FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Warren Buffett’ Category

There is absolutely nothing wrong with working hard and making a lot of money, but there is something wrong with being completely arrogant and smug about it. Today, many among the elite are savagely mocking the poor, and that is a huge mistake. You shouldn’t kick people when they are down. There are tens of millions of Americans that are deeply frustrated about losing their homes, losing their jobs or barely being able to survive in this economy. These frustrations have been one of the primary reasons for the rise of the Tea Party movement and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement. What these movements have in common is that people in both movements are sick and tired of the status quo and they want something to be done about our broken system. There are huge numbers of families out there right now that have just about reached the end of their ropes. Instead of showing compassion, many of the ultra-wealthy have decided that it is funny to mock the poor and those that are suffering. So how are all of these protesters going to respond to the “let them eat cake” attitude of the Wall Street elite? The protesters are being told that nothing that they can do will change anything and that they should be grateful for what Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy have done for them. They are essentially being told that they should just shut up and go home. So will we see these protest movements become discouraged and die down, or will the patronizing attitudes of so many among the elite just inflame them even further?

Right now, there really are two different “Americas”. In one America, the stock market is surging, corporate profits are soaring and BMW is operating factories at 110% of capacity just to keep up with demand.

In the other America, unemployment is rampant, millions of families are being kicked out of their homes and more than 45 million Americans are on food stamps.

There is more economic frustration in this country today than there has been at any other time since the Great Depression. We are watching pressure build to very dangerous levels.

It is important to note that I certainly do not agree at all with the solutions being put forward by the organizers of the Occupy Wall Street protests. As I have written about previously, collectivism is one of our biggest problems, and more collectivism is not going to solve anything.

But it is definitely understandable that people are incredibly upset about this economy and that they want to protest. Most Americans realize that something is fundamentally wrong with our economic system.

Unfortunately, most of them do not understand how we have gotten to this point or what it is going to take to fix things. That is one of the reasons why I write about economic issues so much. We desperately need to educate America.

But what is undeniable is that there is a growing rage in this country that protest movements such as the Occupy Wall Street are giving a voice to.

Our system is badly broken. The people out there protesting in the streets may not understand much, but they do understand that something needs to change.

The Wall Street elite should be taking these protests as a signal that they need to get their house in order. The status quo just is not going to cut it. But instead of taking leadership and calling for significant change, many among the elite are openly mocking the protesters.

The incredible arrogance displayed by so many on Wall Street and by so many in Washington D.C. is absolutely appalling.

The following are 10 examples of how the elite are openly mocking the poor in America today….

#1 According to an article in The New York Times, poor families that lost their homes to foreclosure were openly mocked during a Halloween party thrown by the law firm of Steven J. Baum. This particular law firm represents many of the largest mortgage lenders in the United States….

The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Photos from this Halloween party are posted on The New York Times website. To say that they are appalling would be a huge understatement. The following is how The New York Times described one of the photos….

In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

#2 To many on Wall Street, the OWS protests are one big joke. In fact, Wall Street executives have been spotted sipping champagne while watching the Occupy Wall Street protests from their balconies.

#3 In response to the Occupy Chicago protests, signs were put up in the windows of the building where the Chicago Board of Trade is located that spelled out this sentence: “We Are The 1%“.

#4 Many columnists for major financial publications have had no fear of mocking the Occupy Wall Street protesters. For example, Doug Hirschhorn recently wrote the following for Forbes….

As your Occupation of Wall Street continues, you may want to grasp a few things. First, it is not going to change anything in the short term and probably not much in the long-term either.

I hate to be the bearer of that news, but money makes the world go round and “Wall Street” is all about money. Second, the top traders, banks and hedge funds are still going to out earn and generate substantial profits from speculating on the disconnects in the prices of things generated from all the moving parts in the global economy and it has nothing to do with why you lost your house or job or can’t find a job. If anything the successful ones are helping you, your pensions funds, retirement savings and the economy in general. If Wall Street stops. The world stops. Period.

#5 Instead of attempting a balanced report on the Occupy Wall Street protests, Erin Burnett of CNN openly made fun of them during a recent broadcast. After being a stalwart on CNBC for so many years, Burnett has very close ties to Wall Street and apparently she does not like anyone criticizing her friends. You can see video of Burnett mocking the Occupy Wall Street movement right here.

