[Photo via Flickr]

By Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, Special to ProPublica

This story was co-published with Foreign Policy.

Accra is a city of choking red dust where almost no rain falls for three months at a time and clothes hung out on a line dry in 15 minutes. So the new five-star Mövenpick hotel affords a haven of sorts in Ghana's crowded capital, with manicured lawns, amply watered vegetation, and uniformed waiters gliding poolside on roller skates to offer icy drinks to guests. A high concrete wall rings the grounds, keeping out the city's overflowing poor who hawk goods in the street by day and the homeless who lie on the sidewalks by night.

The Mövenpick, which opened in 2011, fits the model of a modern international luxury hotel, with 260 rooms, seven floors, and 13,500 square feet of retail space displaying $2,000 Italian handbags and other wares. But it is exceptional in at least one respect: It was financed by a combination of two very different entities: a multibillion-dollar investment company largely controlled by a Saudi prince, and the poverty-fighting World Bank.

The investment company, Kingdom Holding Company, has a market value of $12 billion, and Forbes ranks its principal owner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as the world's 29th-richest person, estimating his net worth at $18 billion. The World Bank, meanwhile, contributed its part through its International Finance Corporation (IFC), set up back in 1956to muster cheap loans and other financial support for private businesses that contribute to its planet-improving mandate. "At the World Bank, we have made the world's most pressing development issue—to reduce global poverty—our mission," the bank proclaims.

Why, then, did the IFC give a Saudi prince's company an attractively priced $26 million loan to help build the Mövenpick, a hotel the prince was fully capable of financing himself? The answer is that the IFC's portfolio of billions of dollars in loans and investments is not in fact primarily targeted at helping the impoverished. At least as important is the goal of making a profit for the World Bank.

I reached this conclusion after traveling to Ghana—in many ways typical of the more than 100 countries where the IFC works—to see firsthand the kinds of problems the World Bank's lenders are supposed to tackle and whether their efforts are really working on the ground. I pored through thousands of pages of the bank's publicly available reports and financial statements and talked to dozens of experts familiar with its performance in Ghana and many other countries.

Continue reading »

By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

As the sixth year of the foreclosure crisis comes to an end, the percentage of loans in foreclosure remains a staggering eight times higher than it was in 2005. About 5.3 million homeowners — about 11 percent of all borrowers — are behind on their payments.

But 2012 was also the year that home prices hit a bottom and have started to very slowly climb. The number of new homeowners falling behind on their payments has dropped substantially since the peak. The government also took a dramatic step: a $25 billion settlement with the five biggest mortgage servicers.

Earlier this year, ProPublica focused on one homeowner — Sheila Ramos, who lost her home in Florida and ended up living in a tent in Hawaii — to pull together all the threads of the crisis and give readers a single story that explains the causes of the crisis, the bumbling response by the big banks and Washington, and the human toll exacted by the whole debacle. It is also available as a Kindle Single, which includes extra material.

We've also been keeping a close watch on whether the government is keeping its promises about compensating victims of the crisis.

The largest program is a review overseen by federal regulators covering more than 4 million loans. It launched back in 2011, but as of mid-December, no homeowner had received any compensation. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency spokesman Bryan Hubbard said regulators had been "working toward beginning compensation for a limited number of people [this month] with reviews and remediation continuing through 2013."

The program — called the Independent Foreclosure Review — has been beset with questions about its fairness, transparency and integrity since it launched. At least partly due to those problems, many borrowers aren't even bothering to apply for compensation. As of November, only 315,000 borrowers have sent in forms requesting to be reviewed, according to the OCC's Hubbard, about seven percent of people eligible to apply. The final deadline to apply is at the end of this month.

Federal regulators designed the program to work like this: Each of the banks would hire an "independent consultant" (approved by the regulator) to conduct reviews of the bank's foreclosure cases. The bank was supposed to foot the bill, but the consultant, not the bank, was supposed to decide which of the bank's customers deserved compensation and how much.

But ProPublica has revealed evidence that the banks themselves are heavily involved in the reviews, calling their independence and integrity into question. After our story about Bank of America's involvement in its review, the bank and its consultant changed their review process. Bank of America also engineered a de facto appeals process; if the consultant decided a BofA customer deserved compensation, the bank could provide more information that it wasn't at fault. Borrowers have no such ability to appeal.

To lead its role in the review, JPMorgan Chase installed an executive named by the Justice Department for allegedly facilitating a scheme to defraud Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She declined to comment for our story.

