boom's biggest stated-income lender, the Securities and Exchange Commission has accused former IndyMac Bancorp Chief Executive Michael W. Perry and two former chief financial officers of defrauding investors at the failed Pasadena savings and loan. The civil lawsuit, filed Friday in Los Angeles federal court, contends that Perry and former CFOs A. Scott Keys and S. Blair Abernathy misled investors about the crumbling financial condition of IndyMac and its IndyMac Bank operating unit by filing false disclosures with the SEC. "The three executives regularly received internal reports about IndyMac‘s deteriorating capital and liquidity positions in 2007 and 2008, but failed to ensure adequate disclosure of that information to investors as IndyMac sold millions of dollars in new stock," the SEC said in a news release Citigroup Settles Fraud Cases Tied to Texas Mortgage Assigner By Donal Griffin and Dakin Campbell - Feb 8, 2011 12:00 AM ET A Citi logo appears on a sign above a Citibank branch in the ground floor of Citigroup Inc. headquarters in New York. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg Citigroup Inc., the third-largest U.S. bank, settled or lost at least five claims in 2010 brought by borrowers who accused the bank of filing fraudulent mortgage documents provided by a Texas firm. In the most recent settlement in December, a bankrupt homeowner in Wappingers Falls, New York, challenged Citigroup‘s use of a mortgage ―assignment,‖ which shows the transfer of ownership of a mortgage. It was signed by an employee at Orion Financial Group Inc., a Southlake, Texas, firm that provides document services to lenders. The document was ―of fraudulent nature and questionable origin,‖ the borrower‘s attorney, Linda Tirelli, wrote in an August objection to the bank‘s claim at U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. Citigroup created and filed the assignment after proceedings began because it otherwise couldn‘t prove its right to collect the debt, she wrote in an e-mail. The bank denied the allegations and didn‘t admit liability in the settlement. Attorneys general in 50 states are investigating the industry‘s use of mortgage assignments as part of a wider probe into faulty foreclosure methods, according to Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for Iowa attorney general Tom Miller. Last month, a Massachusetts court ruled that two foreclosures by Wells Fargo & Co. and U.S. Bancorp were invalid because assignments presented in those cases failed to prove the chain of ownership of the mortgage, sending financial stocks down. Connect the Dots Bankruptcy judges are ―appropriately skeptical‖ when mortgage servicers claim to have assignments, said Keith Lundin, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in Nashville, Tennessee, in an interview. ―They‘ve got to show me more than their swearing that they have the right,‖ he said. ―They‘re going to have to connect up the dots back to the note and the security agreement, which would be the mortgage.‖ Harold Lewis, an executive with the CitiMortgage subsidiary, told Congress in November that the bank reorganized foreclosure operations last February, helping it avoid the faulty affidavit-signing practices that forced peers such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. to temporarily halt home seizures last year. Citigroup paid almost $82,000 in opponents‘ legal costs when settling challenges to four bankruptcy claims that used Orion letters in 2010, according to agreements filed with federal bankruptcy courts in New York and Arkansas. The bank reduced interest rates on the remaining debt by an average of 49 percent, while cutting the outstanding mortgage balance in three cases by a combined $55,000, the filings show Madoff Fraud = The Emperor Has No Clothes.