Foreclosure Nation

Japan's Nikkei share average plunged 10.6 percent on Tuesday, posting the worst two-day rout since 1987, as hedge funds bailed out after reports of rising radiation near Tokyo. ~ Reuters, March 15, 2011 While it's far too early to assess the full impact of the Japanese disaster on markets around th...

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NEW YORK — The Nasdaq finished within 25 points of its highest level in a decade Friday, reminding investors of a time many would rather forget: The bursting of the dot-com bubble. Today, tech is hot again. Facebook – which hasn't even gone public yet – is worth some $50 billion. Online content com...

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NEW YORK -- After the last major banking crisis, some two decades ago, roughly 3,800 bankers were prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms, by the Justice Department's count. Yet this time, some four years after the economy descended into the most punishing financial crisis since the Great Depressio...

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Even as hedge fund assets grew at a record-breaking pace last quarter, no firm is so big that its failure would pose a threat to the financial system, a hedge fund trade group asserts. The comment comes after two regulators -- the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading...

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BOSTON - The usual flurry of brokerage firm traders seeking to join hedge funds after the payout of annual bonuses could be more of a blizzard this year, with compensation shrinking on Wall Street and a regulatory crackdown in the offing. Wall Street's leading banks cut bonuses by an average of 5 p...

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To get to the heart of what went wrong with the report released yesterday by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, check out its account on page 254 of how the largest investor in a cash fund managed by Bank of America suddenly pulled out $20 billion of its money in November 2007. The withdra...

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Wall Street firms that sold mortgage-backed securities appear to have violated federal securities laws by misleading investors on the quality of the underlying mortgages, a bipartisan panel created by Congress to investigate the root causes of the financial crisis concluded. Banks that sold home lo...

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In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the number of individual investors surged thanks to the rise of the Internet. As information became instant and ubiquitous, and the fees associated with making trades decreased, people took advantage of their ability to do their own research and retail trading p...

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NEW YORK — The Dow Jones industrial average broke through 12,000 for the first time in two and a half years Wednesday, but a late fade kept it from closing above that level. The index of 30 prominent U.S. companies finished the day with a modest gain. Weak profit forecasts from Boeing Co. and Xero...

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The bipartisan panel appointed by Congress to investigate the financial crisis has concluded that several financial industry figures appear to have broken the law and has referred multiple cases to state or federal authorities for potential prosecution, according to two sources directly involved in ...

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No doubt about it, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's use of well over $2 trillion in Fed funds did help push higher the price of many securities, especially those in natural resource or commodity businesses -- increasing the paper wealth of the investing class. A related goal was to buttress the rate of...

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WASHINGTON — Investment advisers and stockbrokers should be subject to the same fiduciary standard of conduct — putting a customer’s interests above their own — rather than the different governance regimes that currently apply to the two groups, the Securities and Exchange Commission recommended on ...

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No doubt about it, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's use of well over $2 trillion in Fed funds did help push higher the price of many securities, especially those in natural resource or commodity businesses -- increasing the paper wealth of the investing class. A related goal was to buttress the rate of i...

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WASHINGTON — Investment advisers and stockbrokers should be subject to the same fiduciary standard of conduct — putting a customer’s interests above their own — rather than the different governance regimes that currently apply to the two groups, the Securities and Exchange Commission recommended on ...

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J. Bradley Bennett, over the last two decades, has defended financial advisers, brokerage firms and corporate chieftains accused of everything from insider trading to accounting fraud. Now, he’s switching sides. On Jan. 3, Mr. Bennett became the top cop at Wall Street’s self-policing organization,...

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Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs generated at least 18 percent of its revenues last year through trading and investing for its own benefit, according to a regulatory filing made Tuesday detailing the first nine months, flatly contradicting the firm's previous claims that such speculative activity mad...

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In a ruling that could be historic, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled against two fraudster banks, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo, who illegally foreclosed on homes. In short, the two banks stole homes to which they had no legal claim. This rattled stock markets, causing the broad-base...

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New requirements under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act will affect advisers to private investment funds such as private equity funds, hedge funds and other pooled investment vehicles with the costs and resources dedicated to compliance expected to disproportionately aff...

