WELL FARGO TO PAY 860$ MILLION AS PENALTY FOR SELLING HOME LOAN PACKAGES TO GOVT CONTROLLED MORTGAGE GIANT FREDDIE MAC: BUT IS IT ENOUGH TO STOP BANKING FRAUD?

 

Wells Fargo, one of America's largest banks, has been ordered to repay 869$ million to Freddie Mac for selling the govt. controlled mortgage administrator loan packages that were fraudulent, or obtained fraudulently.

Th California based bank agreed to pay the sum to defray the huge liabilities created by the fraudulent mortgages to Freddie Mac.  

Citigroup too, agreed to repay Freddie Mac 395$ million for similar reasons.  

The issue at hand, is the widespread fraud and misrepresentation carried out during the sale of mortgages or mortgage packages to Freddie Mac.  The mortgages sold to Freddie Mac, under Federal Law, must have some guarantees that protect the agency from acquiring mortgages that can default.  Some of these guarantees stem from the due diligence the banks must exercise in requiring applicants to disclose their true ability to repay the mortgage and the bank's own duty to verify the veracity of the disclosures made by the applicants.  

Everyone knows by now, that the major banks and some smaller ones, were all guilty of obtaining mortgages by creating false paperwork, accepting paperwork in which there was no disclosure of the applicant's ability to repay the mortgage and so forth.  The mortgages were then bundled and resold as investment packages, securities and derivatives, causing the collapse of the market in 2008. 

Although no one has to date ended up in court to face jail time or any similar punitive measures, this is the first step to bring at least a measure or accountability to those banks that so easily broke every banking rule when obtaining mortgages.  

Banks now live in an era where money is no longer made the traditional way.  Today banks rely on fees, whether those fees are tacked onto services for accounts, or credit cards, or refinancing and mortgage applications. Without a proper set of legislation to curb the ease with which existing regulations are overlooked or disregarded, there is no guarantee that banks will not repeat the actions that led to the last economic meltdown.  In that sense, not much has changed.  

Partial source : France 24/ 10.1.13

THE CRACKDOWN ON NOMADIC IMMIGRANTS : GERMANY TO START DEPORTATION OF POVERTY IMMIGRANTS.

 

Europe is showing signs of fatigue from unfettered immigration.  With the opening of the borders and a lax immigration policy have come scores of immigrants who are now incapable of finding an occupation and are resorting to crime.  A small number of these immigrants never had any intention of finding work in the first place, and have always lived nomadic lives, some governments contend.  

What is at stake here is the denomination of these nomadic people, some erroneously called Roma, as 'poverty immigrants'.  There is a strong sense that the realization that the approach to immigration and the reproach once bestowed on nations who marginalized nomadic people before the European Union came into effect were both wrong, and the scope of the 'integration' policies dynamics and problems are finally coming into focus. 

The bulk of such nomadic people come from Romania and Bulgaria.  In their home country they were often put in ghettos, where their propensity to live off of petty crime was somewhat contained, but never stopped.  However, the contention that all Romanians and Bulgarians are somehow to be grouped in with these nomadic tribes is discriminatory at best.

Some of these nomadic people have learned that by immigrating to wealthy countries with an established social network of aid for poor people, they can take advantage of government handouts and welfare, without ever having any intention of becoming socially productive. 

Germany is stepping into the fray by passing laws that would prohibit entry to those people who are entering the country just to live off of the generous social system they have in place and to bar re-entry for a number of years after extradition. 

Some of the immigrants, German citizens say, are actually sent by organized gangs in their country of origin who obtain fake business license to gain entry, only to claim later that their venture has failed and they now need assistance to survive. 

This policy however is at odds with the EU statues that grant the right to work and travel throughout its member states.  

But statistics do not support such contentions that all Romanians and Bulgarians are out to defraud the state.  Only 9.6% of these people are actually unemployed, a percentage at times much lower than the unemployment rate of the indigenous members of the country. 

The EU commission is resisting the measure, saying that restricting movement of EU citizens is 'out of the question'. 

Partial Source : France 24/ 6.9.13