In a telling irony, it seems likely the review will end up steering far more money toward the consulting companies hired by the banks than will go to harmed homeowners.

Finally, some banks have been shockingly slow to begin their reviews. Regulators have ordered Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to conduct reviews of their former mortgage servicing subsidiaries, for instance, but they still haven't begun. The process covers loans that were in foreclosure in 2009 or 2010, but the review won't get going until at least 2013. That seems likely to further deter harmed borrowers from applying for compensation.

A Federal Reserve spokesperson said a company, Navigant Consulting, had been selected to conduct the review for both servicers, but the contracts had not been finalized. It's unclear when the review would begin.

The government's other big reaction to the foreclosure crisis, the National Mortgage Settlement, has also had its disappointments. The deal involved 49 states, the federal government, and the five largest mortgage servicers. The headline number was $25 billion, but only $5 billion of that is actually cash that the big banks would pay out. The other $20 billion is composed of "credits," awarded when the banks take steps to avoid foreclosures, for instance by offering loan modifications that cut the amount homeowners owe.

Of the cash, half — $2.5 billion — was to go to states to address the foreclosure crisis. But as we've reported, almost $1 billion of that is actually being used to patch state's ailing budgets. (See our state-by-state breakdown here.)

$1.5 billion will be sent to borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure, with each borrower receiving only about $1,000-$2,000. That process has finally gotten underway, and the deadline for borrowers to make a claim to receive that payment is early next year. (See more info about this in our FAQ.)

As for the $20 billion in credits, the banks appear to be in the process of fulfilling those obligations, but there are plenty of questions about how much good it's doing. Some credits are for actions banks were taking already (like demolishing abandoned homes). And although government officials touted the agreement as a way to boost the number of modifications that reduced borrowers' debts, much of the banks' activity hasn't focused on keeping borrowers in their homes. Rather, the number of short sales — an agreement by the bank to sell the home for less than the amount owed — has been far higher.

As the foreclosure crisis and the government's sputtering response enter their seventh year, ProPublica will be keeping watch.

Without reading the final settlement, it's difficult to say, but it seems that this might replace the Independent Foreclosure Review, and provide some real relief for homeowners and families who suffered foreclosures. But, as Lynn Drysdale, a lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid and a former co-chairwoman of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, said: “It’s certainly a victory for consumers and could help entire neighborhoods. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and for those people who have had to totally uproot their lives because of eviction it may still not be enough.”

NYT:

Banking regulators are close to a $10 billion settlement with 14 banks that would end the government’s efforts to hold lenders responsible for foreclosure abuses like faulty paperwork and excessive fees that may have led to evictions, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Under the settlement, a significant amount of the money, $3.75 billion, would go to people who have already lost their homes, making it potentially more generous to former homeowners than a broad-reaching pact in February between state attorneys general and five large banks. That set aside $1.5 billion in cash relief for Americans.

Most of the relief in both agreements is meant for people who are struggling to stay in their homes and need the banks to reduce their payments or lower the amount of principal they owe.

The $10 billion pact would be the latest in a series of settlements that regulators and law enforcement officials have reached with banks to hold them accountable for their role in the 2008 financial crisis that sent the housing market into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. As of early 2012, four million Americans had been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and a huge amount of abandoned homes swamped many states, including California, Florida and Arizona.

The five largest banks involved in the $26 billion settlement with the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial -- are included in the current negotiations.

A report by Strike Debt on the disaster wrought by Hurricane Sandy and the government’s response. This is a preliminary and living public service document that highlights the use of loans as the main form of assistance to help those affected better understand the choices being imposed on them. You are not a loan!

INTRODUCTION

This report is a preliminary and living document highlighting the economic effects of Hurricane Sandy on New York City. It examines how the use of loans as the main form of “aid” to disaster-impacted communities is not effective at addressing individual or community needs. Further, the use of loans may lead to disastrous longer- term economic consequences for the impacted communities.

Although Hurricane Sandy was the first “Frankenstorm” to hit New York City, in recent years climate disasters have become a regular sight on the evening news. From Hurricanes Katrina and Irene to Midwestern droughts and wildfires in the Southwest, many communities are facing these types of crises all across the country. As our climate has changed, the burden of the cost of disaster has also been shifting. Individuals are now expected to shoulder relief expenses that used to be shared publicly. Victims are faced with long-term, unexpected economic consequences as well as displacement from the communities they call home.