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Wall Street's biggest banks, whose missteps caused a global financial crisis and economic slowdown two years ago, were more agile when it came to countering the political and regulatory response. The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry'...

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NEW YORK (AP, Matthew Craft) -- Americans are leaving bond mutual funds at the fastest rate in more than two years. U.S. investors pulled $8.6 billion out of bond funds in the week ended Dec. 15, the largest withdrawal since October 2008 when financial markets were in free-fall. They pulled an aver...

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NEW YORK—U.S. stocks wavered after U.S. third-quarter economic growth missed economists' estimates while existing-home sales for November rose less than expected, although home prices showed signs of stabilization. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up 3 points to 11535, drifting in and out...

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Despite the fact that the S&P is up over 80% in the last 21 months, US financial firms are currently tripping over each other in their zeal to raise their S&P 500 and GDP targets for 2011. JPMorgan's chief US equities strategist, Thomas Lee, came out on December 3rd with a target of 1425 on the S&P ...

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Two agonizing years for the U.S. economy have been some of the best years on record for Wall Street. After first receiving billions in taxpayer aid, and now ultracheap funding from the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks are on track to wrap up two of their best years ever. Even if the current quar...

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I don't hate Jamie Dimon. He's smart and hard-working, and undoubtedly wants to believe that his work contributes to society. But his bank continues to harm millions of Americans, and his political activism is helping an entire industry pilfer and endanger the economy. Now he's started to publicly ...

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Poor, sad Jamie Dimon, the frustrated and--by his account--tragically misunderstood chief of megabank J.P. Morgan Chase. It's not enough that he gets to keep the tens of millions of dollars he netted turning an already enormous institution into a sprawling empire of finance that now controls $2 tri...

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The debate is raging about banks and their size, financial regulation, and the international capital standards known as "Basel". Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, in his New York Times magazine profile, expresses admiration for the Basel committee and says, "… they are asking the questions that, in...

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WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder has confirmed that the U.S. attorney's office in the southern district of New York is conducting a criminal investigation of Wall Street. At a news conference, Holder declined to say whether the investigation involves hedge funds and allegations of inside...

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Every day millions of shares of stocks and mutual funds are traded on the national exchanges. The system is premised on an equal playing field. Buyers and sellers are supposed to have access to the same information in order to make decisions about whether to buy or sell. Many have long suspected th...

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Fitch Ratings has assigned a negative outlook to the entire U.S. residential mortgage servicer sector, citing increased concerns surrounding alleged procedural defects in the judicial foreclosure process. A negative outlook from the agency signals that any rating change over the next two years will...

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With a surge in lawsuits against law firms specializing in foreclosures, a case in Mississippi is casting light on another aspect of the mortgage mess — the connection between Wall Street private equity firms and those law firms, often known as foreclosure mills. The lawsuit on behalf of homeowner...

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Foreclosure fraud is ruffling a lot of feathers on Wall Street, and while the full scope of losses remains unclear, even major banks are now acknowledging that this is a multibillion-dollar disaster, not just a set of minor paperwork headaches. So how bad will it get for Wall Street? There are seve...

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WASHINGTON — The pace of U.S. home foreclosures may not slow much after all. Bank of America said Monday that it plans to resume seizing more than 100,000 homes in 23 states next week. It said it has a legal right to foreclose despite accusations that documents used in the process were flawed. All...

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By David S. Hilzenrath Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 14, 2010; 8:13 PM Stocks of major banks declined sharply Thursday amid concern that widespread corner-cutting in the foreclosure process could saddle the financial system with a costly and paralyzing mess. The sell-off was ...

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Pension funds and other investors who have suffered losses on mortgage-backed securities could have a "strong legal basis" to call into question the very securitized mortgages they purchased stakes in, increasing the pressure facing large Wall Street firms that packaged these securities during the h...

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One billion dollars? Six billion? Ten billion? More? A foreclosed home in Miami. The halt in foreclosures may lead to billions in costs for banks. After scratching their heads for weeks over how much the foreclosure mess will hurt banks’ bottom lines, investors got out their calculators Thursd...

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