Hey, girl, you can totally trust Goldman Sachs now when it suggests you should buy subprime mortgages. Not like that other time. Goldman is telling...

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan is pushing back against a government proposal that would force his company to assume responsibility for billions of...

NEW YORK (By Jonathan Stempel) - The Obama administration is trying to push a settlement that could force the largest U.S. banks to pay for reduction...

Stashed away in a draw somewhere on Capitol Hill is a simple piece of legislation that would have done much to stop the mortgage mess, robo-signing, unfair foreclosures, and the growing claims against lenders.

However preordained the financial crisis was, it's remarkable how long its architects kept the game going. They managed to sustain the unsustainable for five years -- roughly from 2002 into late 2006.

The Reagan years inundated American homeowners with advertising campaigns encouraging them to borrow against their homes to take dream vacations. This was the first time, in history, when people imagined the way to get rich was to run in to debt.

Most of us want to be physically fit, but very few of us are. The same holds true with financial security. As my father (and many others) used to say, "A lot of people want to go to heaven but no one wants to die to get there."

We first became aware of the "Will-the-real-Michael-Hudson-please-stand-up?" problem years ago when we started getting compliments from friends and colleagues for each others work.

Given the current robosigning, document-backdating foreclosure crisis, it's worth thinking about what happens when fraud and recklessness go unchecked. Here it is in the words of Wall Street's finest.

JPMorgan Chase loves using its research department to push its agenda that puts them in the optimist camp. But take a look at their methodology. The scope of losses gets drastically larger if you change a few arbitrary assumptions.

Fraud in the foreclosure process conceals a second, more massive fraud: the astonishing levels of mortgage fraud perpetrated by subprime lenders during the housing bubble.

Washington failed to act the first time around -- when lenders were engaged in a frenzy of predatory lending. The foreclosure scandal is a second chance for lawmakers to prove they can ferret out the truth.

When bankers think they can get away with rampant fraud and get paid very well to do it, they'll do it. Robert Rubin's best defense is that he really isn't all that bright -- he's either an idiot or a criminal.