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Bill Black On MF Global, the Justice Department, Prosecutions - (www.capitalismwithoutfailure.com) Good video! Here are some snippets…
On what will come of MF Global: There will be civil suits - by employees, customers, the SEC, and the CFTC. There will be administrative actions. But the dog that has refused to bark for about a decade is the Justice Department.
On the Justice Department's refusal to take on difficult prosecutions: This is the most pathetic excuse for not prosecuting. Of course it's hard. They would be going up against the best criminal defense lawyers in the world. Those lawyers wear nice suits. They are very glib. They are great talkers.
On whether convictions are possible: In the S&L crisis, which were more complex frauds in many ways, we convicted over 3000 individuals - 1000 of those convictions were of elite executives. We prioritized with the FBI and Justice Department to go after the worst 600 to 700 cases. We prosecuted all of them. We had a 90% conviction rate. Yes, it is very hard. It takes many years. At the peak, we had over 1000 FBI agents working the S&L crisis. Right now we have 350 agents working all aspects of fraud out of this crisis, including all the little mortgage frauds. It is absurd.
Two CA title officers hit with 606 felony and misdemeanor counts - (www.latimes.com) A Clark County grand jury in November indicted two Southern California title officers on a combined 606 felony and misdemeanor counts, alleging the two headed a vast "robo-signing" operation in which tens of thousands of foreclosure documents were fraudulently filed in the Las Vegas area. "This is real important stuff because it asserts that bank employees and companies that work for banks actually have to follow the law, and if they break the law, they can be indicted," said Kurt Eggert, a Chapman University law professor. Nevada has been one of the states hit hardest by the housing bust. Las Vegas residents have seen the worst home-price declines of any major metro area in the nation; prices are down 60% from the August 2006 peak, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index. Vegas also had the highest foreclosure rate of any major U.S. city for 22 months until October. About 58% of Nevada homeowners are underwater on their homes, which means they owe more on their mortgages than the current values of their property. That is the highest percentage nationwide, according to CoreLogic, a Santa Ana mortgage data tracker.
SIX (6) Wal-Mart heirs are wealthier than entire bottom 30% of US - (www.latimes.com) Does an annual income of $150,000 make a person rich? Depends on whom you ask. As Americans fret over how to tax the rich and Occupy protesters rail against the 1%, new reports find that the definition of wealth is a tenuous one. First, some context: The wealth of the 1% is about 225 times greater than that of the typical family, compared to 125 times in 1962, according to analysis from labor economist Sylvia Allegreto with UC Berkeley. And based on the most recent data, the cumulative wealth of the Forbes 400 was $1.54 trillion -- equal to the worth of the bottom half of American families. That means the $69.7 billion held by the six Walton relatives of Wal-Mart founders Sam and James Walton in 2007 was equal to the net worth of the bottom 30% of Americans, according to Allegreto.
Today, she said, the Walton pot is estimated to be around $93 billion.
An Unthinkable Risk at a Brokerage Firm - (www.nytimes.com) Are customer accounts at brokerage firms safe? Until the collapse of MF Global, that’s a question I thought I’d never have to ask. Brokerage firms are required by law to maintain segregated accounts holding all client assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market funds and cash. The law was passed after the 1929 crash, in the depths of the Depression, to make sure that customer assets were there at all times, ready to be disbursed even if everyone asked for their money at once. This obligation to protect customer assets “is considered sacrosanct,” Robert Cook, director of the division of trading and markets at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told me this week. “It’s considered a sacred obligation.” Lehman Brothers may have engaged in many foolhardy practices, but even in the firm’s last days, when officials were desperate for cash, no one dared touch customer assets, which remained safely segregated despite the firm’s collapse.
Foreclosure fees pad Colorado counties' funds - (www.denverpost.com) Colorado counties for years have sat atop a pile of cash largely generated on the backs of homeowners, banks and businesses plowed over by the state's foreclosure tidal wave. The public trustee system has generated huge profits by charging the public more than what's needed to actually run its offices, according to financial documents provided by several counties and reviewed by The Denver Post. What's more, each trustee office has generated so much money that it has a bank account set aside with enough funds to maintain the office for a whole year — salaries included — in the unlikely event that not a single foreclosure gets filed. The money — likely reaching into the tens of millions of dollars statewide each year — comes mostly from the multitude of fees that county public trustees by law charge in every foreclosure case they handle.
Millionaires say their tax rate has nothing to do with job creation - (www.npr.org)
Blogger Aleksei Navalny Rouses Russia With A Phrase - (www.nytimes.com)
LV flippers - (www.vegasinc.com)
'Ron Paul effect' has GOP worried - (www.newsleader.com)
Republicans get lessons in propaganda - (www.adn.com)
Taming the Too-Big-to-Fail Banks - (www.dallasfed.org)
Fraus est celare fraudem: It is fraud to conceal fraud - (www.blogspot.com)
German Health Insurance and Individual Freedom - (www.nytimes.com)
Health insurance premiums rising faster than incomes for California families - (www.contracostatimes.com)
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