#6 Barack Obama continues to mock the poor by telling them to cut back on vacations and little luxuries like going out to eat while at the same time sending his own family out on incredibly expensive vacations. The following is one example I noted in an article earlier this year….

Barack Obama recently made the following statement to American families that are struggling to survive in this economy: “If you’re a family trying to cut back, you might skip going out to dinner, or you might put off a vacation.” A few days after making that statement Obama sent his wife and children off on yet another vacation, this time to a luxury ski hotel in Vail, Colorado.

Later on in that same article I mentioned another outrageously expensive vacation taken by the Obamas that was paid for by our taxes….

Back in August, Michelle Obama took her daughter Sasha and 40 of her friends for a vacation in Spain.

So what was the bill to the taxpayers for that little jaunt across the pond?

It is estimated that vacation alone cost U.S. taxpayers $375,000.

During a time when so many millions of American families are deeply, deeply suffering it is truly appalling that the residents of the White House would be so insensitive.

#7 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain recently declared that anyone that is unemployed or poor in America should only blame themselves….

“Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

#8 Sometimes our politicians are so insensitive that it is almost hard to believe. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News while she was still the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi stated that we need poor people to have less children because it costs the government so much money to take care of them….

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

#9 Warren Buffett has some interesting observations on class warfare. He is one of the few wealthy Americans that is willing to say what everyone else is thinking. Back in 2006, Buffett was quoted as saying the following in an article in The New York Times….

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Buffett was not taking pride in the fact that the elite have won, but there are many others among the elite that are very proud of what they have done and they are not afraid to look down on the poor.

The level of income inequality that we have in the United States today is absolutely amazing. According to data from a few years ago, the average household income for the top 0.01% of all Americans was $27,342,212. According to that same data, for the bottom 90% of all Americans the average household income was just $31,244.

#10 Every single day, our “representatives” in Washington D.C. are living the high life at our expense. It is amazing that out of the entire population of the United States, we continue to overwhelming elect rich people to Congress. As I noted in a recent article, more than half of all the members of Congress are millionaires, and the median wealth of a U.S. Senator in 2009 was 2.38 million dollars.

Without a doubt, the wealthy rule over us all and they intend to maintain control and perpetuate the system which has rewarded them so handsomely.

When necessary, they are not afraid to call in the police to bust some skulls. Sadly, we are already seeing some brutally violent confrontations between law enforcement authorities and Occupy Wall Street protesters in many areas of the country. The other day, I wrote about the horrific violence that took place in Oakland recently….

Unfortunately, the authorities are not just going to sit by and watch these protests happen. In fact, they are already clamping down hard in many areas of the nation. For example, police in Oakland recently used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up the Occupy protest in that city. When police opened fire, the streets of Oakland literally became a war zone for a few minutes. You can see shocking videos of the violence here, here and here.

Power and wealth have become incredibly concentrated in the United States today. As one scientific study demonstrated recently, the elite control almost the entire global economy. In fact, the University of Zurich study discovered that there are just 147 gigantic corporations at the core of it all.

It is not a good thing that such a very small group of people completely dominates all the rest of us.

Once again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with working hard, making great contributions to society and becoming very wealthy.

However, what we have today is a fundamentally broken system that funnels most of the wealth and most of the power into the hands of the ultra-wealthy and the gigantic corporations that they own.

It would be great if the American people could come together and work to make some positive changes to our system.

But right now, it appears that strife, discord and hatred are going to continue to rapidly grow in this country. We have become a very divided nation and we are watching anger and frustration grow to very dangerous levels.

All of this is a recipe for mass chaos. Our country is marching toward a date with disaster and right now we show no signs of changing course.

Please pray for America.

We definitely need it.

The Economic Collapse

Bank of America stock jumped over 9% Thursday on news that Warren Buffett is making a $5 billion investment in the bank. But, at $7.65, the stock closed more than a $1 below its high of the session and BofA shares were falling anew Friday morning, trading as low as $7.45 before stabilizing.

When the news broke that Buffett was investing in BofA, the chattering class rejoiced….Buffet has “saved” Bank of America”…Buffett Deal Is “Seal of Approval” … “Time to Buy Bank of America“… and my personal favorite: Buffett’s vote of confidence in B of A, US economy.

Warren Buffett is a great investor but the idea his deal with Bank of America is good for anyone but Warren Buffet is baloney.

