Welcome to your Black Friday open thread! Have you trampled anyone while shopping for bargains? I’m typing at you from my brand-new iPad (yes, I gave in to gadget lust).
One thing we should all be thankful for is Elizabeth Warren. She helped to kill the bill to allow mortgage fraud by banks.
Elizabeth Warren was the first senior Obama administration official to recognize the potentially incendiary impact of a bill that would have made it significantly easier for mortgage companies to foreclose on homes, and her subsequent warnings played a crucial role in persuading the President to veto the measure, according to freshly released documents and people familiar with the deliberations.
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State officials across the country–who have been pursuing probes looking into wrongdoing within the foreclosure process– feared that those jurisdictions with lax standards could have become hotbeds for foreclosure documentation fraud. Lenders and mortgage companies could have used those states as central clearing houses to produce bogus foreclosure paperwork, and then export those documents to other states with more stringent regulations–an expedient bypass around the strictures.
Obama ultimately declined to sign the law, and the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.
Officials said Warren was among the first federal officials to recognize the significance of the notary bill, titled the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010. She met with authorities from several states and then relayed their concerns to influential administration officials.
Republicans have already promised oversight of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If only Republicans had decided oversight of the financial industry was as important.
The outlook is not so good for peace in the Koreas. Tension is still building:
Tension mounted on Friday near a South Korean island bombarded this week by North Korea as Pyongyang’s military again fired artillery, this time in what appeared to be a drill on its own territory. The North’s state-run media warned that a planned United States-South Korean military exercise could push the Korean Peninsula closer to “the brink of war.”
Meanwhile, South Korea struggled with the domestic political fallout from Tuesday’s deadly attack, which exposed the weakness of South Korean defenses and brought public criticism of President Lee Myung-bak for failing to retaliate more forcefully. On Friday, he appointed a new defense minister, whose predecessor resigned on Thursday for failing to keep forces at ready in an area that has seen repeated military clashes with North Korea.
The U.S. is going to going to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. I’m sure this will do nothing to ease the tensions there. This is one area to keep a watch over.