FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Bear Stearns’ Category

Right?

1. In mid-2006, Bear Stearns induced investors to purchase, and Ambac as a financial guarantor to insure, securities that were backed by a pool of mortgage loans that – in the words of the Bear Stearns deal manager – was a “SACK OF SHIT.”1 Within the walls of its sparkling new office tower, Bear Stearns executives knew this derogatory and distasteful characterization aptly described the transaction. Indeed, Bear Stearns had deliberately and secretly altered its policies and neglected its controls to increase the volume of mortgage loans available for its “securitizations” made in patent disregard for the borrowers’ ability to repay those loans. After the market collapse exposed its scheme to sell defective loans to investors through these transactions, JP Morgan executives assumed control over Bear Stearns and implemented an across-the-board strategy to improperly bar EMC from honoring its contractual promises to disclose and repurchase defective loans through a series of deceptive practices. In what amounts to accounting fraud, JP Morgan’s bad-faith strategy was designed to avoid and has avoided recognition of the vast off-balance sheet exposure relating to its contractual repurchase obligations – thereby enabling JPMorgan Chase & Co. to manipulate its accounting reserves and allowing its senior executives to continue to reap tens of millions of dollars in compensation following the taxpayer-financed acquisition of Bear Stearns.

Oh, maybe they did.

At least that’s what the lawsuit claims.

It’s especially nice when you make crap loans and then short the companies you intentionally lay off the bad paper on, knowing they’ll blow up in advance.  And that’s alleged too:

24. Knowing that its fraudulent and breaching conduct was resulting and would continue to result in grave harm to Ambac, Bear Stearns then implemented a trading strategy to profit from Ambac’s potential demise by “shorting” banks with large exposure to Ambac-insured securities. (The “shorts” were bets the banks’ shares or holdings would decrease in value as Ambac incurred additional harm.) In late 2007, Bear, Stearns & Co. Senior Managing Director Jeffrey Verschleiser boasted that “[a]t the end of October, while presenting to the risk committee on our business I told them that a few financial guarantors were vulnerable to potential write downs in the CDO and MBS market and we should be short a multiple of 10 of the shorts I had put on . . . In less than three weeks we made approximately $55 million on just these two trades.”31 Bolstered by this success, Bear Stearns carried this trading strategy into 2008. On February 17, 2008, a Bear Stearns trader told colleagues and Verschleiser, “I am positive fgic is done and ambac is not far behind.”32

Nice.

But wait, as Billy Mayes used to say, there’s more!

JP Morgan caused EMC to reject legitimate repurchase demands by Ambac, as well as other financial guaranty insurers, to understate materially the accounting reserves JPMorgan Chase & Co. was required to accrue and disclose in its financial statements to reflect the liability inherited from EMC for repurchase obligations associated with defective loans. JP Morgan thus interfered with EMC’s contractual obligations to Ambac (and other insurers) to assist its parent corporation, JP Morgan Chase, effectuate a massive accounting fraud. JP Morgan interfered fraudulently, and deceptively represented to Ambac that the rejections of Ambac’s repurchase demands were based on the reasons set forth in the written responses to the demands. In fact, JP Morgan itself had concluded, and knew that EMC and Bear Stearns & Co. (prior to JP Morgan taking control of Bear Stearns & Co.) previously had concluded, that the bases for the repurchase demands for a substantial portion of challenged loans were well founded. Indeed, in a number of instances, EMC had made repurchase demands on the originators of the loans for the very same reason(s) Ambac cited in support of its repurchase demands to EMC.

But I thought Jamie Dimon has repeatedly told us that JP Morgan was a very ethical company, and never did anything wrong?  Ambac disagrees.

27. Moreover, even while refusing to repurchase breaching loans that Ambac identified and requested, the same JP Morgan executive implemented a policy of demanding that suppliers repurchase from EMC the same loans, for the same reasons that Ambac and other financial guarantors had requested EMC to repurchase.36 JP Morgan rebuffed Ambac’s repurchase requests even where Bear Stearns had previously demanded that originators repurchase the exact same loans because the same or similar defects subsequently identified by Ambac.37 The duplicitous and deceptive conduct is patent and the motivation clear: JP Morgan adopted a strategy to deliberately and systematically deny the financial guarantors’ legitimate repurchase demands to avoid JPMorgan Chase & Co. from bringing onto its financial statements the massive off-balance sheet exposure and, in doing so, effectively engaged in accounting fraud.

