banking

Pure evil from the ‘Kochtopus’ – unconstrained predatory lending

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Our lawless Republican legislators love loan sharks and predatory lenders. Remember the consumer rights fight we had over Jonathan “Payday” Paton and the payday loan industry in 2008? (From the archives, The Sun Sets on Payday Loans in Arizona). Neil Young wrote the song “rust never sleeps,” and neither does evil. It is omnipresent and … Read more

The manufactured ‘crisis’ over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

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The latest attempt by Donald Trump to fill the D.C. swamp with his loyal cronies to destroy federal agencies he does not like is this manufactured “crisis” over who will head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This fake “populist” is actually a big supporter of the banksters of Wall Street, the The Predator Class whose unbridled avarice and greed led to The Mortgage Fraud Scandal, The Biggest In Human History, that nearly destroyed the U.S. economy and the world’s financial system.

Donald Trump, a grifter and con man himself, believes the banksters of Wall Street were the real victims in this financial scandal, and that they should be freed from the minimalist banking regulations enacted in the Dodd-Frank Act to allow them to once again prey on consumers victims again, something you would expect a grifter and con man to say. Casting Wall Street as Victim, Trump Leads Deregulatory Charge.

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The Twitter-troll-in-chief”s tweet is, of course, total bullshit, as Philip Bump of The Post explains. Trump once again rises to Wall Street’s defense:

This isn’t true: Banks have repeatedly set new quarterly records on incomes over the past several years, including in the second quarter of 2017. If that’s devastation, sign me up.

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Bloomberg News’s editorial board, in an editorial praising the watchdog agency, described some of its successes: “It created the first federal rules to make payday lending less predatory. It gave the public reams of valuable information, such as a database that allows consumers to compare credit-card agreements. Its practice of publishing complaints pushed financial institutions to be more responsive. Its investigation of Wells Fargo brought national attention to the fake-accounts issue.”

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Evil GOP bastards vote to gut Dodd-Frank banking regulations

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Remember those terrifying days in September 2008 after the housing bubble had collapsed, the world’s financial system teetered on collapse, and the economy was in a free-fall?

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Yeah, Tea-Publicans in Congress hope you suffer from short-term memory loss and that you have forgotten all about those dark days.

The evil GOP bastards want to return to what they view as those halcyon days when the banksters of Wall Street ran wild in unregulated casino capitalism — speculation, fraud and theft — that nearly destroyed the world’s financial system. Not one bankster of Wall Street was ever convicted for the greatest financial crime in history, but the GOP is OK with that … the banksters are the “masters of the universe” whom the lickspittle servants of the GOP serve in Congress.

While You Were Paying Attention To Comey, House Republicans Voted For Everything Big Banks Want:

While much of the political world was watching the fallout from former FBI Director James Comey’s Senate testimony Thursday, House Republicans were jamming through a bill that would largely gut the financial regulations in Dodd-Frank, the landmark banking legislation passed in 2010 after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

But instead of quietly sneaking the legislation through, Republicans were loudly touting the bill ― which passed, 233-186, with all Democrats and one Republican (Walter Jones of North Carolina) voting no ― as a major victory.

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ICIJ releases a searchable data base of ‘The Panama Papers’

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PanamaCityThe International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that released the report  “The Panama Papers” (Getty images, Panama City) last month, a leak of financial data of companies and individuals using  tax havens to evade payment of taxes in their countries, How Reporters Pulled Off the Panama Papers, the Biggest Leak in Whistleblower History (“The leak includes more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that, according to analysis of the leaked documents, appears to specialize in creating shell companies that its clients have used to hide their assets”), has now released a searchable data base of those records. ICIJ releases database revealing thousands of secret offshore companies:

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a searchable database that strips away the secrecy of nearly 214,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, from Nevada to Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands.

The data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures.

The database also displays information about more than 100,000 additional offshore entities ICIJ had already disclosed in its 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.

ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.

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