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- Currencies Try to Rebound Today
- Superior Biotechnology Leads to Superior Drugs
- The Delusion of Regulating Risk
- Talk of a Greek Exit Gets Louder
- Doug Casey on Taxes and Freedom, Part II
- Is Facebook the Rusty Hinge of the Stock Market?
- Fitch Downgrades Japan
- Doug Casey on Taxes and Freedom
- Greeks Run on Banks as Euro-Confidence Wanes
Frontline On MF Global’s Six Billion Dollar Bet
While the sur-realities of just what Corzine and the rest of the MF Global ‘traders’ did has been extensively discussed here and elsewhere, PBS’ Frontline provides the most succinct (and relatively in-depth) documentary on just what occurred from how the corrupt CEO lobbied regulators who had the power to stop his risky bets to the endgame realization of the missing customer money. A narrative, not just of “a bet that went bad”, but “a Wall Street morality tale“. Must watch!
The story of Jon Corzine, the former head of Goldman Sachs and political power broker, who took over MF Global in the spring of 2010 with oversize ambition and a passion for risk. But after a massive bet on European debt turned sour, the firm lay in ruins, with more than a billion dollars of customer funds missing.
Watch Six Billion Dollar Bet on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
Watch Six Billion Dollar Bet on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
IRS field agent: Here’s how illegals scam system
Insider reveals: ‘The fraud has been going on for years. Business as usual’
“Angry, resigned, helpless.”
That’s how one Northern California Internal Revenue Service employee described revelations that millions of illegal aliens are claiming and receiving billions of dollars in tax refunds for alleged family members in Mexico using a loophole in the tax code.
Knowledge of the scam has grown following a report by Indianapolis television station, WTHR-TV. The report documented illegal aliens filing the IRS Additional Child Tax Credit form for children – often nieces and nephews – who have never lived in the United States. To legally qualify, a child must be present in the filer’s U.S. residence for over half the year.
“We’ve seen sometimes 10 or 12 dependents, most times nieces and nephews, on these tax forms,” a tax preparer-turned-whistleblower told WTHR News. “The more you put on there, the more you get back.”
“Here’s a return right here: we’ve got a $10,300 refund for nine nieces and nephews.”
“We’re getting an $11,000 refund on this tax return. There’s seven nieces and nephews,” he said, pointing to another set of documents. “I can bring out stacks and stacks. It’s just so easy it’s ridiculous.”
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Millions Of Illegal Immigrants Are Using A Massive Scam To Get Bigger Tax Refunds Than You Are
Did you know that illegal immigrants all over the United States are using a massive scam to receive tax refunds from the federal government that are often in excess of $10,000? It is estimated that 2 million illegal immigrants are filing fraudulent tax returns each year and that they are pulling in more than4 billion dollars in tax refunds every year that they are not entitled to. They are doing this by abusing the additional child tax credit and the IRS knows all about it and yet they refuse to do anything to stop it. Illegal immigrants are filing tax returns that sometimes claim 10 or 12 nieces and nephews as dependents, and most of the time those nieces and nephews do not even live in the United States. So while you and I are being taxed into oblivion, many illegal immigrants are often pulling in tax refunds that are well into five figures. At a time when the federal government is absolutely drowning in debt, this is the type of fraud that desperately needs to be cracked down on, and yet the IRS refuses to take action.
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Student Loan Debt Hits $1 Trillion, Deemed ‘Too Big To Fail’ By One Federal Agency
The student loan debt market is now “too big to fail”, says Rohit Chopra, the student loan ombudsman for the newly created Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.
Speaking on Wednesday to a conference hosted by the Consumer Bankers Association in Austin, Texas, Chopra highlighted the sobering news that total student loan debt in the United States now exceeds an eye-popping $1 trillion, a record high. In prepared remarks published on the CFPB’s blog, Chopra writes:
Students borrowed $117 billion in just federal student loans last year. And students continue to borrow private student loans, which lack the income-based repayment and deferment options of federal student loans. If current trends continue, there will be consequences not just for young people, but for all of us.
If that wasn’t disturbing enough, now comes news that the interest rate on new subsidized student loans from the federal government, called Stafford loans, are set to double to 6.8 percent on July 1 if Congress does not prevent the federal program keeping those interest rates low from expiring.