Warren Buffett is investing in Bank of America for one simple reason — to make money. A lot money.

Follow the Money

Bank of America will pay Buffett a 6% dividend for the privilege of getting access to his money — and his brand. Shareholders will have to pay for that and live with the threat of a massive dilution as Buffett also got the right to buy up to 700 million shares of Bank of America stock at $7.14 per share. (See: Buffett: The One-Man Blue-Chip Bailout Machine Strikes Again)

From Salomon Brothers in 1987 to Goldman Sachs and GE in 2008 to Bank of America today, Buffett has always been willing to help a fellow corporate citizen who’s down on their luck — for the right price.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that… but don’t confuse Buffett’s profit game for altruism, patriotism or any other “ism” other than capitalism.

Buffett has carefully cultivated an image of America’s kindly grandfather. Just a simple, humble guy from Omaha who just happens to be one of the world’s richest men. Many journalists and pundits eagerly peddle this glorified version of the man they call “The Oracle of Omaha” because it’s a good story and appeals to the huddle masses yearning to be free — and looking for a hero.

In recent years, Buffett has opined about why we should ‘Buy American’ — stocks that is — to tax policy, and his prognostications have been greeted as gospel by everyone from the thousands of individual investors who flock to Berkshire’s annual “Woodstock of Capitalism” up to and including President Obama, who cited Buffett’s recent complaint that he and other ‘super-rich’ super-friends aren’t taxed enough. (See: Buffett Blasts Low Taxes On Billionaires, Says Congress Must Stop Coddling Them)

But I’d like to take these Buffett brown nosers to Task for failing to see that Buffett is nothing more than an investor, and like any other good investor, his only goal is to make money.

Buffett: Myth vs. Reality

By putting his “stamp of approval” on Bank of America, Buffett no doubt hoped to profit not just on the BofA deal, but also on his massive holdings in other blue-chip stocks — including financials like USBancorp and Wells Fargo, which would be at risk if a “systemically important” bank like Bank of America were to get into ‘real’ trouble, as appeared to be the case earlier this week.

The idea Buffett is doing the rest of us a favor is naïve, at best. He’s not saving our economy, nor is he giving us a road map on how we can make money. He’s just trying to make money for himself and his shareholders.

Again, not that there’s anything wrong with that…but it says something about our society that we deify this billionaire rather than celebrate researchers seeking the cure for cancer, scientists trying to solve the world’s energy crisis or our children’s school teachers, not to mention our soldiers in uniform.

And while Buffett has never been accused of breaking the law, he’s not without sin either. Consider:

• Buffett is the largest shareholder in Moody’s, one of the rating agencies that placed AAA ratings on subprime mortgages that later proved toxic — arguably one of the biggest causes of the crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, including up to present day. And Buffett started selling Moody’s once the rating agencies’ role in creating the crisis became evident.
• More recently, Buffett came under scrutiny for defending former executive David Sokol, who bought shares of Lubrizol last winter just ahead of the company’s purchase by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. But once public opinion turned against him, Buffett threw Sokol to the curb faster than you can cook a minute steak. (See: The Sokol Saga: Buffett Can’t Remove “Black Mark,” Tuck’s Paul Argenti Says)
• Berkshire subsidiary General Reinsurance paid a $92 million fine to the SEC last year after being found guilty of helping insurance clients like AIG mislead investors about their financial health.
• Buffett has had other run-ins with the SEC, including over Berkshire’s recent purchase of Burlington Northern and as far back as 1974 over a transaction to buy Wesco Financial, The NY Post reports.

Moreover, investors who’ve followed Buffett into investments like Goldman Sachs and GE got burned, assuming they adhered to Buffett’s dictum about “forever” being the best holding period. The rest of us didn’t get the big dividends Buffett earned and both stocks are currently trading below the levels when Buffett made his “confidence-boosting” investments in 2008, Goldman by 12% and GE by 37%.

Finally, shares of Buffett’s own company, Berkshire Hathaway, have underperformed the S&P 500 in the past year and the company recently split its B-shares, violating yet another of Buffett’s not-so-sacred tenants.

Nobody’s perfect but you wouldn’t know it listening to most of the coverage surrounding Buffett where there’s way too much fawning and not enough ‘fair and balanced’ analysis.

