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John Paulson and George Soros Score Big Selling OneWest Bank For $3.4 Billion Comment Now Follow Comments A gang made up of some of Wall Street’s biggest names and formed by former Goldman Sachs partner Steve Mnuchin is set to realize a big score from the sale of OneWest Bank to CIT Group CIT +11.19% for $3.4 billion. Hedge fund billionaires John Paulson and George Soros were part of the group that together with buyout baron Christopher Flowers and billionaire Michael Dell bought the assets in 2009 of the former IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest bank failures ever, from...

Goldman Sachs has completed a $5.1 billion settlement with state and federal officials over the bank’s role in the subprime mortgage crisis. Goldman is the last of the big American banks to reach a settlement with the national working group that was set up in 2012 to investigate how Wall Street exacerbated the mortgage bubble and ensuing financial crisis. Goldman said in January that it had put aside money to cover a $5 billion settlement. The final bill for Goldman is less than the settlements of mortgage giants like JPMorgan Chase, which paid $13.3 billion, and Bank of America, which...

Merrick Garland born and raised in Obama's Chicago Harvard Law ScoolJamie Gorelick's principal deputy In 1993, Garland joined the new Clinton administration as deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The following year, then-Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick—a key mentor of Garland's—asked Garland to be her principal deputy.

Remember a few years ago, when the American housing market collapsed as a direct result of government policies that—in the name of racial justice—pressured banks to approve mortgage loans for massive numbers of underqualified nonwhite applicants? Remember how that collapse set in motion the financial crisis that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama repeatedly called “the worst economy since the Great Depression”? And remember how Obama—who had long been a leading proponent of precisely the policies that had triggered the crisis—cast himself as the savior who was going to restore fiscal sanity and untangle the whole big mess? Well, now Savior Obama...

Anyone heard this bit of audio? Economic crisis President Bush mortgage speech 2002 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW9viaJatpo

It wasn't greed that caused the mortgage mess. In large part, the mess was the product of government policies designed to increase home ownership among the poor and ethnic minorities. Today Peter Wallison points out how Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA created a demand for bad mortgages that encouraged mortgage brokers to generate millions of them. From the Wall Street Journal: Mortgage brokers had to be able to sell their mortgages to someone. They could only produce what those above them in the distribution chain wanted to buy. In other words, they could only respond to demand, not...

In front of a ballroom full of N.C. bankers in January 2006, Wachovia chief executive Ken Thompson warned of the dangers of “toxic” home loans. A problem with so-called option adjustable-rate mortgages, he told the group, was that homeowners can end up owing more at the end of the month than the beginning, which can be a “tough situation” for customers and lenders. “I have literally been amazed at the terms offered by some mortgage lenders, thankfully not at Wachovia and thankfully not so much in North Carolina,” he said. Four months later in May 2006, Thompson took a $24...

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- New York businessman and prominent Democratic fund- raiser Hassan Nemazee was indicted Monday for allegedly defrauding three banks out of $292 million in loans. Nemazee, 59 years old, was charged with aggravated identity theft and three counts of bank fraud in the indictment. Each bank fraud count carries a term of up to 30 years in prison. A lawyer for Nemazee didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Nemazee, who was involved in various presidential campaigns and once served as finance chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was initially charged criminally in August related...

My breakfast companion looked gloomy. He’d flown into Washington from Vienna the day before. When he deplaned, he found a shocking email waiting for him: a demand from his banker for immediate payment of €12,000. Although a resident of Austria, he had taken a home mortgage in Swiss francs, which carried a lower interest rate than mortgages in euros. But 48 hours before he had arrived in the United States, the Swiss franc had surged by 20 percent against the euro. That currency appreciation had wiped out his equity in the house. His frightened banker wanted a new infusion of...

Subprime Scandal: We've long suspected the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wasn't honest in examining events before the meltdown. But an ex-commissioner says the probe was actually a full-blown political cover-up. In a just-released book, former FCIC member Peter Wallison says that a Democratic Congress worked with the commission's Democratic chairman to whitewash the government's central role in the mortgage debacle. The conspiracy helped protect some of the Democrats' biggest stars from scrutiny and accountability while helping justify the biggest government takeover of the financial sector since the New Deal. Wallison's sobering, trenchantly written "Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused...

