Zimmerman Flew and Tyler Knew

A reader points out that it seems unlikely the London Whale losses were not previously approved by Jamie Dimon:

Anyone who works for JPMorgan Chase will promptly admit that NOTHING can occur without going through a multi-approval process or without the clear and explicit consent of LOB and upper-level management.

That said, only a fool would believe Jamie’s statement that JPMC was unaware of the actions of their financial staff who ultimately made poor choices which resulted in what initially was reported internally as a minor loss but rapidly grew to an insurmountable and embarrassing loss.

Chase no help for high school student

A reader writes:

I have a high school checking account. Recently 43 dollars was taken from my account by a “nas-coal”, chase has no idea what this is, but this isn’t even the issue i came to complain about. Chase has put a hold on my account until july 1st, 2014. Do they have the right to seal me off from my hard earned money? Their lines always seem to be busy and their service is horrible. I’m in a predicament. a reply would be appreciated, thanks.

Anyone had this experience?  Any suggestions?

Chase Loss Mitigation Guide

Want to know how Chase handles  customers in arrears?  Someone uploaded Chase’s Loss Mitigation Guide for Prime Collections to Scribd.  Makes you wonder if the have a different guide for subprime borrowers.

Another example of Chase destroying someones life unnecessarily

Posting this on behalf of a reader.  Another example of Chase’s ineptness or downright uncaring attitude royally screwing a customer.  If you got screwed by Chase in a bogus foreclosure, check this out.  They might have to pay you for their mistakes.

How Chase Mortgage practically ruined my life

146 Stonegate Circle

After divorce, I kept the home and refinanced to my name, the loan was sold to Chase

The story is so complex and twisted, I hardly know where to start. What should have been a simple mistake made by the mortgage company, Chase, to my payments caused a downward spiral which has lasted for years and led to much turmoil and grief as I find myself now unemployed, swimming in debt and living in a 2 bedroom apartment while my home sits abandoned with Chase completely unreachable, sending me conflicting mail, conflicting balances & completely unwilling to correct the situation?

It all started several years ago in the beautiful Summer months. I am a single Mom of three fun and active girls, working a very demanding job in management in a Japanese Automobile company, making a fairly impressive salary. I struggled as any Mom would with affording extras; however, I made my mortgage payments and all other payments with a fair amount of ease and managed to add some enjoyment after the bills were paid. Just before the ending of my 15 year marriage, my ex-husband and I purchased this home at 146 Stongegate Circle. The home was an effort to save our marriage as we were both commuting and maintaining a much larger home and the three girls. In the divorce, I was awarded the home and would need to refinance if I could not sell. I did not necessarly plan to stay in the community due to my lack of emotional support in the community and the undesirable Lincoln School System. However, I happily made payments & poured some energy into landscaping and other improvements to the home for enjoyment and to improve the value in hopes of eventually selling. Eventually, I was forced to finance in my name by my ex-husband and all was well–or so I thought–I had a fixed-rate mortgage with my insurance included in the payment which I set up for automatic deduction from my bank account so as to never be late while managing my complex life. I never put any thought into insurance and continued to assume it was with the original insurer, Howell Hurt. I did receive a letter that the mortgage had been sold to Chase, but all would remain the same.

Just making my payments and planting my flowers

The nightmare begins-!st month Chase overcharges by nearly $300

One fine day in Alabama, I am managing my job as a Quality Engineer/Manager and I receive an email that my car insurance payment-which is automatically deducted-is declined due to insufficient funds. I am puzzled as I keep enough of a balance to know my bills will clears. Immediately I log on to my bank account to see if someone has stolen my identity and what I see first is the first of a series of months of torture from Chase. My house payment had been deducted, but it wasn’t the typical $1047.00. Instead, Chase had deducted $1355.00. Not too much of a difference this time, however as a single Mom, I am managing it closely. I decided not to panick because in my life I have learned ‘everything can be worked out–usually with a nice phone call– everything until now. I am going to walk you through the steps that led to my payment escalating to nearly $1500 dollars, harassing phone calls at work from collectors, yet noone could help resolve the issue, eventually leaving the home in fear of foreclosure, hostility at work leading to unemployment, rental home burning and I am now unemployed, homeless and Chase will not provide any relief– just continued phone calls to collect a debt I did not owe. The stress this has caused me is impossible to place into words.

