READING FOR THE WEEK

Will President Obama be able to leave before the next market collapse? Not according to this guy (Money Morning).

Are the "bullion banks" manipulating the gold market? It appears so (Money Morning).

Paul Moreno wants you to believe unions - rather than a culture of racism - kept black ball players out of Major League Baseball (National Review). What an idiot.

How political ideology can lead people to embrace bad economics (NY Times / Paul Krugman).

A Facebook friend posted an ideologically bloated hack piece on rising health care premiums under Obamacare (Wall Street Journal). What he doesn't understand is that health care premiums were already scheduled to go up (Mark Martinez).

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is pissed off. Here's why ...
Homeowners who were illegally foreclosed on received about $1,000 for getting booted (illegally) from their homes (Officer of the Comptroller of the Curreny, or OCC). However ...

It looks like most third party consultants hired by the banks to review each foreclosure case were paid about $10,000 per review (totaling about $2 billion for the consultants). They then tried to keep Senator Elizabeth Warren (and other members of Congress) from their review process, claiming that sharing information with Congress would violate company "trade secrets" (Salon). But wait, it gets better (or is that worse?) ...

The GAO (Government Accounting Office) found that the "independent" foreclosure review process was deliberately skewed - by the OCC and the Federal Reserve - to minimize evidence that homeowners had been cheated out of their homes (Nakedcapitalism).

Bank regulators still got grilled for not doing their job, instead choosing to shill for the banksters (Huffington Post).

UPDATE: Victims of foreclosure fraud are having trouble cashing their foreclosure checks (Think Progress).

- Mark