You know all those off-balance sheet games that I have been screaming about for four years now?  The same sort of games that took Enron down the toilet, and which you can find in virtually every major financial institution in The United States in one form or another?

Yes, those. 

We still allow this to be done in the United States….. why?

After conducting the initial review noted above, Ambac reviewed a random sample of 1,482 loans, with an aggregate principal balance of approximately $88.2 million, selected across all four Transactions. The results of that review are remarkable. Of these 1,482 loans, 1,351, or over 91%, breached one or more of the representations and warranties that EMC had made to Ambac.

91% of the Chocolates in the box are really used dog food, but nobody has gone to jail for selling adulterated boxes of Chocolate.

WHY?

Full complaint below, and again: Where are the damned handcuffs?

Can someone explain how this is not a banking-industry-wide organized criminal conspiracy and why there are not thousands of criminal felony indictments standing right here and now from the top executive offices of these firms on down?

Full complaint below.

Ambac EMC Complaint

The Market-Ticker

I don’t usually swear in the header.  But this time it’s appropriate.

The head of JP Morgan has delivered a furious tirade against “banker bashing”, complaining that the entire industry is being tarred with the same brush and implying that bankers have become political whipping boys.

Oh on the contrary. 

There are a lot of local banks and credit unions that did nothing wrong, and they are in fact honorable people.  I bank at one of them, a local credit union.

I single out for my criticism financial institutions that do things like attempting to prevent disclosure of a lawsuit alleging fraud and double-dipping, the latter amounting to theft of investor funds.

Former Bear Stearns mortgage executives who now run mortgage divisions of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Ally Financial have been accused of cheating and defrauding investors through the mortgage securities they created and sold while at Bear. According to e-mails and internal audits, JPMorgan had known about this fraud since the spring of 2008, but hid it from the public eye through legal maneuvering.

Remember that…. from two days ago?

I do.

Remember this?

The lawsuit’s supporting e-mails, going back as far as 2005, highlight Bear traders telling their superiors they were selling investors like Ambac a “sack of shit.”

Emails eh? 

From the actual traders? 

Telling their superiors that they were selling Ambac “A sack of shit“?

We shouldn’t “criticize” or even “bash” bankers for doing things like that? 

Screwing people is supposed to be beyond reproach?

Really Jamie? 

And we definitely shouldn’t bash bankers for trying to cover up that lawsuit, because, well, the people who were alleged to be responsible might still be working in the mortgage business, right?

That wouldn’t be true, would it?

They say senior traders under Tom Marano, who was a Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Mortgages for Bear and is now CEO of Ally’s mortgage operations, were pocketing cash that should have gone to securities holders after Bear had already sold them bonds and moved the loans off its books.

Mike Nierenberg, who ran the adjustable-rate mortgage trading desk at Bear and is now the head of mortgages and securitization for Bank of America, was a key player ensuring the defaulting loans Bear was buying would move off their books right after they bought them, with little concern for the firm’s due diligence standards. He was joined in this scheme by Jeff Verschleiser, his peer and Senior Managing Director on the mortgage and asset-backed securities trading desk and head of whole loan trading. He is now an executive in Goldman Sachs’ mortgage division.

Aw crap, it appears, if The Atlantic’s reporting is correct, that it is true!

If I rob a bank, can I get a job as a bank teller after I get out of prison?  After all I’m a very trustworthy person who can work industriously in a banking environment…. as proven by the fact that I already know how to rob banks! 

If not, can you explain why your bank tried to keep the public – and investors – from knowing that the people alleged to have robbed the bank’s clients are still working in a banking capacity all over Wall Street? 

It’s just a question Jamie. 

I don’t expect that you’ll answer it.