This report was compiled based on observations made at a community meeting in Midland Beach, Staten Island on November 18, 2012, as well as on interviews with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Small Business Association (SBA) representatives, legal assistance volunteers, volunteer relief workers, local business owners and community members throughout New York City. Data was drawn from newspaper articles, statements from advocacy organizations and official reports.

FINDINGS

The economic costs of the disaster are placed on individuals. Federal aid programs require victims to first apply for loans before qualifying to apply for FEMA aid.
“Aid” programs favor those who can take on debt. Preexisting inequalities are further exacerbated by this form of aid.
Federal programs are inflexible and fail to meet even basic needs of affected individuals and communities.
Relief options are not clearly communicated or well understood. Policies are so complex that even lawyers are confused and are “learning as they go.”
Mold is at a crisis level. Residents will not receive FEMA aid to pay for the mold remediation necessary to make their properties even temporarily livable.

read more at interoccupy.net or download the entire report as a .pdf.

[Via OccupyWallSt.org]

By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

Answers to homeowners' questions about the Independent Foreclosure Review.The administration's website for the foreclosure prevention program. Provides an FAQ, homeowner examples, and other tools to see whether you might qualify for the program.A list of HUD-approved housing counseling agencies nationwide.Tips for homeowners from the Federal Trade Commission.These rules lay out how mortgage servicers are supposed to conduct the program.A finance and economics blog that provides news and metrics on the state of the housing market.

Late last year, the country's bank regulators launched a massive program to evaluate millions of foreclosure cases and compensate homeowners who fell victim to the banks' flawed or illegal practices. Regulators dubbed it the "Independent Foreclosure Review" to emphasize that the banks would not be making key decisions about loans they had made or serviced.

But a raft of evidence — internal Bank of America memos and emails obtained by ProPublica, interviews with two bank staff members who have worked on the review, and little-noticed documents released late last year by a federal banking regulator — throw the independence of the review into serious doubt. Together, they indicate that Bank of America — the financial giant with the largest number of homeowners eligible for the program — is performing much of the work itself.

The ultimate decision as to whether and how much a homeowner will be compensated is not made by Bank of America, the evidence shows, but is based largely on work that the bank itself performs. One current employee called that crucial judgment "only a matter of double checking" the bank's work.

Moreover, the bank gets a chance to challenge that key decision before it becomes final — an opportunity not given to homeowners.

Bank of America strongly objects to ProPublica's analysis. It insists that the independence of the review has never been compromised. It maintains that its role "has been and remains gathering documents." While it may discover "an error" in the course of that work, the bank says that an independent review conducted by an outside firm "is the sole and final basis" for determining whether homeowners have been harmed and how much compensation they merit.

A bank spokesman questioned ProPublica's fairness, writing that "there are no facts to support your claim. Yet it seems you have made a decision to move forward with a story based on speculation and a preconceived notion of this issue."

Bank of America's regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), also maintained that the review was independent. After seeing the internal bank documents obtained by ProPublica, the OCC investigated, officials said. The OCC concluded that the documents, which include a memo sent by Bank of America executives to the hundreds of bank employees working on the Independent Foreclosure Review, are "incomplete and inaccurate," said Deputy Comptroller for Large Bank Supervision Morris Morgan.

But the documents and interviews tell a sharply different story, and the stakes are high. The maximum cash compensation a homeowner can win through the foreclosure review is $125,000. Regulators set different amounts for the various errors and abuses homeowners endured, and those distinctions can result in widely differing payments — for instance $15,000 instead of $125,000 for homeowners who suffered very similar abuses.

ProPublica provided the internal Bank of America documents to Sen. Robert Menendez, who chaired a congressional hearing overseeing the foreclosure reviews. He said, "Congress was led to believe that the consultants would be analyzing homeowner foreclosures completely independently of the Wall Street banks, but these memos raise serious questions as to whether that's true. If banks are trying to skew the results in their favor, regulators should stop that immediately."

The senator also said that regulators "should ensure that homeowners have the same opportunities banks do to influence and contest the findings of the foreclosure reviews."

The Document Trail

Federal regulators designed the program to work like this: Each of the big banks would hire an "independent consultant" to conduct reviews of the bank's foreclosure cases. To ensure that these consultants really were independent, the regulators had to approve them. In September 2011, Bank of America hired Promontory Financial Group to be its independent consultant.

Two months later, the OCC released the contract between Bank of America and Promontory. The 118-page document received little notice, but it clearly spells out that Promontory will make its decision only after reviewing the bank's own analysis of each homeowner's claim.