Landscaping improvements

What happens when you call Chase?

Here’s the process. Call the number for Chase. Auto system answers and request your account number. You enter you account number. The auto system tells you the current payment information; You are eventually given the opportunity to request to speak to a representative; Wait. A representative finally gets on the phone and it is difficult to understand them as they have a very strong accent. You begin to explain there is a problem with your account and the endless chain of transfers begin-each time placing you back through the system to re-enter your account number, hear the account information, representative; transfer. At some point your lunch break is over. I began to sneak off into conference rooms to get on the phone, taking lots of breaks and doing all I could to try to straighten this out. I was transferred to every department and met with the same repeated routine.

Getting my job done before Chase started harassing me

Bills are getting behind, frustration is mounting & work is suffering

Next month. Same drill. After three months of being overcharged and nobody can tell me why, I am starting to get behind on other bills. My insurance can’t be paid. My insurance on my vehicle is cancelled due to late payments. The bank financing my car receives notice and places a forced insurance on my vehicle, several hundred dollars a month. Received a ‘random’ audit from the state of Alabama on car insurance. Tried to explain and fax proof of insurance. Continue calling Chase every other day. People at work start staring at me while I’m on the phone. As a female manager, it is easy to become a target. Females in HR giving me dirty looks. I shrug it off.

Chase admits mistake & makes attempts to correct

FINALLY. I speak with the mortgage company who sold my loan to Chase. They were so very apologetic this was happening to me. Turns out the local insurance company had a scandal and sold all it’s business to another insurance company. The information was somehow messed up and Chase was billing the wrong insurance company. Did not find insurance so placed a more expensive insurance which drained my escrow. I had no knowledge of this. Chase apologized and reimbursed me the overcharges.

Next month…. payment up to $1455. This was not corrected until I moved out of the house. I moved out of the house? Yes. The demise continued to a point where the only hope I had of surviving was leaving the house and renting before foreclosure and then sue.

Ok. So months continue until I decide the only way for me was to pay the amount I owed… not what there statements said (which changed every month on a fixed rate mortgage. I must’ve have spoken to every single representative in every single department at Chase. At the same time, the loan modification rage started. This seemed to be the ONLY department that would work with me. They were holding a workshop in Atlanta, Georgia for those struggling with their mortgage. I went. I took a day from work and headed to Atlanta to meet face to face with my enemy, Chase Mortgage. By the time this meeting occurred, I had been overpaying Chase for a year, took out 2 credit cards to continue the excess charges while they were working it out, stayed behind on other bills and felt completely trapped. At some point, I declared to Chase that I would STOP paying the amount they were charging and only pay what my payment was supposed to be. Therefore when I sent my 1100 dollar payment, they would hold it over til the next month and apply to the next payment and my mortgage was falling behind.

The representative seemed to be a very nice man. He assured me he could take care of it. His idea was to modify the loan and start over. Great. I brought him most of the information he needed to the meeting and we exchanged emails. I explained I am ultra busy at work and I am being watched carefully. (My environment had continued to worsen at work; The HR dept. seemed determined to prove I was doing something besides working) I let him know I would have a tough time making copies and getting information. Now, every time I sent him something, he’d ask for something else. The process grew more complicated and I grew more frustrated. He was requesting I prove I had hardship. My only hardship was caused by Chase’s mistake. He continued to treat me as if he was doing me a favor and I’m holding up the process by not showing hardship. I continued to remind him I did not lose my job, I did not suffer a loss of income, that my hardship was Chase had made a mistake on my mortgage. It came to a point when I realized this modification process was not going to happen. I placed my home on the market and prepared for the worse. I knew I must sell it before I lost it. Well, then, guess what? Somehow this representative contacted my realtor.My realtor called and let me know, he thought they were starting foreclosure. This caused a strain with my realtor and myself as I assured him I had done my best to keep paying while Chase was over-charging.

