California is making a move to force banks to permanently change the way they handle mortgages--dispensing with "robo-signers" for good and similar wise steps in the public interest. Surprise, the big banks (JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citibank and others) don't wanna play ball unless they can stack the deck against their customers. See National Mortgage Settlement in 2015: Banks Battling to Keep Reforms from Becoming Permanent, Huffington Post (May 3, 2012) (hat tip--Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism).
Hopefully, California will not cave to the lobbying by banks and allow them to reinstitute the abominal practices that they employed prior to the crackdown to deprive homeowners of their rights and cause significant more harm than was necessary through automatic foreclosures that weren't in the neighborhood's or bank's real interest. If California takes this strong stand, maybe other states will too. And if the states do, maybe Congress will even finally return to thinking about the impact of poor corporatist policies on ordinary Americans.
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