The Royal Bank of Scotland is a nationalized bank in the UK; 82% of its shares are owned by the British public following a bailout of RBS by that same British public. And although its CEO, Stephen Hester, receives a £1.2m salary, he was recently awarded a £963,000 bonus in shares. This led to an [...] Read more »

The law firm of Steven J. Baum, based in Buffalo, NY, represents many of the major banks in their foreclosure proceedings against homeowners. As described by the New York Times, they recently settled a lawsuit by the Justice Department, for $2 million, because the firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the [...] Read more »

One of the impacts of the Occupy movement has been a shifting of the political dialogue and discourse in this country - much needed, and much appreciated. This change is illustrated in the following graphs from Think Progress, which I found interesting:
During the last week of July, economic discussion on cable news looked like this:

In [...] Read more »

Via Atrios:
Assholes Timmeh And Larreh.
In the fall of 2008, Democrats saw a good opportunity to pass cramdown. The $700 billion TARP legislation was being considered, and lawmakers thought that with banks getting bailed out, the bill would be an ideal vehicle for also helping homeowners. But Obama, weeks away from his [...] Read more »

From an excellent article:
The unemployed commit suicide at a rate two or three times the national average, researchers estimate. And in many cases, the longer the spell of unemployment, the higher the likelihood of suicide.
On online fora such as Unemployed-Friends, the topic comes up often, users finding news reports or hearing tell [...] Read more »

A fellow named Dan Edstrom wanted to track his mortgage, and fortunately, he’s in the right profession:
He performs securitization audits (Reverse Engineering and Failure Analysis) for a company called DTC-Systems.
The following flow chart reverse engineers the mortgage on the Ekstrom family residence. It took Dan over one year to take it this far and it [...] Read more »

Paul Krugman is right:
Urk. I just gave up on the presidential press conference. When Obama declared that Americans rejected Democrats in part because “We were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done,” I checked out.
Nobody cares about this stuff — they care about results. Nobody really [...] Read more »

A fascinating article from Johann Hari and The Independent.
This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end [...] Read more »

Two paragraphs from a VERY thought-provoking diary:
The market theory is that corporations make money by meeting human needs, and the more needs they meet, the more money they make, so corporate profitability is a social good.  This theory is at least 100 years out of date.  Corporations don’t make money by  meeting human needs–or at [...] Read more »

This is a paragraph from a story by the BBC today:
“The _____________ are completely wrong if they think they can destroy Greece,” he added.
What do you think might make sense there?
Pirates, maybe?
Armies of Attila the Hun?
Alien invaders?
Nope:
“The financial markets are completely wrong if they think they can destroy Greece,” he added.
It’s a sad world we’re [...] Read more »

From DaveJ at OpenLeft:
The other day Digby wrote about a scam by Bank of America, where they switched the monthly bill’s envelope to look like junk mail, so people threw it away, and they collect million upon millions in late fees.
The plain brown envelope looked like it was one of those car [...] Read more »

From the AP:

WASHINGTON - The federal government has devoted $4.7 trillion to help the financial sector through its crisis, a watchdog report said Monday.
Under the worst of circumstances, the report said, the government’s maximum exposure could total nearly $24 trillion, or $80,000 for every American. Read more »

From Vanity Fair:
Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had [...] Read more »

Right here. Read more »

From the NY Times:
The Fed is expected to start the first phase of the program, which will provide $200 billion in loans to investors, in early March.
But analysts question whether this approach will be enough to unlock the credit that the economy needs to pull out of a deepening recession. Some worry it may benefit [...] Read more »

From Der Spiegel:
For months, similar cases have been found across Germany, all involving bits of metal contaminated with radioactive cobalt. And most of them come from the same source: three steelworks in India, in particular a company called Vipras Casting, based in Mumbai. Germany’s environmental authorities are alarmed.
…
Since last August, a total of 150 tons [...] Read more »

Four Worlds Bakery, a local, sustainable bakery in West Philly, had a diary on Dailykos yesterday entitled “Betting on the new local economies: I’m expanding my business.” I thought it was rally interesting and inspirational, and I wanted to share one of the most interesting portions:
Sustainable Business model. I have been convinced that the high [...] Read more »

…as long as they’re indebted to the taxpayers of the United States. Makes damn fine sense to me. Call your senators if you’d like to see this passed. And watch her fiery speech: Read more »

Naturally, I agree with Chris at OpenLeft:
Banks about to go under because of bad assets should be nationalized by the government, and the stockholders wiped out. Once that is done, the banks should then resold to the private sector with vastly increased regulations. This is what we did in the 1980’s during the S & [...] Read more »