In covering the hearing of the nine bank chief executives on Capitol Hill, it didn’t take long for me to see that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was having a hard time of it, valiant effort though he did make to defend his bank’s lending practices. Because to look inside Wells Fargo, you will find the worst of the mortgage lenders housed in this bank, Wachovia, which Wells Fargo bought last fall for $15.4 bn, and housed within Wachovia is Golden West Financial, which Wachovia bought for a stupefying $25 bn, Golden West, the purveyor of some of the worst...

France, Israel and Saudi Arabia confront an administration conducting a make-believe foreign policy. When the history of the Obama administration's foreign policy is written 20 or so years from now, the career of Wendy Sherman, our chief nuclear negotiator with Iran, will be instructive. In 1988, the former social worker ran the Washington office of the Dukakis campaign and worked at the Democratic National Committee. That was the year the Massachusetts governor carried 111 electoral votes to George H.W. Bush's 426. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Sherman was briefly the CEO of something called the Fannie Mae Foundation, supposedly a charity...

A toxic brew is bubbling in the housing market that will lead to a mortgage crisis by winter, banking analyst Dick Bove said. Now that the Federal Reserve is nearly done with its monthly bond-buying program, which includes mortgage-backed securities, and Washington continues on its quest to unwind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, conditions could get dicey in the home loan market. Bove envisions a scenario in which long-term financing, like the ubiquitous 30-year mortgage, that has come with fixed interest rates is endangered as mortgage buyers dry up. As part of its quantitative easing program, the Fed had been...

Here's an editorial in the New York Times about the beneficial effects of the $832 billion stimulus bill passed in 2009 that could have been written in the White House: Of all the myths and falsehoods that Republicans have spread about President Obama, the most pernicious and long-lasting is that the $832 billion stimulus package did not work. Since 2009, Republican lawmakers have inextricably linked the words "failed" and "stimulus," and last week, five years after passage of the Recovery Act, they dusted off their old playbook again."The 'stimulus' has turned out to be a classic case of big promises...

<p>In a startling admission, the architect of the biggest regulatory hit on Wall Street since the New Deal now agrees with critics that Washington deserves as much blame for the financial crisis as Wall Street.</p> <p>Former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, co-author of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, said in a recent forum on the crisis that the government — through its decades-long national homeownership campaign and affordable housing goals — "propelled" lenders and investors to excesses they would not have otherwise gone to in the absence of such political incentives.</p>

Full Title: "Did China or Jihadists try to bankrupt America? Pentagon report reveals financial terrorists may have triggered economic crash" Terrorists and other 'financial enemies' were likely responsible for the near collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008, a new Pentagon report has concluded. The 2009 report, Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses, said financial terrorism by Jihadists or countries such as China may have cost the global economy $50 trillion in a series of co-ordinated strikes against the U.S. economy. In an astonishing conclusion, the report claims two unidentified traders deliberately devalued trillions of dollars' worth of stocks at...

Pajamas Media gives an exclusive look at an analysis prepared for the Department of Defense’s Irregular Warfare Support Program (IWSP) by Cross Consulting and Services in 2009 that alleges that the economic meltdown in 2008 was no accident. Kevin Freeman argued that a run-up of speculation by sovereign-wealth funds created a bubble in the oil industry that allowed bear raids on American financial institutions, using credit swaps and other non-regulated investment instruments to crash the US financial system. Bill Gertz reported on the analysis today for the Washington Times: Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion...

ProPublica on Monday reported that the same IRS division that targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle provided the investigative-reporting organization with confidential applications for tax-exempt status. That revelation contradicts previous statements from the agency and may represent a violation of federal guidelines. Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS sector that reviews tax-exemption applications, told a congressional oversight committee in April 2012 that IRS code prohibited the agency from providing information about groups that had not yet been approved. Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Jim Jordan...

NBC-owned television stations in cities across the nation just teamed up with a nonprofit “journalism” group funded by a billionaire husband and wife team who not only spent millions campaigning for President Obama but also topped donor lists to groups like ACORN and MoveOn.org. The nonprofit, ProPublica, will contribute to the news operations of all NBC owned-and-operated stations, including those in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, the network announced Monday. The NBC affiliates will get early access to investigative reports from ProPublica, which describes itself as an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public...