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The New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that the Atlantic Yards basketball project can go forward as planned, dislocating the residents in the Brooklyn, NY area where the stadium is to be built.  In essence, the decision means the state can evict you from your own home, seize your property, and give you [...]

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This is my translation of a Dutch-language article which appeared today in Belgian daily De Tijd. Let’s see if this news is picked up in the U.S.
Citibank Belgium never should have recommended the controversial Lehman Brothers investments to its customers. So states the writ of the Brussels public prosecutor on the case.
The collapse of Lehman [...]

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After I published the recent story on the case against servicing agent MERS in the Kansas Supreme court, I noticed a lot of chatter about some mortgage servicing line items in Wells Fargo’s earnings report. So I wanted to quote a few blurbs from the Kansas Appeals Court and Supreme Court decisions as background for [...]

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In August, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a ruling against a mortgage tracking service which may prove very costly to banks in foreclosure, leading to massive writedowns. It could be a life saver for many trapped in the foreclosure process. The case goes to the core of the functioning of massive markets in securitization and [...]

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Back in March when the US Government felt compelled to bail out out Citigroup, Tracy Alloway over at FT Alphaville noticed a curious thing – Citigroup had effectively been nationalized.
No, they were not seized by government, but Citi was controlled by government.  The Feds had 36% of shares outstanding, which in many cases is [...]

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In my recent post on greed, I wrote about how for the last generation corporations have been trying to get out of as many of their expensive obligations to workers as they can reasonably get away with.  The list of obligations includes but is not limited to pensions, health care and job security.
One can [...]

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After the arrest of suspects based in Colorado and New York in an alleged ‘varsity level’ terrorist plot, the spectre of terrorism in the United States has re-emerged as an issue, one that also has economic overtones because of the fragility of recovery. President Obama is following his predecessor George W. Bush in restricting civil [...]

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Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matt Winkler wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday explaining why he is after the Federal Reserve to come clean about it’s secret lending program during the height of the financial crisis.
Bloomberg has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Reserve to force the Fed to reveal the name of the [...]

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Below is a good video analysis by Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal on the BofA-Merrill Lynch saga.  Bravin discusses the recent rejection by Judge Jed Rakoff of the out-of-court settlement between the SEC and Bank of America (BAC) in which BofA was to pay a miniscule $33 million fine.
Rakoff’s decision to scupper this [...]

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Now that President Obama has signalled his willingness to punish the Chinese for dumping on tires, a whole host of other industries are likely to file their own ‘copy-cat’ complaints.
Reuters says:
President Barack Obama’s decision to restrict tire imports from China after union workers complained of a surge could lead to copycat cases in areas such [...]