In case you missed them (shame on you if you did), here are a couple of fine rants from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. Well, fragments of them; click for the unexpurgated versions.
First rant:
Yet Another Program to Enrich Banks at Taxpayer and Borrower Expense
The chicanery never ends.
The latest bit of looting fobbed off as a win for homeowners is a program to shovel money to second mortgage lenders:
The Obama administration unveiled a new program to help borrowers with second mortgages stay out of foreclosure, offering cash to servicers, investors and borrowers who modify loan terms.
Guess what? Plenty of seconds are under water and have NO economic value. But they play like pigs in foreclosure and renegotiations. So this program will validate values above market value for these homes and unnecessarily enrich second mortgage holders, who otherwise would have to eat their losses.
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Second rant:
On Pelosi’s Duplicity and Apparent Sandbagging of Elizabeth Warren
Despite her longevity as a California pol, house speaker Nancy Pelosi is looking like every bit as much of a dyed-in-the-wool financial services industry backer as the Congressmen on the New York-Boston corridor.
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But if we are lucky (and we’d need to be very lucky) history might repeat itself. The original Depression investigation was also a sham exercise, but Pecora, brought in to write the final report after three previous investigators were fired or quit, asked to reopen the hearings, and some initial successes, plus the arrival of the Roosevelt administration, gave the probe a new leash on life.
But with the both the Democrats and the Republicans firmly in the hold of the banking classes, it will take something more on the order of a miracle to get a serious inquiry underway.