Some links and articles via : Naked Capitalism/ Yves Smith (hat tip)";)

Matt Stoller: Memo to Reporters – How to Cover the 50 State Attorney General Foreclosure Settlement Talks Posted: 17 Aug 2011 02:53 AM PDT By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller everyone I know is working on some type of RMBS litigation. investors suing issuers, issuers suing originators, insurers suing issuers. wild – A tweet from a NYC corporate lawyer, 8/17/2011 Doesn’t it seems like we’ve been on the verge of a 50 state Attorney General settlement with the banks over robo-signing and mortgage securitization liability for nine months? It does, doesn’t it? Why is that? Maybe it’s because… that’s what journalists keep writing. Here’s what I mean. July 15, 2011, Huffington Post As Government Nears Accord With Banks, Questions Swirl Over Scope Of Investigation, by Shahien Nasiripour Even so, state and federal officials are nearing a settlement that would release companies like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase from legal liability in exchange for a cash settlement, reduced payments for homeowners, transition assistance for troubled borrowers and promises to improve performance and comply with state and federal rules. July 7, 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek BofA, JPMorgan Near Foreclosure Deal With U.S., States, by Dawn Kopecki Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and three other U.S. mortgage servicers are in advanced talks to resolve state and federal claims over faulty foreclosures, according to two people briefed on the matter. Negotiators tentatively set a July 13 target for a settlement, which may exceed $20 billion, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private. July 7, 2011, Charlotte Observer Negotiators make progress in mortgage talks, by Rick Rothacker Banks and state and federal officials negotiating a settlement over mortgage servicing practices have made “substantial progress” but there’s still “work to do,” a spokesman for the attorney general leading the effort said. July 7, 2011, Fortune Can Brian Moynihan fix America’s biggest bank?, by Shawn Tully Then, in late June, Moynihan rocked Wall Street by unveiling a landmark settlement that takes a giant step toward finally putting the home loan mess behind Bank of America. Moynihan announced that BofA will pay $8.5 billion to 22 big investors — from BlackRock (BLK) (to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which claimed that Countrywide had misrepresented the quality of loans it sold them. In a single stroke, he effectively removed the biggest cloud over the company’s future The deal is so comprehensive, covering all of Countrywide’s disputed mortgages sold to private investors, that it should serve as a model for the rest of the industry and a bullish sign for the broader economy. It may be the single best headline in financial services since the credit crisis began. “It’s a win on the board that Brian Moynihan needed,” says Credit Agricole analyst Mike Mayo, a famously tough critic of the big banks. “The challenge is to ensure that the momentum continues.” This one isn’t about the 50 state AG deal, as such, but it’s on mortgage liability. Besides, it’s such an obvious PR plant for Moynihan that I had to include it. And BofA stock has dropped 32% since it came out! June 2, 2011, LA Times Foreclosure settlement to come in a ‘matter of weeks,’ HUD secretary says, by Alejandro Lazo June 10, 2011, Businessweek Foreclosure Probe ‘Closer’ to Settlement, Iowa Official Says, by Margaret Cronin Fisk and David McLaughlin Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, leader of a 50-state probe of foreclosure practices, said a settlement is “closer” and that state and federal officials want a monitor to ensure that banks keep their promises. March 15, 2011, Reuters Geithner seeks swift foreclosure pact with banks, by Dave Clarke and Rachelle Younglai A comprehensive settlement between U.S. authorities and banks over alleged mortgage servicing abuses needs to be reached quickly to help the housing market heal, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Tuesday… Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who is leading the states’ probe of mortgage servicing problems, said last week that he hoped to have a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks in the next two months. March 7, 2011, Reuters Iowa AG looks to foreclosure deal within 2 months, by Dave Clarke The Iowa attorney general, who is leading the 50-state probe into mortgage foreclosure problems, said on Monday that he hopes to have a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks in the next two months. February 24, 2011, Washington Post Government settlement with financial industry over foreclosure practices draws near, by Brady Dennis State and federal officials, who have been negotiating with financial firms over how to address widespread abuses in foreclosure practices, are moving closer to a settlement that could force banks to reduce the principal on mortgages for some borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth. November 16, 2010, Reuters, CNBC Banks, state AGs near foreclosure settlement: report, by Jonathan Stempel and Jonathan Spicer U.S. banks and a task force of the nation’s 50 state attorneys general are nearing a settlement of an investigation into the lending industry’s foreclosure practices, CNBC said on Tuesday. October 12, 2010, AP States aim to force changes in foreclosure process, by Alan Zibel The top law enforcement officials of states around the country are launching a joint investigation into the problems with foreclosure documents that surfaced in recent weeks. They are already weighing the outlines of a potential settlement with the industry, said Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who will lead the investigation. And so, the moral of the story is, the robo-signing/chain of title/overall mortgage securitization liability issue is a bear of a problem. It isn’t going away. So here’s a tip to journalists writing about the housing market. Don’t trust what Bank of America, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, various Federal regulators, Obama officials, and probably other bank-associated parties tell you. Don’t trust the bank-friendly conventional wisdom, because it will end up making otherwise good stories inaccurate (this goes for headline writers as well). The banks don’t know their legal liability and the regulators don’t know how to fix this problem. And everyone’s suing everyone. So how can you write about it? Well, do what other analysts (like Yves Smith) do, look at the actual content. Felix Salmon has a good example of how to do that here, with his post on The well-intentioned but doomed mortgage settlement. And the first story I cited, by Shahien Nasiripour, (aside from the “they’re on the verge of a settlement” CW) is great, showering important details on the actual state of the investigation. Or press your sources on why they told you a settlement was coming, when it didn’t. It’ll be an interesting explanation, which I’d like to hear. Maybe the AGs will come out with a settlement tomorrow. But for the last nine months, that’s pretty much what the reporting has been saying. And it’s been wrong.

