The New York Times’ Ron Lieber has an excellent column on the severe hangover left by the cocktail of cheap credit and spiraling college tuitions: the tens of thousands of young people saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of what is, effectively, subprime student loan debt. In some More…
Citigroup is selling new mortgage-backed securities for the first time in two years.
The company expects the mortgages to be rated AAA. But, BusinessWeek notes, “$67.3 million of the loans were to self-employed borrowers and $66.3 million didn’t require borrowers to document two years of their incomes and assets.”
It’s earnings week on Wall Street, and analysts had estimated that megabank Citigroup would break even in the first quarter. This morning, it announced a $4.4 billion profit — meaning the bank made around $49 million a day in the first three months of the year. Sure, markets More…
Tomorrow, the House Financial Services Committee, headed by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), starts a series of hearings on mortgage modification and the housing market. The schedule is as follows:
This morning, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission heard from Robert Rubin and Charles Prince, the former heads of banking behemoth Citigroup.
Prince opened his remarks with regrets. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact for our country. I’m sorry about the More…
Bloomberg’s long-standing Freedom of Information Act request for a look at who in the financial system took part in the Fed’s now-secret $2 trillion loan program has been granted by a second court on the basis that there exists no exemption to FOIA rules for the continued economic More…
A new report from the Treasury Department — the last of its kind — shows that despite all the regulation-avoiding PR campaigns, new loans at the nine largest banks that still owe bailout funds to the government dropped by 35 percent in January.
The nine banks
It was a tough day to be Herbert Allison. The Treasury official charged with monitoring the $700 billion Wall Street bailout appeared Thursday before the congressional panel created for that same purpose — and was promptly lashed by committee members for evading many of the questions they hurled his way. More…
Recent media reports that Citigroup had discovered a potential way around regulations forbidding it from abusive rate hikes sparked more than a public outcry; it convinced Citi’s competitors to follow suit. Since the regulations are set to take effect Monday, card companies are scrambling to inform customers about More…
With Obama’s much-vaunted mortgage modification program all but deemed a failure — one million applications have resulted in 31,000 modifications in the $75 billion program — the administration is set to embark on a new phase in its project to resolve the ongoing mortgage crisis. That phase involves More…
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