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Banking Law

Bank Lawyers Blog

Commentary on Banking Law

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Last Entry: March 30, 2011 at 23:38:00

VISA's IPO Benefits Banks

Posted on February 26, 2008
When we discussed the potential positive effects of Visa's announced intention to engage in a public stock offering fourteen months ago, we didn't list one that since that time has become its biggest apparent benefit: boosting Visa member banks' capital...

Sheila Bair: CDO Lawyer

Posted on February 25, 2008
Sheila Bair continues to say anything...ANYTHING...to satisfy her consumer advocacy fetish. Her latest exercise in self-pleasuring came last Friday, in a speech in San Jose (I guess she knew the way). She was hell-bent on continuing to give legal advice to servicers of collateralized subprime mortgage debt obligations as to how to best serve the interests of various classes of bond holders without getting themselves sued by an unhappy class...

Subprime? Not Here, Hoss.

Posted on February 24, 2008
This article pretty much confirms my recent experience, limited though it may be. Small, local banks like Cardinal have largely avoided the problems larger banks face from the subprime meltdown. Most community banks in the Washington region generally don't rely just on residential real estate mortgages for profits...

You Can Sue, But Can You Collect?

Posted on February 21, 2008
It's easy to see the chickens coming home to roost when you live inside the coop. That's why those of us coop-dwellers who represent banks and thrifts who engage in mortgage banking have been warning for the last several years (for example, here and here) about the threat to not only the bottom line, but to capital, posed by "buy-back" obligations...

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The Biggest Winners

Posted on February 20, 2008
When Housing Wire observed last month that the biggest winners of the current mess in the mortgage markets would be lawyers, he wasn't whistling "Dixie." Navigant Consulting, Inc., a global provider of business, regulatory and financial advisory services, released a study today that shows the number of subprime-related cases filed in federal courts dramatically outpacing the savings-and-loan (S&L) litigation of the early 1990s...

Fifth Third Sued Over Vendor's Error

Posted on February 19, 2008
When we first discussed a vendor's error that led to negative effects on borrowers' credit scores, which in turn led to a massive headache for Fifth Third Bank, we noted a consumer law expert's opinion that injured consumers would have little recourse, at least under federal law...

Congress Craves Cramdowns

Posted on February 18, 2008
Cramdowns in Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceedings is an idea that appears to be on the fast track. Congressional Democrats aren't going to let the matter drop and they've got a new angle. They're arguing that it's "foreclosure relief" for innocent borrowers who are about to lose their homes due to the evil machinations of greedy, heartless lenders who tricked them into borrowing money on terms they couldn't afford in order to steal their family homesteads...

The Real Meaning of "Special Interest"

Posted on February 18, 2008
While Democrats in Congress (and in various state houses) have been kicking banks to the curb over their alleged role in the foreclosure "tsunami" washing over this great land we like to call "the land of the free and the home of the knave," Republicans are proving that they're good politicians: those who, when they're bought, stay bought...

Eliot Spitzer: Idiot

Posted on February 14, 2008
Someone needs to hit Eliot Spitzer with a Thorazine dart, slap a straight jacket on him, and strap him to a gurney before his Bush Derangement Syndrome causes his head to explode. Not that if that happened, any bystanders would be splattered with gray matter, but when a vacuum is breached, the concussive effects of the implode can be devastating...

Red Means Stop, Green Means Go

Posted on February 12, 2008
Due to the Darwinian dictates of my so-called "profession," clients actually expect their legal counsel to work in return for the payment of fees billed. What is WRONG with this picture??? As a result of this sad state of affairs, posting will be spotty for the rest of this week...

OTS Keeps Pitching

Posted on February 11, 2008
As previously reported, OTS Director John Reich is relentless in his shilling for a continued role for the OTS as a federal regulator. He's jumped all over proposals from Congress that a federal regulator oversee previously unregulated mortgage brokers and bankers...

CheckFree Pushes Consumer RDC

Posted on February 10, 2008
In response to my skepticism last week about remote deposit capture's path to glory in the consumer arena, commenter Elisabeth demurred: "I imagine that in the not too distant future, RDC for consumers will be old hat." She may very well be on to something...

Ohio AG Sliced, Diced and Julienned By State Magistrate

Posted on February 08, 2008
In between holding press conferences concerning his brain storm to stem the tsunami of loan foreclosures in Ohio through the use of mediation and suing Freddie Mac for fraud for not publicly disclosing that it was conspiring to wreck the economy, Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann has jumped on a bandwagon started in November, when federal district court judges in Ohio started dismissing, without prejudice, foreclosure actions filed in federal court by foreclosing lenders who lacked documentary evidence to prove that they owned the loans they were foreclosing prior to the commencement of the foreclosure actions...

The Coalition of the Wilting

Posted on February 07, 2008
In addition to keeping busy squawking about the slow pace of across-the-board loan modifications for subprime mortgagors (h/t Calculated Risk), an alert reader pointed out that our "Little Mz. Sheila" has been busy with one of her pet projects: roping poor FDIC-insured commercial banks into making unprofitable "affordable small dollar loans" (unsecured, of course) to subprime borrowers...