Chase representative will not help and will not give me another representative

Suddenly the Chase representative became very rude and would not return my emails. I asked him to PLEASE assign me to a new representative. I never heard another word back from him. I did not know what to do. I kept getting phone calls from Chase,repeatedly on my work phone. I tried to tell them over and over that I had a rep I was working with. I spent way too much time on the phone with them. Co-workers began to give me disdainful looks at I hid in conference rooms for privacy. The worst happened when I spent too much time prior to going into work one am and an HR Manager began to record my time. I did not know at the time how much I was being watched. They actually asked a guard to log my time as I traveled between plants. She began to question associates who worked with me about what time I arrived and if I was on the phone. I filed a complaint as this was now harassment.

I was stressed beyond words. I still had done nothing wrong. I paid my payments just fine until Chase made this mistake. Now, my car insurance premium was high, my mortgage was behind, my home wouldn’t sell, the representative wouldn’t return my emails, I now had credit card balances, feared foreclosure and now feared losing my job. All because I did nothing but attempt to pay my mortgage to keep a home for me and my three girls.

I felt forced to Rent before my credit was ruined…. then, the worst happened… lost my job and my rental home burned. Still no help from Chase

Not knowing what to do, I figured if Chase would not modify and they were threatening foreclosure; it would be best to leave now and rent before they ruined my credit. I did. I left the home on the market and rented a farmhouse for me and my girls and told Chase I was tired of the struggle, just go ahead and foreclose. Now, I’m maintaining the Power Bill at the old home and the new. I continued to visit the home owned by Chase and paint and keep it up. Yet, they charged me a huge amount of money to winterize the home.

I asked the Chase representative repeatedly to give me another representative. He would not answer my emails. I never got another representative. I eventually lost my job due to the situation caused by Chase Mortgage. Then, shortly after, I came home to find a horrible accident of unknown origin happened and my home that I rented had burned. I am now jobless and homeless. I cannot make the mortgage, I cannot modify the loan, I cannot get Chase to return my emails, I cannot sell the home and Chase is completely unreachable. The power bill for the home owned by Chase was up to 1500 dollars to maintain it while trying to sell. I never got a new representative to work with so every attempt to talk to them was still the same chain of representative transferring my calls. I can’t afford the power bill to even move back in, so I rent a nasty apartment that flooded and had

Finally, Chase may have to compensate the people they screwed

From the Wall Street Journal.

U.S. Sets Rules for Foreclosure Compensation

WASHINGTON—Banks could be forced to pay as much as $125,000 per customer to compensate borrowers who were subject to foreclosure-processing errors.

More than a year after finding widespread abuses in the industry, banking regulators unveiled a plan Thursday to compensate borrowers for a wide variety of errors, including starting foreclosure for a borrower who wasn’t in default, denying loan assistance in error, making a mistake on a loan modification and wrongfully foreclosing on a member of the military.

image

A foreclosed home on Pine Island in Lee County, Fla., in November 2010.

Banks have set aside vast amounts of money for foreclosure-related liabilities, said banking analyst Nancy Bush at SNL Financial. “This would just be an additional drop in the bucket,” she said.

Many borrowers with foreclosure errors may not see any money. Only about 194,000 of 4.4 million borrowers sent letters last year have requested a review of their cases to date. Separately, independent consultants are doing reviews of about 145,000 consumers’ files.

The compensation plan is separate from a $25 billion foreclosure-abuse settlement that federal and state officials announced earlier this year. That settlement covered the nation’s five largest mortgage-servicing firms: Bank of America Corp., BAC +1.53% Wells Fargo WFC +1.45% & Co., J.P. Morgan Chase JPM +1.35% & Co., Citigroup Inc. C +0.57% and Ally Financial Inc..

The Financial Services Roundtable’s Housing Policy Council, which represents banks subject to the review, called the regulators’ action “an important step toward completion” of the foreclosure review process.

The national servicing settlement includes $1.5 billion in cash payments, or up to $2,000 per borrower, for homeowners who went through foreclosure between September 2008 and December 2011. That was a different approach from bank regulators, who required banks to hire independent consultants who are undertaking a more detailed review of each consumer’s case.

The biggest awards under the rules announced by the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, would be $125,000 per consumer. Those awards would go to consumers who lost their home without defaulting on their mortgage. Banks also must pay that same fine if they violated a federal law preventing foreclosures on the military or foreclosed on a homeowner enrolled in a loan modification plan.