The Market-Ticker

Lawsuit alleges the bank took extreme measures to defraud investors, and now JPMorgan may be on the hook

Former Bear Stearns mortgage executives who now run mortgage divisions of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Ally Financial have been accused of cheating and defrauding investors through the mortgage securities they created and sold while at Bear. According to e-mails and internal audits, JPMorgan had known about this fraud since the spring of 2008, but hid it from the public eye through legal maneuvering. Last week a lawsuit filed in 2008 by mortgage insurer Ambac Assurance Corp against Bear Stearns and JPMorgan was unsealed. The lawsuit’s supporting e-mails, going back as far as 2005, highlight Bear traders telling their superiors they were selling investors like Ambac a “sack of shit.”

News of internal whistleblowers coming forward from Bear’s mortgage servicing division, EMC, was first reported by The Atlantic in May of last year. Ex-EMC analysts admitted they were sometimes told to falsify loan-level performance data provided to the ratings agencies who blessed Bear’s billion-dollar deals. But according to depositions and documents in the Ambac lawsuit, Bear’s misdeeds went even deeper. They say senior traders under Tom Marano, who was a Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Mortgages for Bear and is now CEO of Ally’s mortgage operations, were pocketing cash that should have gone to securities holders after Bear had already sold them bonds and moved the loans off its books.

Mike Nierenberg, who ran the adjustable-rate mortgage trading desk at Bear and is now the head of mortgages and securitization for Bank of America, was a key player ensuring the defaulting loans Bear was buying would move off their books right after they bought them, with little concern for the firm’s due diligence standards. He was joined in this scheme by Jeff Verschleiser, his peer and Senior Managing Director on the mortgage and asset-backed securities trading desk and head of whole loan trading. He is now an executive in Goldman Sachs’ mortgage division.

According to the lawsuit, the Bear traders would sell toxic mortgage securities to investors and then sell back the bad loans with early payment defaults to the banks that originated them at a discount. The traders would pocket the refund, and would not pass it on to the mortgage trust, which was where it should have gone to be distributed to the investors who owned the bonds. The Marano-led traders also cut the time allowed for early payment defaults, without telling the bond investors. That way, Bear could quickly securitize defective loans, without leaving enough time for investors to do their own due diligence after the bonds were sold and put-back any bad loans to Bear.

The traders were essentially double-dipping — getting paid twice on the deal. How was this possible? Once the security was sold, they didn’t have a legal claim to get cash back from the bad loans — that claim belonged to bond investors — but they did so anyway and kept the money. Thus, Bear was cheating the investors they promised to have sold a safe product out of their cash. According to former Bear Stearns and EMC traders and analysts who spoke with The Atlantic, Nierenberg and Verschleiser were the decision-makers for the double dipping scheme, and thus, are named as individual defendants in the suit.

Bear deal manager Nicolas Smith wrote an e-mail on August 11th, 2006 to Keith Lind, a Managing Director on the trading desk, referring to a particular bond, SACO 2006-8, as “SACK OF SHIT [2006-]8″ and said, “I hope your [sic] making a lot of money off this trade.”

It’s this blatant internal awareness inside the Bear mortgage trading division that the Ambac suits says led Bear to implement an across-the-board strategy to disregard its contractual promises and conceal the defective loans. By JPMorgan taking over Bear, it became the successor of interest in Bear Stearns. As the lawsuit lays out, JPMorgan is responsible for the flagrant accounting fraud started by Bear designed to avoid, and has continued to avoid, recognition of vast off-balance sheet exposure relating to its contractual repurchase agreements. This allowed executives to reap tens of millions of dollars in compensation from a bank that wouldn’t have been able to buy Bear without tax payer assistance.