Ford Comes Forward

Posted on February 06, 2008
There were no hats and horns in evidence last week when the FDIC's moratorium on approving applications for industrial loan corporations and industrial banks quietly expired. The week prior to the expiration, Home Depot joined Wal-Mart (paid subscription required) in pulling its pending application to acquire EnerBank off the table because, according to a Home Depot spokesperson, "the bank no longer fit its 2008 strategy of focusing solely on its retail operations...

Adjusting The Underwriting "Shower"

Posted on February 05, 2008
As we said last October, ...[I]t's likely that some bad legislation will be enacted that will over-correct prior (and no longer persistent) market practices and exacerbate the current credit squeeze by making housing credit tougher to obtain and more expensive for prime, as well as "less than Grade A," borrowers...

Remote Deposit Capture: A Consumer Service?

Posted on February 04, 2008
Last April, we commented on the increasing use by banks' business customers of "remote deposit capture" services, by which business scan and electronically transmit to their bank electronic images of checks that the customer would otherwise have to physically deposit via a bank branch, ATM, overnight deposit box or courier service...

Sunday Funnies

Posted on February 03, 2008
Some articles of interest for those of us with nothing better to do: CIO Asia has a one year look back at the TJX breach that we've discussed (most recently here) and finds some interesting lessons. One of them is that data breaches can be incredibly costly...

Bair Broaches Another Bad Idea

Posted on February 02, 2008
What are you doing here? Run over to Calculated Risk and read Tanta's fisking of FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair's most recent exercise in self-pleasuring via a demand that lenders write down the principal amount of their first lien loans to the "current value" of the property securing the loans, and why it won't work on the scale that Bair presupposes...

Good News: Bankruptcy Work Is Booming

Posted on February 01, 2008
Last May, l wrote about the claim that due to the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005, it was hard to find enough lawyers who were willing to take on personal bankruptcy work. We're pleased to report that ten months later, that no longer seems to be a problem...

From Russia, With Love

Posted on January 31, 2008
Fort Worth-based OmniAmerican Bank was the target of a sophisticated band of cyber crooks recently, which hacked into the bank's system, "stole account numbers, created new PINs, fabricated debit cards, then withdrew cash from ATMs in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as Britain, Canada and New York...

Another Whistle Blower Blows The Whistle

Posted on January 31, 2008
As residential real estate lenders continue to suffer, more claims emerge that certain corners of the business may have been rotting from the inside out long before anyone noticed the smell. We recently profiled outside appraiser Jennifer Wertz, who was allegedly blackballed by Washington Mutual, and a former credit analyst, who claimed he was fired by Wamu, for "doing the right thing," or, more accurately, refusing to "do the wrong thing...

Doing The Chavez Shuffle

Posted on January 30, 2008
A few readers have asked for my thoughts about the call last week of tin horn Venezuelan socialist dictator and Tony Soprano wanna-be Hugo Chavez, a man whose face appears once to have been set on fire and beaten out with a rake, for South American nations to pull their reserves out of U...

To Dream The Impossible Dream

Posted on January 29, 2008
It's not as if we didn't see this coming. According to yesterday's American Banker (paid subscription required), the US Justice Department is about to hit money services business Sigue Corp "with a record money laundering fine "that experts said signals more aggressive enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act...

And The Winners Are...Trial Lawyers

Posted on January 28, 2008
Housing Wire's Paul Jackson ended a post last Friday about the expansion of New York City's class action lawsuit Countrywide Financial Corporation and others with the words "It?s pretty clear that the biggest winners out of current market turmoil are the lawyers...

No Longer Civil

Posted on January 26, 2008
Last spring, The Arizona Republic ran an article that gave a laundry list of lawsuits that large lenders and Wall Street firms were filing against local lenders, brokers, agents, appraisers, title companies, and other third parties who had engaged in bilking them through various mortgage fraud schemes, particularly with respect to subprime mortgages...

Bank Customers Still Going Phishing (and Vishing)

Posted on January 25, 2008
The American Banker (paid subscription required) reported last month that notwithstanding banks' efforts to thwart "phishing," more bank customers are falling for phishing schemes. The number of people who said they lost money as a result of a phishing scam rose 43% from a year earlier, to 3...

California: Here It Comes

Posted on January 24, 2008
Our federal solons are busy concocting sweet treats for the voters in an election year, the kind that melt in your mouth, give you a brief sugar high, then bring you crashing back down to earth smack dab in the midst of an economic cycle that will work its way out the painful way regardless of your wishful thinking...

Who's On First?

Posted on January 24, 2008
Among the many MENSA members who populate the US Congress and who are helping to straighten out the mortgage mess is Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, a Democrat, a 13-year veteran of the House, and member of the House Budget Committee. Tuesday's American Banker (paid subscription required) had a priceless tidbit that illustrates that the Bozo Factor is alive and well in halls of Congress...

Mortgage Modification And The "Free" Market

Posted on January 23, 2008
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.---Milton Friedman "Did, too!""Did not!""Did, too!""Did, not!" No, that's not Paris Hilton and Britney Spears fighting over who went commando in the limo last night, that's the Mortgage Bankers Association and FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair having in their own little bitch-slap-fest last week concerning whether or not mortgage loan servicers are modifying residential loans quickly enough to satisfy the "unreasonably imprudent subprime lender test...

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