Why is the US Media Going Easy on the Rapidly Widening Murdoch Scandal? Posted: 17 Aug 2011 02:46 AM PDT The US press appears to have the attention span of a gnat. The S&P downgrade, Euromarket driven stock gyrations, and the Republican presidential race jockeying have displaced older stories. Yet the News International phone hacking scandal is blowing up to Watergate-level proportions in the UK, with fresh evidence showing that Rupert and James Murdoch (at best) misled Parliament in their testimony last month. And since phone hacking appears to be widespread, not just at the now defunct News of the World, but potentially other News International entities in the UK, it isn’t hard to imagine that US news outlets also engaged in questionable and possibly impermissible conduct. Yet the contrast between the US and UK coverage is marked, and it goes beyond the obvious explanation that l’affaire Murdoch is chock full of major domestic power players. The difference in presentation is marked. The stories in the Guardian, which did the real spadework, and the Independent (to pick two examples) are incisive, direct, and suitably scandalized. The latest stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg (to pick two counter-examples) have headlines almost designed to have the reader ignore the articles. And even if they do contain most of the facts, they bury the lead, so someone reading the first paragraph or two might decide they had the drift of the gist, when the real meat was much further in the piece. The very high concept is the Parliament released a passel of documents that show that Rupert and James Murdoch lied in their recent testimony. They tried, as they have in the past, to claim that the phone hacking scandal was limited to one bad apple, Clive Goodman. The most deadly item published is a letter from Goodman claiming that hacking was widely discussed at News of the World editorial sessions until editor Andrew Coulson told staff to refrain (note from the mention, not necessarily the actual behavior). Yet James Murdoch claimed that a £243,000 payment to Goodman had nothing to do with the desire to protect the paper! If you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. For those who may need a playbill, Coulson became the communications chief for the current prime minister, David Cameron, on Rupert Murdoch’s personal assurance that he was clean. Ouch. There are all sorts of other goodies in the documents. In response to a query from the Parliament committee, Harbottle & Lewis, disputed the Murdochs’ claims about its investigation. It stated that it had been engaged to perform a limited review, analyzing 2500 e-mails supplied by News International to see if they contained evidence that specific employees were aware of or engaged in phone hacking. The firm said their access had been restricted and their requests for more information had been denied. This is particularly significant because James Murdoch testified that he relied on the work of Harbottle & Lewis in his claim that he thought any problem at News International was limited to Goodman. And the law firm provided the version of the Goodman letter to the Parliament committee which included the accusation of widespread hacking; the one provided by News International had that section redacted. Here is the headline from the main story on this development at the Independent: Huge pay-off for reporter who kept quiet about scale of hacking News International executives were told four years ago that phone hacking was rife at the News of the World and subsequently paid a jailed employee a quarter of a million pounds after he claimed that Andy Coulson authorised and then tried to hide the extent of it at the newspaper when he was editor. Previously secret papers show that Rupert Murdoch’s most senior lieutenants paid the NOTW’s disgraced royal editor, Clive Goodman, £243,000 in compensation soon after he had made damaging accusations against the company and its senior staff. Now admittedly this account does rely on readers knowing that News International executives, particularly the Murdochs, have tried the “see no evil, hear no evil” routine. The Independent also has a long section at the bottom of the article showing extracts from the new documents and explaining what their significance is and what the next steps related to each might be. It’d clear, easy to digest, and engaging. The Guardian finds the scandal so exciting that it had a live blog yesterday: “Phone-hacking scandal: live“. But it also has major subheads give you the main points quickly if you don’t want quite that much detail: • ‘Devastating’ new evidence submitted to select committee • Four-year-old letter alleges phone hacking ‘widely discussed’ at News of the World editorial meetings • Select committee to re-sit on September 6 • Two new witnesses to be quizzed by committee Another indicator: you know it’s bad when the headline at a government body is clearer than what you get in the US press. At the UK Parliament site which made the documents public: Committee publishes further written evidence on phone-hacking. Understated but direct. Now look at the anodyne headlines in the US. News Corp.’s James Murdoch May Need to Explain Contradictions Bloomberg Letter Counters Hacking Avowals From News Corp. New York Times Both these headlines are fails. Bloomberg’s