Bazllionaire Wilbur Ross, a man who's made a big play on mortgage servicing rights and who's waiting until the US government ":gets real" on the terms it offers to private investors before he jumps into the bailout of broken financial institutions, had some interesting opinions about the proposed bo...

Last month, real estate columnist Steve Brown shot off a nice little rant about how bank regulators were forcing banks to clamp down so hard on real estate lending that they were denying credit to good borrowers as well as bad ones. The Kansas City Business Journal provides further evidence of this ...

A recent action that received little coverage (other than by BankThink) was the request by Consumers Union that The Treasury Department order the OCC to rescind its preemption regulation. Consumers Union is trying to win the case of Cuomo v. The Clearing House Association, LLC through the back door....

Last fall, theology professor R.R. Reno wrote a long blog piece at First Things that defended the federal government's bailout from the attacks of his more ideologically pure brethren on the right. Professor Reno recently came back with a follow up piece this week that concedes that he angered a lot...

Reader Gregg Somerville, a stockbroker, sent me a link to his "rapumentary" ripping Hank Paulson. It may be a few months behind the curve at this point, but it remains hilarious. The line about Richard Fuld being the only guy who ever lost calling Paulson's bluff is a classic. I mean, we have to lau...

"Anti-death penalty lobby hopes for discreet Obama support," is the AFP report via Google News. In a country that has almost two-thirds support for the death penalty, US President Barack Obama will likely shy away from addressing the issue head on but could signal a discreet change in atti...

Yesterday's The Wall Street Journal documented the most detailed evidence to date that many community banks who don't need the government's TARP money are backing away from participating in the Capital Purchase Program, primarily because their "fear of the unknown" is being tipped into near paranoia...

I wish I could get as worked up about the page one story in today's Wall Street Journal as many others have done. I simply cannot. The entire process of picking winners and losers in the bank bailout game totally lacks transparency and accountability. Cockroaches always roam in the dark, folks. Want...

To no one's surprise, (certainly not ours), first lien residential mortgage loan cramdowns will soon be coming to a bankruptcy court near you. Although we haven't seen the bill yet, Dick Durbin's office announced today that he, Chuck ("Bank Run") Schumer and Chris ("I Boinked Princess Leia") Dodd, h...

Although often berated as a prime example of the "Liberal Main Stream Media" that conservative radio talk show hosts love to loathe, the latest issue of Time magazine sang the praises of a company that's often been labeled as one of the biggest of the bad boys when it comes to loan servicers who liv...