Aaron Task is the host of The Daily Ticker. You can follow him on Twitter at @atask or email him at altask@yahoo.com

So many to choose from this week…. Buffett and BAC (which I already wrote on), Bernanke’s continued mendacity and of course the destruction of real liquidity in the markets due to all the gaming and schemes that the “Wall Street Capitalists” have engaged in over the last few years.

But today’s column is reserved for those topics I haven’t explored this week.  We’ll begin with this:

The Elko County Sheriff’s Office was notified in July of possible sexual contact between David Ralph Anderson, 61, and a girl younger than 14.

According to Elko Justice Court records, the victim told investigators that on seven to 10 occasions between 2010 and this year, Anderson allegedly taught the victim about various sexual acts and had sexual contact in the form of touching each other’s genitals.

Alleged perverts aren’t anything special, right?  Well, this one is.  The article says he’s a TSA employee.

Still want to go through that security line to fly, do you?  There wouldn’t be anything special about being a TSA employee that might be attractive to an alleged pervert, is there?  Oh yeah, there is – you get to grope the balls of little boys and fondle little girls breasts, and it’s part of your job description.

Why do we allow this as citizens of this nation again?

You can never eliminate as a prospective matter all perverts – by definition until the first time they get caught, arrested, tried and (hopefully) imprisoned you don’t know they’re perverts.  But you can refuse to create government-sponsored and mandated positions where people like this can molest thousands of kids as part of their job!

What sort of sick society have we become that we’re willing to subject not only ourselves but our kids to sexual abuse simply to exercise our constitutional right to travel?  And don’t give me this “privilege” crap – you (as an adult) may be able to consent to being groped (legally) to get on a plane (the difference between sexual assault and simple sex is in fact consent) but the premise of someone being a minor is that they cannot consent as a matter of law and you cannot consent for them.  Arguing that this is acceptable is identical to arguing that a parent should be able to “consent” to their child sleeping with an uncle – or anyone else for that matter.  Disgusted yet?  You should be – with yourself.

In the first runner-up slot for outrage of the week we have this regarding JP Morgan:

The U.S. Treasury Department announced an $88.3 million settlement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) for apparent violations of international sanctions programs, including Cuban assets control and anti-terrorism regulations.

The Treasury said that JPMorgan through its correspondent banks maintained prohibited financial transactions with sanctioned entities in countries including Cuba and Iran.

The JPMorgan payment agreed upon by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, known as OFAC, involves “egregious” violations for five years, according to a Treasury Department statement.

JP Morgan, of course, sees it differently and called them “rare incidents”, unrelated and isolated.

Uh huh.  Treasury says they were egregious violations of the law and went on for five years.

We can argue over whether Cuba should have sanctions upon it, or Iran for that matter.  Nonetheless it is the law, and if you so much as move $5 to one of these prohibited entities you’re subject to huge fines and potential imprisonment.

When a big bank does it?  Well gee, we’ll just issue a tiny little fine for five years of misconduct, indict nobody and imprison nobody, despite the fact that real people in real parts of the bank authorized and performed these transfers.

That is, real people broke the law – either intentionally or through willful blindness.

If the penalty for holding up a bank was simply paying a fine equal to the amount you stole, how many times would your corner bank be held up between noon and 4 PM every day?

That’s what I thought.

Then there’s this stupidity on Bernanke and “Fed activism”:

Advice from Ben S. Bernanke, scholar, to Ben S. Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman: Be bold.

Really?  What’s the record on “being bold”?

I count three successive chairmen who were in fact utter fuckups and trashed our long-run economic prosperity by putting in place economic and monetary theories that are trivially disprovable using nothing more than fifth-grade mathematics.  That one of them received a PhD for advocating even more of the same crap is an outrage and indictment against so-called “higher” education.  They were high all right, but elevation above the crowd in intellectual prowess most-certainly isn’t what is being referred to.

Other Fed chairmen also have been criticized for bold action. Volcker in the early 1980s pushed interest rates to a record 20 percent to target inflation above 13 percent. While prices eventually dropped, the economy fell into a 16-month recession in July 1981 after emerging from a six-month slump in July 1980.

Prices dropped?  The hell they did.  Even the government’s own twisted statistics do not show contraction in prices – that is, reversion to the mean. The Millennials may not remember this but I sure do and so do people older than I. Indeed, what happened was that the modern ponzi economic “expansion” born of the lie that credit growth is in fact economic growth (it is not; output must always grow faster than credit or mathematically you are eventually screwed!) was born, nurtured, fed and then exploded – twice – into full-blown economic crises from which we have not escaped and won’t until we stop running monetary and fiscal policies that have proven bereft of merit.