Smaller awards would go to consumers who had other kinds of violations. Consumers whose applications for loan modifications were improperly denied are in line for up to $15,000. Those who were never solicited for loan help as required under federal programs are eligible for up to $1,000.

Borrowers are likely to face a tough burden of proof for the larger awards, said David Dunn, a lawyer who represents banks at law firm Hogan Lovells,

JPMorgan trading loss widens to $3B

More pain for JPMorgan Chase:

The trading losses suffered by JPMorgan Chase have surged in recent days, surpassing the bank’s initial $2 billion estimate by at least $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the losses.

When Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, announced the losses last Thursday, he indicated they could double within the next few quarters. But that process has been compressed into four trading days as hedge funds and other investors take advantage of JPMorgan’s distress, fueling faster deterioration in the underlying credit market positions held by the bank.

A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment, although Mr. Dimon has said the total paper trading losses will be volatile depending on day-to-day market fluctuations.

The Federal Reserve is examining the scope of the growing losses and the original bet, along with whether JPMorgan’s chief investment office took risks that were inappropriate for a federally insured depository institution, according to several people with knowledge of the examination. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way.

The overall health of the bank remains strong, even with the additional losses, and JPMorgan has been able to increase its stock dividend faster than its rivals because of stronger earnings and a more solid capital buffer.

Read more …

That last paragraph is what gets me.  The company can lose $3B and still be strong.  Why are they complaining so much about lost fee revenue from the new (and reasonable) rules regarding debit cards, automatically enrolling people in debit card overdraft schemes, etc.?  Because they don’t want to give up the free money they are “stealing” from retail banking customers.

Foreclosure settlement money going to plug State budget gaps

The New York Times reports today that about 10% of the foreclosure settlement money being paid by the banks is being siphoned off to plug some state budget deficits.

Needy States Use Housing Aid Cash to Plug Budgets

Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to provide a little relief to the nation’s struggling homeowners is being diverted to plug state budget gaps.

In a budget proposed this week, California joined more than a dozen states that want to help close gaping shortfalls using money paid by the nation’s biggest banks and earmarked for foreclosure prevention, investigations of financial fraud and blunting the ill effects of the housing crisis. California was awarded more than $400 million from the banks, and Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed using the bulk of that sum to pay the state’s debts.

The money was part of a national settlement valued at $25 billion and negotiated with five big banks over abuses in their mortgage and foreclosure processes.

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

As part of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay the states $2.5 billion, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of the foreclosure surge. But critics complained that this was the only cash the banks were required to pay — the rest comes in the form of “credits” for reducing mortgage debt and other activities. Even that relatively small amount has proved too great a temptation for lawmakers.

Only 27 states have devoted all their funds from the banks to housing programs, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. So far about 15 states have said they will use all or most of the money for other purposes.

In Texas, $125 million went straight to the general fund. Missouri will use its $40 million to soften cuts to higher education. Indiana is spending more than half its allotment to pay energy bills for low-income families, while Virginia will use most of its $67 million to help revenue-starved local governments.

Like California, some other states with outsize problems from the housing bust are spending the money for something other than homeowner relief. Georgia, where home prices are still falling, will use its $99 million to lure companies to the state.

“The governor has decided to use the discretionary money for economic development,” said a spokesman for Nathan Deal, Georgia’s governor, a Republican. “He believes that the best way to prevent foreclosures amongst honest homeowners who have experienced hard times is to create jobs here in our state.”

Andy Schneggenburger, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Association of Neighborhood-Based Developers, said the decision showed “a real lack of comprehension of the depths of the foreclosure problem.”

The $2.5 billion was intended to be under the control of the state attorneys general, who negotiated the settlement with the five banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally. But there is enough wiggle room in the agreement, as well as in separate terms agreed to by each state, to give legislatures and governors wide latitude. The money can, for example, be counted as a “civil penalty” won by the state, and some leaders have argued that states are entitled to the money because the housing crash decimated tax collections.

Read more …

Simply distasteful.

 

Dimon’s incomprehensible answer to the $2B loss

Huh?

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