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bloomberg.com — For Americans, the foreclosure crisis has wiped out fortunes, bringing destitution and homelessness. For Florida attorney David J. Stern, it has brought mansions, a Bugatti sports car and a luxury yacht. Florida has the third-highest residential foreclosure rate in the U.S., and Stern, 50, has made a fortune off the bust. His foreclosure-processing business has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue preparing documents for the cases that his law firm brings on behalf of lenders seeking to reclaim homes from borrowers who can’t pay their mortgages.

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huffingtonpost.com — Top Citigroup executives sought to assure investors and the public Monday that the firm's foreclosure process and its handling of key documents in securitizing home mortgages is "sound," despite growing concerns over how lenders may have skirted the law when bundling home mortgages, selling them and kicking delinquent borrowers out of their home.

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ourfuture.org — The bank lobby is spreading a host of silly myths about the foreclosure fraud outbreak in an effort to downplay the scandal and minimize concerns over potential bank losses that have emerged in the blogosphere. Housing Wire’s Paul Jackson spouts most of them in his post today. Jackson does acknowledge a host of major problems for banks that have been recently highlighted by the blogosphere, but he’s still spreading serious misinformation on foreclosure fraud and its potential effects. Banks routinely rip-off borrowers in the foreclosure process, and the blogosphere's uproar over foreclosure fraud is more than justified.

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tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com — The latest jobs bill coming out of Washington isn't really a bill at all. It's the Fed's attempt to keep long-term interest rates low by pumping even more money into the economy ("quantitative easing" in Fed-speak).

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blogs.wsj.com — Republicans candidates collected about 70% of the political donations from the employees and political accounts of financial services firms in June, the most recent month in which records are available, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s a reversal from March, when Democrats collected 70% of the donations from Wall Street.

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thenation.com — The government’s $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG’s collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand—moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public.

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reuters.com — Key Democratic lawmakers hope to exploit the rare August return of the House of Representatives to intensify pressure on the White House to nominate Elizabeth Warren as head of the new consumer financial protection agency.

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thehill.com — President Obama will have the opportunity over the next year to dramatically remake the leadership at the nation’s financial regulators. The president’s appointments on bank regulation, insurance rules and consumer financial protection will have broad power to carry out the 2,300-page financial overhaul enacted by Obama last month.

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bloomberg.com — The new rules being negotiated by regulators in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision would have a greater impact on the firms’ so-called trading books, which include stocks, bonds and other securities, Dugan said in an interview. Loans and other debt held until maturity in their banking books would be less affected.

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bloomberg.com — Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, authors of the U.S. financial overhaul, plan hearings on the status of global talks to revise bank-capital standards amid worries that proposed rules are being watered down.

“I am concerned the recent proposals out of Basel will result in weak and perhaps even nonbinding provisions that provide credit to banks for holding forms of capital that have little or no value in absorbing losses,” said Senator Ted Kaufman, Democrat of Delaware. “The financial reform bill includes only a promise of higher capital requirements for U.S. banks, which we were told were going to be negotiated on an international level.”

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