After Backlash to Repudiated Plan, No Deal Mortgage Deal Imminent
Readers no doubt saw both on this site and elsewhere that the Obama Administration was cranking the heat up on the mortgage
settlements
talks, and was apparently planning to go ahead with the Federal
regulators inking a pact, on the assumption they’d get enough state
attorneys general to provide at least a modest fig leaf. The assumption
also seemed to be that the Administration could enlist Congressmen to
pressure some of the current and rumored dissident Democrat AGs to fold
and join the Obama camp.
That
effort appears to have gotten such a large repudiation today, when the
settlement terms were presented in Chicago to Democratic AGs and
discussed over the phone with the Republican AGs that Tom Miller who is
leading the attorney general negotiations has done a major climbdown:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEJanuary 23, 2012STATEMENT FROM ATTORNEY GENERAL TOM MILLER(CHICAGO, Illinois) State Attorneys General from both parties, along with our federal partners, are today discussing the details of the progress we have made so far in settlement negotiations, including the terms we must still resolve. We have not yet reached an agreement with the nation’s five largest servicers, and we won’t reach a settlement any time this week.
What is intriguing here is the Miller camp claim (effectively) that there never had been a deal on
the table. That contradicts the story in the Financial Times last week
and a report I had gotten from an investor with good contacts on the
Republican side. Since Miller has repeatedly played fast and loose with
the truth, I’m not sure I believe the message implied here, that they
are still moving forward on a deal, just more slowly than they had
messaged, as opposed to a deal on the table came unglued and they need
to regroup in a more serious way.
We
will hopefully get more intelligence (or maybe just better attempts at
disinformation) but I read this as an indication the deal agreed between
the Federal regulators and the biggest servicers somehow came unglued.
Possibilities include: someone exposed a definitional/drafting flaw (the
Feds thought it meant one thing and the banks thought it meant
another); someone (one of the banks?) retraded the deal; the
Administration has assumed it could rely on a certain minimum number of
AGs to fall in line and they regarded that minimum number as essential,
and the pow wow today exposed that they are below that level.
Regardless,
this is positive news, since it vindicates the courageous attorneys
general who are pressing forward with investigations and prosecutions
rather than trying to cover up pervasive fraud by servicers. Thanks so
much to NC readers for your calls to attorneys general. You helped play a
role in telling the Administration that the public will not support
coverups when enforcement and reform are what is really needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment