Image courtesy good.is

While you were spending time resting, relaxing, and ringing in 2012, your favorite bloggers at USDemocrazy were keeping tabs on some of the most interesting stories of the new year.

Hate unused and seemingly useless balances on old metro cards? Some students at NYU have proposed an idea that would allow the more than $52 million dollars in unused fares to be used for community-based charities.

All eyes are on Iowa as the nation predicts the Republican nominee – well, most of them. A new study on the ever-coveted undecided voters seeks to define the complexities of the group. Twelve distinct types were found, including the Apathetics that are actually less likely to vote for candidates that try hard to get their votes. Another researcher claims that undecided voters are just interested in a candidate that can beat Obama.

Hundreds of people in Minneapolis protested the end of hawalas services there, the wire-transfer service that allows the largest population of Somali immigrants in the United States to send money back home. US banks call the transfers too risky, while many people that rely on the service are unsure of where to turn.

Continue to keep an eye on our posts this year for updates, especially as we move into election season!

It’s been an eventful few weeks with the Occupy movement around the country. The video above show the aerial view what is estimated to be 100,000 Occupy protestors taking over a highway in Oakland last week.

Now that more people are looking at the movement, some criticism on the recent weeks of police violence has been emerging. One marine says that the crowd-control methods of the Oakland police are even prohibited in war zones.

Saturday marked the International Day of Divestment from international banks where thousands of people transferred their money from big corporations like Bank of America to local credit unions. One report shows that since September 29, 4 in 5 credit unions have seen membership increases. This is an increase more than all new membership in 2010.

Over at Occupy Wallstreet, female protestors have constructed a safe haven for women. This safe house is in response to the few incidents of sexual assault that have taken place in Zuccotti Park.

Still confused about what this movement is and why people are so passionate about it? Take a look at this short animation that summarizes the problems at hand.

And FYI – we’re putting the final touches on our first installment of our own #DOCcupy that features our local movement in Baltimore. Fingers crossed that it’ll launch this week!

Thanks to Wikimedia

Everybody can remember a bully in the playground from their youth. This big nasty character would take candy or money from innocent little ones.

You better watch out! Today some of these bullies have grown up and may be after your house!

There has been a crisis in the housing market where big banks (who own the loans on homes around the country) have been falsely repossessing houses.

Here’s what’s been happening:

Banks make loans to individuals and resell the ownership of the loans to investors.  To do this Stephen Ganel, of Time, notes

the banks had to file and retain paperwork that transferred the ownership of the mortgages from the original lenders to the new investors. Well, it appears the banks bungled that process, or at the very least in a number of case, in potentially many cases, they lost the paperwork.… (then)the banks tried to cover it up.

To deal with the missing paperwork, Calculated Risk notes, banks used

“Robo-signers” [, who] are individuals who signed affidavits stating that they had “personal knowledge” of the facts in a foreclosure case, when in fact they did not.

Was this just a mistake or was it something more sinister?

To find the truth some of America’s biggest banks temporarily stopped foreclosing and begun internal investigations.   Banks are coming to the conclusion that they have done nothing wrong.

This Monday, Bank of America concluded that their loan process was fine and restarted foreclosing.

Not trusting the banks, 50 state attorney generals have launched their own investigation. Along with this the Federal Government has begun its own investigations of bank practices.

The results of these investigations won’t be in for some time (does anything other than slush money move fast in Washington) but banks are feeling a little pressure.

Foreclosures can depend on the ruling of judges and it seems they are not trusting banks evidence as much as they used to.

In the end this may just be another bump on the road (hopefully) to recovery. Then again, when your looking to buy a house this could change how you look at mortgage and how its filed (ideally not in the circular file).

President Barack Obama gave a big speech yesterday. He was addressing the leaders of Wall Street and challenged them to join him in an effort to fix the problems that caused the financial crisis the world is facing today. The cartoon above addresses the same issue. The cartoonist thinks that this is a burning issue.What do you think?

Thanks to Wikicommons.

Question: Do you remember that recent financial crisis that was going to (play scary music) DESTROY THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!?! (in case you don’t… crawl out from under your rock and check out US Democrazy’s past coverage).

Fortunately for us, politicians everywhere agreed to do everything possible to ensure that such a crisis did not happen again.

Unfortunately, these politicians cannot seem to agree on… what exactly “everything possible” means…

Like everything in Washington these days, reform of the financial and banking industry (which helped create the almighty mess we are stuck in) is in a partisan deadlock.

There was some progress made in 2009 when the House of Representatives passed a financial reform bill last December.

Since then, that bill has languished in the clutches of the US Senate (an organization about as fast as molasses up hill in January).

But HARK! (play triumphant music) all that is about to change!  A Senate version of the bill may be emerging!

The Wall Street Journal reports that a potential Senate bill, among other things, would place the Federal Reserve in charge of consumer protection in the financial markets.

(You can view the consumer protection part of the plan, spearheaded by Senator Chris Dodd, here…brought to you by Mother Jones).