Not only is the mathematics clear on this but so is the empirical evidence – a 30-year unbroken track record of failure.

Greenspan, after the 2001 recession, slashed the Fed’s benchmark interest rate to 1 percent in late June 2003, the lowest since 1958, and held it there for a year in a bid to fend off what he called a remote chance of deflation. Critics blame him for inflating the housing bubble that burst in 2007 and thrusting the economy into recession by holding interest rates too low for too long.

Even so, Bernanke has presided over even more economic upheaval.

Yeah, and every bit of it was self-inflicted by himself and the two chairsatan before him.

Why doesn’t anyone talk about the 1920-21 deflationary recession?  It would be called a Depression except that it didn’t last long enough to be classified as one.  In terms of the delta on prices (some 37% at the wholesale level – downward!) and collapse in industrial output it was the most-violent that I can find a contemporary record on.  The stock market was cut in half and unemployment soared.

The cause of the collapse was over-exuberant hiring post WWI and the release of a huge number of Army members back into the civilian labor pool.

What’s interesting is that there was a Presidential election and Warren Harding presided over nearly all of this. Harding received counsel to intervene from one Mr. Hoover – yes, that Mr. Hoover, who was at the time Commerce Secretary.

He refused that advice and the market and economy cleared within 18 months, posting the largest single-year industrial output gain ever in the history of the United States.  Not only that but unemployment returned to the full-employment level as well.

Activism by the federal government and federal reserve works and a “hands off” policy of letting those who get in over their head with leverage, overcapacity and debt doesn’t, eh?

Isn’t selective memory – and how it’s used to block out the success of the government refusing to prop up idiots and swindlers alike a funny thing?

Oh, incidentally, there are nations who have figured out that the debt ponzi doesn’t work.  Spain is one of them.

The amendment (to the constitution) calls for public debt not to exceed 60 percent of gross domestic product, though the ceiling may be breached in the case of “natural catastrophe, economic recession or emergencies.” The parties pledged to pass a separate law by June next year that will set a maximum structural deficit of 0.4 percent of GDP to be met by 2020, the same year the debt limit comes into effect.

0.4%, or in essence a balanced budget, and public debt may not exceed 60% of GDP.

The ruling party in Spain is the Socialist party.  Even die-hard redistributionist political actors, if they look at the math and stop lying to themselves and the public, find the truth inescapable and ultimately come to the correct conclusion: You must pay for the government services you wish to receive, all of them, with current tax revenues – not promises to pay tomorrow.

Wake up America; it’s a disgrace that a socialist nation can and does out-think you at a fifth grade level of comprehension.

I want to know when we’re going to get apologies and retractions of the claim that Bank of America did not need any new capital.

Remember, that was a mantra.  Well, how about that deal then….

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the biggest U.S. lender, said Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will invest $5 billion to bolster the company after losses tied to subprime mortgages drained capital. Bank of America surged in New York trading.

Berkshire will get cumulative perpetual preferred stock paying a 6 percent dividend, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said today in a statement. Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire also gets warrants to buy 700 million shares at $7.14 each.

Six percent eh?  That’s damn expensive money – something like 30 times the official “overnight” rate to borrow.  In addition he got warrants to buy 700 million shares at $7.14 each, which are (at this writing) about 75 cents each in the money.  Oh, and there’s no lock-up period on those either.

Can I ask an inconvenient question on the latter?  447 million shares have traded hands on BAC this morning thus far.  Were any of them shorted against the box by Berkshire, given that there are no apparent restrictions on his disposition of those warrants?

Buffett conceived of the investment while in the bathtub yesterday morning and had his assistant contact Moynihan’s to get the banker’s private number, CNBC reported, citing an interview with Buffett.

Riiiiiight.  The phone call that was reported with Obama and the incessant pumping yesterday of exactly this “idea” in the corporate media (CNBS, again) didn’t have anything to do with it I’m sure.  I’m also sure there’s no sort of backdoor deal in the wings from the government; after there there’s no record that the 2008 “investments” were ultimately backstopped by the government, right?

Oh wait… there was and they were.  Oh darn.