80% of Loans Went Bad Almost Immediately

In 2007, when Ambac started to realize something was very wrong with its high-rated bonds, it demanded Bear provide loan-level detail and reviewed 695 non-performing loans in its portfolio. Ambac’s audit concluded that 80 percent of the loans showed an early payment default. This meant they should have never have been packed in the bonds Bear sold and were required to be repurchased. Bear refused, and of course had already been pocketing buyback money for itself from the originators. Bear also never told investors that its auditor Price Waterhouse and Coopers submitted an internal review in August 2006 that this repurchase process was not in-line with its due diligence standards and not typical for the industry. By January 2007, a Bear internal audit also reported the firm had collected $1.7 billion in repurchase claims — a 227% increase over the previous year. Yet Marano’s group of traders continued their double-dip payment scheme and kept selling the toxic loans with full awareness of the poor quality of the due diligence.

Jeffrey Verschleiser even said in an e-mail that he knew this was an issue. He wrote to his peer Mike Nierenberg in March 2006, “[we] are wasting way too much money on Bad Due Diligence.” Yet a year later nothing had changed. In March 2007, Verschleiser wrote to Nierenberg again about the same due diligence firm, “[w]e are just burning money hiring them.”

Then in November 2007, Verschleiser wrote to his risk committee that he knew insurers for mortgage securities were going to have big financial problems. He suggested they multiply by ten times the short bet he’d just made against stocks like Ambac. These e-mails show Verschleiser’s trading desk bragging to firm leadership that he made $55 million off shorting insurers’ stock in just three weeks.

Eventually, as Ambac kept demanding a repurchase of the bad loans, Bear acknowledged in late 2007 it would have to buy some back. The lawsuit lists over $600 million in claims with $1.2 billion in damages from the soured mortgage securities it invested in and insured against. But according to the lawsuit, in the spring of 2008, JPMorgan dismissed an outside audit review of the loans’ need to be repurchased and once again refused to pay Ambac. The suit asserts JPMorgan knew a repurchase would result in a huge accounting liability that would put their balance sheet in serious trouble at that time.

Last week, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said it will take years to get through mortgage litigation risk the bank inherited and had set aside around $9 billion for litigation-related risk. Yet in the bank’s January earnings call, Dimon suggested that the bank may not have to buy back any soured mortgages from private investors and said that the issue is “not that material” for JPMorgan. Still, Ambac recently won a court order in December to add accounting fraud against JPMorgan to its suit, which can double or triple lawsuit awards. So it’s hard to tell whether America’s largest bank is prepared to pay for the sins of Bear. JPMorgan did fight tooth and nail for the Ambac suit not to be made public, however, because the firm argued it could damage the reputations of senior bank executives currently working in the industry. Individuals named as defendants included: Jimmy Cayne, Alan “ACE” Greenberg, Warren Spector, Alan Schwartz, Thomas Marano, Jeffrey Mayer, Mary Haggerty, Baron Silverstein, Jeffrey Verschleiser, and Michael Nierenberg.

Ambac’s lawsuit is led by Eric Haas of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. Depositions show internal Bear executives saying Nierenberg and Verschleiser were responsible for deciding how much risk to take when acquiring loans and for aspects of the securitization process. They reported up to Marano. Testimony shows Marano would have known about the decisions his head traders were making. When asked about these accusations, Nierenberg’s, Marano’s, and Verschleiser’s current employers had no comment. The defendants’ lawyers at Greenberg Traurig LLP failed to respond to calls for comment.

A public hearing is currently scheduled to be held by the New York State assembly regarding whether legal action should be brought against banks for misleading insurers about mortgage related securities. If approved, the New York Attorney General will likely be asked to bring criminal fraud charges against these banks. Now we must wait and see if JPMorgan will settle or go to trial — or if the bank tries to claw back tens of millions of dollars in pay from the former Bear executives.

The Atlantic

From NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com)

– The Federal Reserve made $9 trillion in overnight loans to major banks and Wall Street firms during the financial crisis, according to newly revealed data released Wednesday.

Well, except for the public was told that this would be limited to $700 Billion, remember?

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who had authored the provision of the financial reform law that required Wednesday’s disclosure, called the data that was released incredible and jaw-dropping.

“The $700 billion Wall Street bailout turned out to be pocket change compared to trillions and trillions of dollars in near zero interest loans and other financial arrangements that the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution,” Sanders said.

I’d call it more than ‘jawdropping’ – I’d call it theft.

