“Banking” on The Daily Caller

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — The CEO of JPMorgan Chase offered a quick but blunt apology to shareholders Tuesday for a $2 billion trading loss that “should never have happened” and survived a push to strip him of the title of chairman of the board. (more)

Western banks are showing some signs of strain and poor management. In news that can’t help but bring up memories of Bear Stearns as well as the more recent fiasco with MF Global, we learn of new troubles with Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan, even as legislators discuss the merits of breaking up big banks. (more)

Is it possible that Western central bankers have been attempting to suppress the value of gold? For many years the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) has been attempting to expose manipulation in the gold (and silver) market. (more)

The devil is always in the details. Nowhere is this statement truer than in the area of federal legislation. Nowhere are those details more devilish than in the Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed in the wake of the 2008 banking and financial crisis. This law holds a ticking time bomb that, if not addressed, will destroy a large swath of the U.S. economy while further concentrating the banking business in the hands of those few behemoth banks that did so much to cause the economic crisis from which our nation is still emerging. (more)

These days, billions of dollars is spoken of as pocket change. A by-product of massive government debt burdens and decades of cheap cash from central banks is the notion that, while solvency might be important, liquidity should be easy to find. Particularly for financial institutions, the official state position appears determined to prohibit cash flow issues from developing on a serious scale. (more)

Five big banks have agreed to give twenty-three Democratic attorneys general more than a billion dollars that can be distributed to housing groups and community organizers in the months prior to the 2012 election. (more)

On Wednesday, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve announced a plan to boost liquidity in financial markets. Under the plan, private banks will have access to cheap dollars for as long as the global debt crisis rages and they aren’t borrowing from one another. Stock indices responded favorably to the news, but the plan will, at best, only provide short-term relief. (more)

Bank of America Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan will have his work cut out for him next week when he speaks at an investor conference in New York. (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of troubled banks tracked by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. fell in the April-June quarter, the first quarterly drop in five years. But growth in bank earnings slowed, a sign that the financial industry is feeling the effects of a weak economy. (more)

In a White House blog post on Monday, just hours before President Obama didn’t nominate her as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren warned supporters that danger lurks for her regulatory paean to class warfare. “Make no mistake,” she wrote, “this agency still has enemies in Washington, D.C. And they have a plan.” (more)

LONDON – A former Swiss banker on Monday publicly turned over to WikiLeaks confidential offshore banking details of about 2,000 account holders, setting the stage for new revelations by the whistleblower group. (more)

Stop wasting my time
You know what I want
You know what I need
Or maybe you don’t (more)

In the face of international opprobrium, Iran and North Korea march relentlessly towards joining the small club of nations capable of deploying and selling nuclear weapons. If allowed to succeed, their new status would irrevocably alter the global balance of power as we know it. (more)

Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) — Brian Williams burned through $12,000 on rent for a vacant storefront in the historic district of St. Louis where he planned to open a pizzeria after banks refused him a $35,000 loan, forcing him to delay opening by a year. (more)

When Randy Persten’s mortgage was foreclosed in 2008, he looked at the paperwork and found a mystery. A company he’d never heard of — called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS — was bringing the foreclosure action against him. (more)

U.S. mortgage rates reached new record lows in the latest week as economic data raised the appeal of safe-haven government debt, according to a survey released on Thursday by Freddie Mac, the second-largest U.S. mortgage finance company. (more)

Late Wednesday afternoon, news leaked that the White House finally made a decision on the appointment of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor-turned super regulator. And Warren got her wish. Sort of. (more)

After two months bankers would like to forget, Wall Street may need a September to remember to avoid closing the books on the worst quarter for investment banking and trading revenue since the peak of the financial crisis. (more)

Housing policy reform is beginning to take shape. At this point, it looks like both the financial sector and Washington agree that the government must maintain a big role in the mortgage market. The favored strategy to do so thus far appears to be government mortgage guarantees that require a fee from banks that wish to obtain them. It would be kind of like depository insurance, except for mortgages. What could go wrong? Fannie and Freddie (F&F) provide a sufficient explanation. (more)

The housing collapse the U.S. has endured over the past few years has forced the industry to question some of its most basic assumptions. For decades, the market believed that housing couldn’t broadly decline in value, particularly not substantially. It was wrong. We now know that a bubble can actually result in overinflated housing prices and subsequent national home price declines. As banks and lenders adjust, they may have to revisit the mortgage products they used to believe were very safe. Will the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage survive? (more)