Blogs: Crash Course

The appraiser who was crucial to an east side mortgage fraud scheme was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison this afternoon as more than 30 supporters looked on, some sobbing. “Oh my God,” someone in the packed courtroom shouted as the judge, James K. Bredar, sentenced David C. Christian to a sentence well...
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A federal grand jury indicted mortgage broker Joshua S. Goldberg today, alleging he helped steal $2.5 million from various lenders through a mortgage fraud scheme in Baltimore. City Paper first outlined the scheme in this 2008 story. As the financial crisis worsened Goldberg and his husband, Bayardo Alvarez, continued to get big mortgages and...
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Gawker has a letter (also authenticated by our sister paper, Orlando Weekly) from Central Florida’s palace-building time share mogul, David Siegel, to his 8,000 employees. In it he tells them that if President Obama is re-elected, he’ll fire them all: “You see, I can no longer support a system that penalizes the productive and...
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MoJo has an interesting vid of Mitt Romney laying it out to his base.  You’ve probably seen or heard about it. Most of the attention so far has been focused on his remarks about the “47 percent who are with , who are dependent on government.” But later in the speech Romney says...
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The New York Times‘ Dealbook says Baltimore’s City Solicitor is “leading a battle in Manhattan Federal Court” against banks involved in the LIBOR scandal. “As unemployment climbed and tax revenue fell, the city of Baltimore laid off employees and cut services in the midst of the financial crisis. Its leaders now say the city’s...
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No news. No news about labor, on Labor Day, when unemployment is 9-plus percent and U-6 unemployment–which counts not only people without work seeking full-time employment, but also those who’ve become discouraged and stopped looking as well as those working part-time for economic reasons–is 16-plus percent. Lots of news about Sept. 11, 10 years...
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At the start of this blog, I predicted that the financial crash would cause the government to spend huge money bailing out the people who caused it, adding a great deal to the national debt and sparking a crisis of confidence in the country’s ability to repay it, which would lead to a policy...
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Steven Davidoff at the Times’s dealbook comes through with an obvious, 20-years-late observation that Wall Street firms’ “reputations are dying” in the rubble of the bust and revelations of rampant, systematic chicanery. Fortunately, we have Yves Smith to put this in a corrective context. Far from “dying,” investment banks’ reputations died decades ago amid...
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A federal jury on Tuesday found the flamboyant founder and CEO of bankrupt Florida mortgage lender Taylor Bean and Whitaker guilty of fraud. Lee Farkas appears to be the first CEO convicted of a crime in the five-year-old mortgage crisis. He faces life in prison at his July sentencing. Farkas, a college dropout, founded...
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As I write this, the countdown to government shutdown proceeds apace, with Republicans performing rhetorical double Luntzes to try to pin blame on Democrats. Amidst that pathetic kabuki we have what passes for “seriousness” in the budget proposal of one Paul Ryan, congressman from Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee. Ryan’s plan,...
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Many words have been written about the alleged fact that “nobody goes to jail”  for the giant theft perpetuated on us all. But one guy—Taylor Bean and Whitaker  founder Lee Farkas—is now on trial for fraud in Virginia. According to testimony from just one of the lender’s executives who has already pleaded guilty (and–YES!–faces...
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I keep doing the same basic post over and over, hoping something will change. I know what that makes me, so this is one of the last posts I’m going to do in this blog (though you can still find me over here occasionally). It’s had a reasonably good run, made its point. Time...
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