By Karl Denninger

The Federal Reserve’s Veil of Secrecy Is Being Taken Down, But Slowly

One of the first things that ‘put me off’ of Obama was the choice he made of key appointments to his Administration, selecting the two Robert Rubin acolytes Tim Geithner and Larry Summers to his team, marginalizing Paul Volcker, and then making no place for Robert Reich. Although I am sure that, like the rest of us, he puts his pants on one leg at a time, he has shown himself to be a remarkably intelligent and competent member of the Washington political world. I admire him.

Make no mistake, the Fed looks to have been abusing its secrecy and its position, and Bernanke and Geithner are culpable. Reich makes the points as well or better than I could so here is his recent piece on the subject. All the blog’s are picking it up.

As I recall, the Fed said they were only acquiring ‘investment grade’ instruments, which would be taken on its balance sheet in support of the US Dollar, in addition to the usual Treasury Debt. The recent exposures of the holdings of Maiden Lane show these to be more like junk bonds, and certainly not as represented.

The Fed must be audited, and it role as the ‘master regulator’ and as the place where the Office of Consumer Financial Protection would be located is a farce, a cruel joke. Chris Dodd must either be senile, entirely cynical, or believe the American people to be complete idiots. The only reason I could even imagine for considering it is that the Fed is a ‘cost plus’ agency, meaning that they are self funding out of the mechanism of creating money, taking all their costs out before they turn over the interest income from the public debt back to Treasury. This is also a source of their growth and power. The problem that public agencies often have is that the industries that are regulated by them use their donations and lobbyists to stifle approrpriations for the agencies that regulate them in order to hamper and stifle them.

How can you even think of putting an office of reform and consumer protection in the very institution that was at the epicenter of a historic fraud? And shows itself completely willing to mislead the public, and some even believe perjure itself to the Congress to protect its true owners, the big Banks?

There are more things to come. But the frauds yet to be revealed may very well shake this government to its foundations, and very few blogs and almost none of the mainstream media are yet pursuing those stories of market manipulation, secret dealings, insider trading and official protection of corruption.

From The Fed Is In Hot Water by Robert Reich

“First, only Congress is supposed to risk taxpayer dollars. The Fed is not part of the legislative branch. Its secret deals, announced almost two years after they were done, violate the democratic process, if not the Constitution itself. Thomas Jefferson put a stop to Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a powerful central bank out of fear it would be unaccountable to the public. The Fed has just proven Jefferson’s point.

Second, if the Fed can secretly bail out big banks, the problem of “moral hazard” – bankers taking irresponsible risks because they know they’ll be rescued – is far greater than anyone assumed after Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the banks. Big banks will always be too big to fail because they know the Fed will secretly back them up if they get into trouble, even if Congress won’t do it openly.

Third, the announcement throws a monkey wrench into the financial reform bill now on Capitol Hill, which gives the Fed additional authority by, for example, creating a consumer protection bureau inside it. Only yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) blasted the Dodd bill for expanding the Fed’s authority “even as it remains shrouded in secrecy.” (When Jim DeMint and I agree on something you know it has to be close to a universal truth. – Jesse lol)

The Fed has a big problem. It acts in secret. That makes it an odd duck in a democracy. As long as it’s merely setting interest rates, its secrecy and political independence can be justified. But once it departs from that role and begins putting billions of dollars of taxpayer money at risk — choosing winners and losers in the capitalist system — its legitimacy is questionable.

That it chose to reveal the truth about its activities during a week when Congress is out of town, when much of official Washington and the Washington media have gone on vacation, and only after several federal courts have held that the Fed must release documents related to its bailout of Bear Stearns, suggests it would rather remain secret than become transparent.

Much of what Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner did (when Geithner was at the New York Fed) in 2008 was presumably necessary. But the public has no way of knowing. The public doesn’t even know who else the Fed has bailed out, or what entities it will bail out in the future. All we know is the Fed secretly bailed out Bear Stearns and AIG and thereby subjected taxpayers to risks that remain even today, without informing the public. That’s not a record on which to build public trust.”