Reform should be bringing out cheers, right? Well, some don’t seem to think this bill contains much reform at all.

The blog Calculated Risk snidely remarks on the proposal that

wasn’t the Fed already responsible for consumer financial protection?

Don’t think Calculated Risk are the only one who picked up on this.

Heather Booth, Executive Director of the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), an alliance of organizations promoting changes in the way Wall Street us regulated, issued this statement on the Senate proposal:

The revised proposal does not provide what is needed to protect American families or the financial system as a whole: a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency

Yesterday, Paul Krugman, Noble winning economist, wrote in a similar vein that this bill

eliminates a key plank of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent agency protecting consumers.

Not only that but Mr. Krugman goes so far as to say that

it’s time to draw a line in the sand

and that no reform bill is better than

such a watered-down reform.

Now the question may be forming in your head (at least it did in ours), how could a reform bill, such as that passed by the House of Representatives, with support from the White House and many Americans become watered down?

Arianna Huffington, namesake of the Huffington Post, conjectures that the weakening of the bill was due to the banking lobby .

A couple of hundred million dollars later, and we’re left with this punch-to-the-gut of reform, from the top-line summary of Dodd’s plan: “the independent agency proposal would be dropped.”

Representative Barney Frank, a key player in the House of Representative’s reform, states the weak Senate bill is because

Procedurally, the Senate Republicans are killing this or watering it down,

We’ve taken a look at what the experts have said on this issue… perhaps it’s best we hear from those who will be most affected by this so-called reform. That would be YOU.

That’s right, we want you to go to the top right of this article, where it says “leave a comment”, click that spot and write your thoughts.  Otherwise we may just have to write them for you.

Got You Too… FDIC advances a proposal to penalize banks for risky practices.

I feel like I’m forgetting something…

Florida Grandmother Forgotten in Jail for 15 Days

Last Sunday, we saw TV cat fights involving lions, tigers and even President Obama!

That’s right, on Sunday President Obama had his catty claws out. In an interview he referred to America’s Wall Street bankers as a bunch of “fat cats”.

To make the name calling worse, it was only a day before Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet with these very same top bankers.

What was this meeting about (clearly not another friendly beer summit)?

In Obama’s own words:

America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry — and now that they’re back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy

Obama was having a hissy-fit at the bankers. He wants them to start lending money again so that businesses can start growing again and in turn hire people (again).

Now normally most people would jump at a chance to meet the President.  However Obama’s cold words and the cold weather kept some bankers at home.

Bad weather grounded the commercial flights for the CEO’s of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanly, as well as the Chariman of Citigroup.

The big question is will this meeting result in increased lending by the brow-beaten bankers?

Shahien Nasiripour, at the Huffington Post, doesn’t think so.

He could be wrong though.  After the meeting, Bank of America announced that it would increase loans to small and mid-sized businesses by $5 billion in 2010.

Who knows maybe those “fat cats” are cuter than people think?

The U.S. is all about new beginnings. And making mortgage lenders work, too.

Lesson learned: cold, hard cash is best not kept in the freezer. (Any old police office with the muchies is going to look there.)

Thanks to Wikicommons.

***UPDATE: Here are the Official Results***

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been under a lot of stress lately. (We at USDemocrazy thinks it has something to do with fixing the tanking economy.)  Now it seems he has been passing this stress onto others.

The US Treasury has required major banks to undergo “Stress Tests” (like waiting in line at the DMV) to see if they are financially sturdy enough (i.e. have enough money) to stand on their own two feet without government crutches.

The results are in… sort of…

The Feds will not be releasing the official results until later today. Luckily, there have been a number of leaks to the press.

Geithner has announced the results will be “reassuring” … although anythingother than total disaster might seem reassuring in this economic climate.

Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Regional Financial, Sun Trust, KeyCorp,  Morgan Stanley, Fifth Third, P.N.C. and GMAC need more money. No surprises here.

Among those banks tough enough to survive are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, MetLife, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, and American Express. (You can now open the champagne and charge it to your AmEx card.)

What happens to those stressed out banks? Does the government issue Valium?

Well, it seems the banks get one month to put a plan together for raising cash.

Once the banks get their stress report cards, the pundit class will weigh in with their interpretation of the grades.  The NY Times has a great collection of experts giving their two cents worth.  Arianna Huffington is as vocal as ever with her opinion,

“The fact that the stress test results to be released on Thursday are unlikely to show the full extent of the sickness of our financial system is one more symptom that Obama’s economic team needs to be put in quarantine…”

We’ll see down the road how accurate these tests were.  So what do y’all think? Are you and the banks stressed enough?

Hey amigo, where’d ya get that gun… From the US!

What’s the prognosis, doc? Some stocks with a side of t-bonds.

Ron Paul meets Sacha Baron Cohen.

I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics. So, that didn’t turn out that way. But, by the time he started pulling his pants down, I … What in (inaudible) is going on here? I ran out of the room.