TOP STORIES:
Fallen
Foreclosure King David J. Stern Disbarred - (www.motherjones.com) The long, legal saga of David J.
Stern, the south Florida attorney who made a fortune
off the wave of home foreclosures stemming from the housing crisis,
has reached its end. After years of court battles over the practices of
Stern's once-mighty, multimillion-dollar law firm, the Florida Supreme Court
last week disbarred Stern. As the Palm Beach Post reports,
a Palm Beach County judge who refereed Stern's case and who recommended
disbarment criticized the 53-year-old lawyer for failing to take
responsibility or show "any remorse" for his firm's
actions. Mother Jones was one of the first news outlets to expose the shoddy and legally questionable work done
by Stern's army of lawyers and paralegals as it foreclosed on hundreds of
thousands of Floridians, including backdating crucial documents used to
foreclose on homeowners. Nancy Perez, the Palm Beach County judge,
said the blame fell on Stern for that shoddy work. "The incidents were not
isolated, but rather a representation of the culture of the firm, as to the low
level of competence and ethics," Perez wrote. "(Stern) is the lawyer.
It was his firm. Mr. Stern is responsible."
Cuomo
and Schneiderman Prepare to Fight Over JPMorgan Settlement - (www.nytimes.com) Gov. Andrew
M. Cuomo has asked people if they think Eric
T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York State, wears
eyeliner. Mr. Schneiderman has told people that he believes Mr. Cuomo’s
administration is Machiavellian and is out to undermine him. A little
backbiting by the officials and their aides, who occupy power suites at
opposite ends of the State Capitol’s second floor, might be chalked up to the
kind of rivalry that is an unseemly but unsurprising fact of life atop the
state’s political food chain. But this relationship, as described in repetitive
detail by many in New York Democratic circles, has gone from bad to toxic. “The
two men are like oil and water,” said one Democrat who knows both of them well,
“and lately fire seems to have been added.”
Coming 'oil glut' may push global economy into deflation -
(www.telegraph.co.uk.com) OPEC spare capacity set to reach levels last
seen in the depths of the financial crisis in 2009, analysts say. One piece of
the jigsaw puzzle is missing to complete the deflation landscape across the
West: a slide in oil prices. This is becoming more likely each month. Turmoil
across the Middle East and parts of Africa has choked supply over the past two
years, keeping Brent crude near $110 a barrel despite a broader commodity
slump. Cotton and corn prices have halved, as has the UBS index of industrial
metals. Such anomalies rarely last. "We estimate that crude oil is now the
mostly richly priced commodity in the world," says Deutsche Bank in a
fresh report. Michael Lewis, the bank's commodity strategist, said markets face
an "new oil supply glut" as three forces combine. US shale will add
1m barrels a day (b/d) to global supply for the third year running; Libya will
crank up shipments after a near collapse in 2013; and Iran will come out of
hibernation. "This will push OPEC spare capacity to levels last seen in the
depths of the financial crisis in 2009," he said.
Investors beware: Market history can be misleading - (www.washingtonpost.com) Now, let’s say that as last year opened, you
knew that for the 20 years ended in 2012, long-term Treasury securities
had outperformed stocks, returning 8.5 percent a year (including reinvested
interest) vs. 8.22 percent for the S&P. Bonds outperforming stocks
over such a long period is the investment equivalent of the sun rising in the
west: a repudiation of the natural order. Stocks are riskier than Treasury
securities, which can’t default absent total idiocy in our nation’s capital.
Therefore, financial theory says that stocks are expected to carry what
economists call an “equity premium” above what bonds produce. Oops. If you
decided last year to learn from history and bought long Treasurys rather than
stocks, you got clocked. You would have lost 12.7 percent of your money (as
measured by Barclays index of long-term Treasurys) in one of the worst bond
years ever and missed out on the aforementioned 32.4 percent S&P gain.
Because of bonds’ horrible 2013 and stocks’ good one, the 20-year record is now
back in favor of stocks, 9.22 percent to 6.92 percent.
House
ownership subsidy changes to flatten Coastal California house prices – (www.ochousingnews.com) Tax expenditures for homeownership, such as
deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes and the partial exclusion
for capital gains on the sale of a primary residence, have long been recognized
as ineffective, regressive, and extraordinarily expensive—costing $121 billion in 2013 alone. Until now,
most reforms—including the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan—have focused
on restructuring the mortgage deduction into a flat-rate credit. But what
if we largely replaced the deduction with incentives to buy a house, rather
than to run up a lot of mortgage debt?
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