The market didn’t believe a word of it in the general sense, although BAC is still trading 12% higher as I write this.  We’ll see how long it lasts, or whether this simply provides incentives for the Bears to look at the facts and say “you lied about not needing capital – now we’re really going to lean into you.”

This is so predictable, it’s ridiculous, and apparently, the market is not fooled this time round.  It was announced on the major media networks that Warren Buffet was ‘investing’ $5 Billion in Bank of America.

Such was the claim on CNBS just a few minutes ago.

The last bank, and arguably the one that has the most to lose, Wells Fargo, which up until now has fervently denied it engaged in robosigning and thus refused to halt foreclosures, has just been caught red-handed by the FT. In a sworn deposition, which will certainly lead to a foreclosure halt by Warren Buffett’s pet bank, and confirmation that WFC was merely lying like everyone else on Wall Street, the Financial Times has obtained legal documents that prove Wells was merely one of many. Per the FT: “Legal documents obtained by the Financial Times suggest that Wells Fargo, the second-largest US mortgage servicer, also used a “robo signer”. Unlike its rivals, Wells Fargo has not halted foreclosures. The San Francisco-based bank said on Tuesday it was reviewing some pending cases, but it has maintained that it has checks and balances designed to prevent serious procedural lapses.” Now that Wells’ checks and balances end up neither checking nor balancing, perhaps it is time for Charlie Munger to tell the shareholders of Wells to “suck it in“, as the bank is about to be faced with a rather simple dilemma: beg for TARP 2 (and confirm that Munger, and his partner, are nothing but a bunch of pathetic senile hypocrites) and thus more taxpayer bailouts, or see a huge portion of its shareholder value (and thus Charlie Munger’s precious, precious money) about to be wiped out.

In a sworn deposition on March 9 seen by the FT, Xee Moua, identified in court documents as a vice-president of loan documentation for Wells, said she signed as many as 500 foreclosure-related papers a day on behalf of the bank.

Ms Moua, who was deposed as part of a foreclosure lawsuit in Palm Beach County, Florida, said that the only information she verified was whether her name and title appeared correctly, according to the document.

Asked whether she checked the accuracy of the principal and interest that Wells claimed the borrower owed – a crucial step in banks’ legal actions to repossess homes – Ms Moua said: “I do not.”

Ms Moua nevertheless signed affidavits that said she had “personal knowledge of the facts regarding the sums of money which are due and owing to Wells Fargo”. The affidavits were used by the bank in foreclosure proceedings.

Ms Moua added that before reaching her desk, it was her understanding that the foreclosure documents had been reviewed by outside lawyers.

Wells declined to comment on the deposition but said its records show its “foreclosure affidavits are accurate”. The bank added: “When we find team members who do not follow procedure, we fix what is done incorrectly. Until this case is resolved, we should keep in mind that a deposition does not suggest a wrongful foreclosure.”

And with that, the foreclosure moratorium which TurboTaxing Tim so had hoped to avoid, becomes a self-imposed reality…Or is it: to our big surprise we read in the News-Press.com, that despite the banks’ self-imposed moratorium, the foreclosures are, in fact, continuing:

But in Lee County, court records show both of those banks have continued to get court judgments allowing the sale of mortgages on foreclosed houses at public auction.

That’s despite statements from both banks that they stopped doing that about two weeks ago.

April Charney, a Jacksonville-area legal aid attorney who’s an expert on foreclosure issues, said she’s hearing similar reports from around the country.
She scoffed at the banks’ protests that they didn’t intend for the judgments to be issued.

“It’s a farce,” she said. “We’re all being played.”

JP Morgan spokesman Tom Kelly said Tuesday he didn’t know the bank’s attorneys were continuing to get judgments allowing them to go forward with auctions.

Twelve judgments have been issued in Lee for JPMorgan since Oct. 2, the latest on Tuesday, according to court records.

“We reached out to our local foreclosure counsel and asked them to ask the courts not to enter judgments,” Kelly said. “I don’t know what happened there.”

At this point we wonder: will Wall Street ever stop lying to the American public (no), and even when it pretends to do so, will it at least be true to its word for at least a few days. Ultimately, these two questions are far more imporant than whether or not a bunch of documents were filed properly and reside where needed. If 99% of the American population can not have any faith and trust in those who truly rule the country (Wall Street for those who may be confused) then America is one food crisis away (and thanks to Bernanke’s liquidity laxatives we give that a few months at most) from outright social unrest.

ZeroHedge