As more details emerge about the massive $26 billion foreclosure settlement between the five biggest mortgage lenders and the states’ attorneys general, a growing number of borrowers are realizing that the deal will do little, if anything, to help them out.
With little more than three months until the interest rates on federally subsidized student loans double, students are pushing lawmakers to help them out.
The cost and promised savings of health reform tied lawmakers in knots two years ago. The issues are no less complicated or uncertain today.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges Tuesday against three senior executives from the now-defunct Thornburg Mortgage, accusing them of fraudulently overstating the company’s income by over $400 million ahead of its bankruptcy. Thornburg filed for bankruptcy in May of 2009, felled by heavy losses associated with the subprime mortgage crisis. At the time, it was the seventh-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, with over $36 billion in assets, and had been the second-largest independent mortgage company in the U.S. after Countrywide. As the company’s financial situation deteriorated, the SEC alleges that former Thornburg CEO Larry Goldstone, chief financial officer Clarence Simmons, and chief accounting officer Jane Starrett conspired to falsely record a profit in the company’s 2007 annual report. In reality, the SEC says, the company had been hammered by over $300 million worth of margin calls from trading partners in the weeks leading up to the report, as the value of its mortgage-backed securities plummeted.
After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica will cease production of its iconic multi-volume book sets.
U.S. stocks rallied late Tuesday to close sharply higher on news that most of the nation’s largest banks have passed the government’s latest test of their financial health.
JPMorgan Chase will increase its stock dividend by 20% and has the authority to buy back roughly $15 billion of its shares, the company said in a press release Tuesday.
Patrick Geryl, who has spent more than $130,000 preparing for doomsday, sent CNNMoney his list of the nearly 100 survival items that he plans to purchase before December. 21, 2012 — the day he believes the world as we know it will end.
China and the United States are the world’s largest economies and, by some measures, each other’s most important trading partners. But it’s a rocky marriage.
The Federal Reserve sounds a bit more upbeat about the job market and the global economy, but still the central bank is erring on the side of caution.
