Wells, Citigroup Call Truce in Wachovia Battle

Says it will not sign onto any lenient robosigning settlement

(NEWSER) - Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley—best remembered for her failed campaign against Scott Brown —has filed a lawsuit against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Financial over alleged mortgage fraud offenses, including the “robo-signing” scandal. The suit also names MERSCORP which produces an electronic mortgage registration system, the Boston Globe reports. Coakley is essentially breaking away from the rest of the country’s attorney generals, who have been haltingly trying to negotiate a settlement en-masse with the banks. More»

Standard & Poor's applies new criteria to banks around the world

(AP) - Standard & Poor's is adjusting the ratings on 37 of the world's largest financial institutions, and that means downgrades for the biggest banks in the US. Bank of America and its main subsidiaries were among those cut at least one notch today, along with Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. More»

Banks took in billions of dollars, even as they claimed to be healthy

(NEWSER) - For more than two years, the Fed and the banks it bailed out during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis have kept many of the details of the massive, multi-trillion-dollar bailout a secret. But, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests, 29,000 pages of bailout details are pouring out of the Fed at last, and those details are explained in an extended and damning report by Bloomberg Markets magazine. Among the biggest revelations:

• $7.77 trillion: the total amount doled out in aid by the Fed to all the banks, as of March 2009, which Bloomberg notes surpasses 50% of the value of "everything produced in the US that year." In comparison, the $700 billion TARP "at least had some strings attached," says one House Democrat. "With the Fed programs, there was nothing."

New book says Obama's team routinely undermined him

(NEWSER) - In March 2009, in the throes of the financial crisis, Barack Obama told Tim Geithner to focus on a proposal to dissolve Citigroup—but the Treasury Secretary ignored him and never developed a plan, according to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind’s new book Confidence Men. In the book, which was obtained early by the AP and the New York Times , Suskind writes that Obama’s “authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers.” More»

In exchange for up to $25B payoff

(NEWSER) - State prosecutors are offering big banks an expensive Get Out of Lawsuits Free card. Prosecutors have offered a variety of banks caught up in the “robosigning” scandal immunity from some litigation in exchange for a total of $10 billion to $25 billion in penalties, the Financial Times reports. Some officials think the immunity being offered is far too broad; as written, it could potentially free the banks from lawsuits related to their securitization practices, or at least impede cases related to it. More»