fails to mention “hacking scandal”; the “contradiction” could be about anything, say succession plans. The New York Times does include a key signifier, but “Counters Hacking Avowals” is MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) inducing. And the articles are light years apart from their UK counterparts. All you learn from Bloomberg is that James Murdoch may have to go back to Parliament again. Since execs just about never get roughed up by Congress and even when they do, it seems to be empty theatrics, this hardly seems very serious. Here is how the article begins: A trove of documents and statements released by the U.K. Parliament in the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal implicates top former executives while contradicting testimony of Chief Operating Officer James Murdoch on what and when he knew about the illegal practices. The contradictions mean Murdoch may be called to Parliament to answer more questions about a confidential settlement he approved with Gordon Taylor, according to a statement issued by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which is investigating the scandal. Taylor, the chief executive officer of the Professional Footballers’ Association, was a victim of hacking by News Corp.’s defunct News of the World tabloid. The documents and statements prompted lawmakers to request explanations for inconsistencies from several executives, including Andy Coulson, the tabloid’s former editor, and Les Hinton, who recently resigned as publisher and CEO of Dow Jones & Co. and had led News Corp.’s U.K. publishing unit. You have to get to the fourth paragraph to learn about the Goodman letter (no mention of the probable bribe) and the fifth to learn that is looks to be a smoking gun. And as too often happens in Bloomberg stories on complicated topics, the piece is disjointed. I suspect a lot of readers would lose patience part way through. The New York Times piece starts off in a workmanlike manner, but stunningly omits key elements that would let US readers know why the revelations are important: An influential parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct tabloid, The News of the World, released a potentially damning four-year-old letter Tuesday claiming that hacking was routine and “widely discussed” at the paper, a direct contradiction of repeated assertions by the paper’s owners and editors that until recently they were unaware of the breadth of the problem. The letter, from Clive Goodman, a former News of the World royal correspondent who briefly went to jail in 2007 for intercepting voice mail messages of members of the royal household, is important because it challenges the claim by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation that until last December it believed that the hacking was limited to one “rogue” reporter — Mr. Goodman — and that it had conclusively investigated the matter. Mr. Goodman sent the letter, including the now-redacted names of others he said knew about the hacking, to the company after he was fired. There is NO mention that James and Rupert got up and made serious misrepresentations to Parliament weeks ago! Instead, we are led to believe, in the next paragraph, that the big implication is that this letter is awkward for the prime minister: The disclosure is a further embarrassment to Prime Minister David Cameron, who has already been ridiculed by his political rivals for his decision to hire a former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, as his director of communications. It isn’t until paragraph eight that you get a not terribly direct reference to the idea that these documents included material that was seriously at odds with some of the Murdochs’ testimony: The parliamentary panel, the Commons committee on culture, media and sport, said that in light of Mr. Goodman’s letter and other documents, it would re-call for further questioning at least four former employees of The News of the World. It also said it might re-call Mr. Coulson as well as Rupert Murdoch’s son James, who runs the News Corporation’s European and Asian operations It isn’t until the end of paragraph ten that the Times finally says that some of the material “cast[s] doubt on previous assertions by the Murdochs and other company officials.” The balance of the story does provide a good summary of the main revelations, but by then many readers would have abandoned the piece, not expecting such juicy material. Most important, neither of the US pieces point out the real stakes: this isn’t about whether the Murdochs have to sweat under hot lights. James Murdoch may not survive as a News Corp executive, and the scandal calls succession plans and ultimately the Murdoch control of critical parts of the News Corp enterprise into question, at least in terms of acting as hands-on managers. US readers are missing both a riveting scandal and potentially a sea change in the world’s most powerful media enterprise.

We Speak on RT America About Business’s False Quest for Certainty Posted: 16 Aug 2011 08:09 PM PDT I haven’t done this show before and quite enjoyed the chat, although I did muff words in a couple of places. I’m finding that I seemed to be banned from US TV channels, but the flip side is this was a much more substantive conversation than you’d find on the usual suspects here. Hope you enjoy the segment.