If interest rates on new subsidized student loans double, the average student loan borrower on the standard 10-year plan will need to pay $2,800 more… Continue reading
J.P. Morgan Chase’s Ugly Family Secrets Revealed
In a story that should be getting lots of attention, American Banker has released an excellent and disturbing exposé of J.P. Morgan Chase’s credit card services division, relying on multiple current and former Chase employees. One of them, Linda Almonte, is a whistleblower whom I’ve known since last September; I’m working on a recount of her story for my next book.
One of the things we were promised by the lawmakers who passed the Dodd-Frank reform bill a few years back is that this would be a new era for whistleblowers who come forward to tell the world about problems in our financial infrastructure. This story now looms as a test case for that proposition. American Banker reporter Jeff Horwitz did an outstanding job in this story detailing the sweeping irregularities in-house at Chase, but his very thoroughness means the news may have ramifications for Linda, which is why I’m urging people to pay attention to this story in the upcoming weeks.
The Cliff’s Notes version of the story goes something like this: Late in 2009, Chase’s credit card services division sold a parcel of nearly $200 million worth of credit card judgments to a debt collector at a discount. This common practice in the credit-card industry is a little like a bookie selling the outstanding debts of his delinquent gamblers to a leg-breaker for 25 cents on the dollar. If the leg-breaker gets half the delinquents to pay, the deal works out for both sides — the bookie gets 25 percent of money he wasn’t going to collect, and the leg-breaker makes a 100 percent profit.
In the case of credit cards, of course, you’re selling the debts to collection agents, not leg-breakers, but aside from that unpleasantly minor distinction the process is the same. The most valuable kinds of sales in this world are sales of credit card judgments, in other words accounts in which the debtor has already been successfully brought to court. That, ostensibly, is what this bloc of accounts Chase sold in 2009 involved.
Almonte came to Chase in the summer of 2009 as a mid-level executive in the credit card services division’s offices in San Antonio, and was quickly put in charge of preparing the documentation for this enormous sale of credit card judgments. When Chase regional offices from places like southern California and Illinois began sending in the papers for these “judgments,” Almonte very soon found out that something was seriously wrong. From Horwitz’s piece:
Nearly half of the files [Linda's] team sampled were missing proofs of judgment or other essential information, she wrote to colleagues. Even more worrisome, she alleged in her wrongful-termination suit, nearly a quarter of the files misstated how much the borrower owed.
In the “vast majority” of those instances, the actual debt was “lower that what Chase was representing,” her suit stated.
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Another Hidden Bailout: Helping Wall Street Collect Your Rent
Here’s yet another form of hidden bailout the federal government doles out to our big banks, without the public having much of a clue.
This is from the WSJ this morning:
Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are lining up to become landlords to cash-strapped Americans by bidding on pools of foreclosed properties being sold by Fannie Mae…
While the current approach of selling homes one-by-one has its own high costs and is sometimes inefficient, selling properties in bulk to large investors could require Fannie Mae to sell at a big discount, leading to larger initial costs.
In con artistry parlance, they call this the “reload.” That’s when you hit the same mark twice – typically with a second scam designed to “fix” the damage caused by the first scam. Someone robs your house, then comes by the next day and sells you a fancy alarm system, that’s the reload.
In this case, banks pumped up the real estate market by creating huge volumes of subprime loans, then dumped a lot of them on, among others, Fannie and Freddie, the ever-ready enthusiastic state customer. Now the loans have crashed in value, yet the GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises) are still out there feeding the banks money through two continuous bailouts.
One, they continue to buy mortgages from the big banks (until recently, even from Bank of America, whom the GSEs were already suing for sales of toxic MBS), giving the banks a permanent market for home loans.
And secondly, they conduct these quiet bulk sales of mortgages, in which huge packets of home loans are sold to banks at a “big discount.”
By now we’ve come full circle. Banks create the loans, make money selling them off on the market at high prices, then come back and buy them again when they’re low. When the GSEs are in the middle of this transaction, it makes mortgage lending a basically risk-free proposition: Banks get paid for creating home loans and they end up owning valuable property on the cheap, but in between, they offshore the market risk to a government entity and/or to the idiot individual who bought the home mortgage in the first place.
