St.
Louis alderman seeks hearing over stolen money from parks department - (www.stltoday.com) Nearly
half a million dollars was stolen in the scams by two officials over eight
years. A St. Louis alderman is seeking committee hearings to investigate
how two St. Louis parks officials
were able to scheme and steal nearly half a million dollars in city funds over eight years without detection. The
officials — Thomas “Dan” Stritzel, the chief park ranger, and Joseph Vacca, the
deputy parks commissioner — pleaded guilty last month in federal court of a
scheme that involved the complicity of at least two companies doing business
with the city. The companies overcharged the city for services and passed the
money back to a sham company controlled by Vacca and Stritzel, avoiding
detection by city audits. City officials representing Mayor Francis Slay said
there was nothing they could do to prevent the thefts because they involved the
department’s senior officials and the complicity of bona fide vendors. But they
said on Tuesday they are working to put into place additional safeguards. Now,
Ward 21 Alderman Antonio French has called for an aldermanic committee, the
Parks and Environmental Matters Committee, to hold hearings to investigate the
“circumstances and failures that led to Stritzel and Vacca’s indictment.”
Fannie
Mae, Freddie Mac to go after more strategic defaulters - (www.latimes.com) Anyone
thinking of skating on mortgages owned by eitherFannie Mae or Freddie Mac may want to think again. As a result of
new government reports, the two companies say they are going to do a better job
of going after so-called strategic defaulters. Fannie and Freddie can pursue
judgments against borrowers who walk away from their loans even though they
have the ability to make their payments. That's called a strategic default, and
many borrowers are taking that step — typically throwing in the towel because
their homes are no longer worth as much as they owe. But when their homes are
sold at foreclosure and the proceeds are not enough to cover their outstanding
loan balances, it creates a deficiency for which many defaulters either don't
realize they are liable or don't care. To date, the two government-sponsored
enterprises, which are now highly profitable after five years of running in the
red, haven't done a particularly good job at pursuing deficiency judgments,
according to scathing reports from the Office of the Inspector General at the
Federal Housing Finance Agency.
3
days after Fla AG Pam Bondi says she's considering investigating Donald Trump,
Trump gives her campaign $25k - (www.stopforeclosurefraud.com) Last
month, Attorney General Pam Bondi was supposedly thinking about going after Donald Trump for running a get-rich seminar that some
Floridians said fleeced them out of thousands of dollars. New York's A.G. had
already filed suit, saying that Trump's seminars — conducted there and in
Florida — were little more than a "bait and switch" meant to separate
customers from their money. So on Sept. 14, the Sentinel quoted a spokeswoman
for Bondi who said that Florida's attorney general was studying the New York
lawsuit to see whether she wanted to take action here as well. Three days
later, on Sept. 17, Trump's foundation cut a $25,000 check to a committee
associated with Bondi's campaign. It was one of the largest checks that the
"And Justice for All" committee has received. And it looks awfully
fishy. Think about it. A prosecutor says she's trying to decide whether to sue someone
— and that someone suddenly gives her campaign war chest $25,000?
J.P.
Morgan Offers to Front Benefits if Government Doesn't Pay - (www.online.wsj.com) As
if conjuring up the spirit of his bank’s founder, James Dimon is planning to
take the place of the U.S. government if it goes into default—at least as far
as his clients’ federal benefits go. At a meeting of the Institute of
International Finance on Saturday, Mr. Dimon, the chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., said he expects a deal to
be reached between the White House and Congress that will raise the debt
ceiling before the borrowing capacity is otherwise forecast to be exhausted on
Oct. 17. But in the event that the government runs out of cash to make a
$12 billion Social Security payment due on Oct. 23, J.P. Morgan has a plan. Mr.
Dimon said his bank would fund the $6 billion to $8 billion in government
benefits that the bank processes each week for its clients, even if the
government doesn’t actually pay those obligations. “We have a huge amount of
clients who get direct deposit from the government, like veterans and welfare
checks and Social Security, and what we want to do is to take care of our
clients [by making] sure they don’t run out money,” Mr. Dimon said, speaking
after he’d mentioned the plan in the panel discussion. “So you’re basically
advancing the money into their account.”
The student loan bubble is
starting to burst - (www.cnbc.com) The
largest bank in the United States will stop making student loans in a few
weeks. JPMorgan Chase has
sent a memorandum to colleges notifying them that the bank will stop making new
student loans in October, according to Reuters. The official reason is quite bland. "We
just don't see this as a market that we can significantly grow," Thasunda
Duckett tells Reuters. Duckett is the chief executive for auto and student
loans at Chase, which means she's basically delivering the news that a large
part of her business is getting closed down. The move is eerily reminiscent of
the subprime shutdown that happened in 2007. Each time a bank shuttered its
subprime unit, the news was presented in much the same way that JPMorgan is
spinning the end of its student lending.
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