When a homeowner sends in a complaint about the way Bank of America handled his or her foreclosure, the contract states, the bank "will process the complaint and provide the complaint, supporting resolution documentation, report of its findings, and proposed resolution to Promontory for independent review and decision concerning the complaint at issue." Promontory, the contract continues, will then review the "complaints and claims, together with [Bank of America's] recommended resolution and supporting documentation, and provide a decision on the complaint."

Job ads posted in the fall of 2011 for "Foreclosure File Reviewer" positions at Bank of America reflect this scope of work. Among the job duties listed in one ad were "Complete Claim Review and perform Harm Evaluation according to Promontory/OCC definitions"; "If there was financial injury, determine the amount"; and "Perform final determination of Harm." The ads were posted by staffing companies, but the bank confirmed to ProPublica it was the ultimate employer.

An internal bank document created to train employees on their role in the reviews also describes a "claim review" process at the bank. Employees would be running tests on the files to see if there was "harm done to the customer as a result of faulty servicing."

Continue reading »

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a civil complaint against JPMorgan Chase for fraud in the selling of mortgage-backed securities. Schneiderman is the co-chairman of a presidential task force formed in January to investigate possible civil and criminal misconduct in the formation and sale of mortgage-backed securities. The allegation is over securities issued by the investment bank Bear Stearns in 2006 and 2007. JPMorgan acquired Bear Stearns in March 2008.

NYT:

The federal mortgage task force that was formed in January by the Justice Department filed its first complaint against a big bank on Monday, citing a broad pattern of misconduct in the packaging and sale of mortgage securities during the housing boom.
...

The complaint contends that Bear Stearns and its lending unit EMC Mortgage defrauded investors who purchased mortgage securities packaged by the companies from 2005 through 2007. The firms made material misrepresentations about the quality of the loans in the securities, the lawsuit said, and ignored evidence of broad defects among the loans that they pooled and sold to investors.

Moreover, when Bear Stearns identified problematic loans that it had agreed to purchase from a lender, it was required to make the originator buy them back. But Bear Stearns demanded cash payments from the lenders and kept the money, rather than passing it on to investors, the suit contends.

Always, it's about the money. No criminal charges, again, because the feds wouldn't receive a cash settlement. Yet over 7,000 Occupy Wall Street protesters have been beaten, pepper-sprayed, arrested, and jailed...bankers? Zero. No justice here.

However, this was done in Schneiderman's capacity as the New York Attorney General, not the task force. A lack of confidence in the task force, perhaps?

By Cora Currier, ProPublica, Sept. 26, 2012

Mortgage giant Freddie Mac did not keep homeowners trapped in high-interest loans in order to boost profits on billions of dollars' worth of complex financial bets it had made. That's the conclusion reached in a report released today by the inspector general that oversees the agency in charge of Freddie Mac.

Last January, ProPublica and NPR reported that Freddie had dramatically expanded its holdings of mortgage-backed securities that would profit if homeowners stayed in their existing high-interest-rate loans. At the same time, the company had taken steps that made it harder for homeowners to refinance at lower interest rates. Our report stated that there was no evidence of a coordinated attempt to bet against homeowners' ability to refinance. The inspector general's report concludes that there was none.

But the inspector general left a key stone unturned: It did not independently evaluate the firewall within Freddie Mac designed to keep Freddie's investment arm from profiting from insider information about the mortgage giant's plans to tighten or loosen homeowners' access to credit. Instead, the inspector general relied on the word of employees it interviewed and conducted no further investigation. It also reported that the agency that oversees Freddie has not tested the firewall's integrity.

Freddie Mac and its sister company Fannie Mae were bailed out by taxpayers after the financial crisis and are now controlled by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Freddie and Fannie guarantee most of the mortgages in the U.S., and they have a mission to make home loans more affordable. But Freddie also has a massive investment portfolio and has to protect against losses. Sometimes, those two goals can conflict.  

Beginning in 2010, Freddie Mac expanded its portfolio of a particular kind of mortgage-backed security known as an "inverse floater." The company offered investors a relatively safe bond with a floating interest rate. It then kept on its books what is called an "inverse floater," which pays out the highest returns if borrowers stay in their mortgages. When interest rates dropped (as they did during that period), Freddie Mac stood to profit on its inverse floaters, because the rates being paid by the pool of borrowers were higher than the prevailing market rates. Inverse floaters lose that advantage the more that homeowners in the pool refinance at the lower rates. 

The report says that Freddie's investment wing increased its holdings in inverse floaters merely because investors were demanding the floating rate bonds linked to them — not because of any strategy to exploit homeowners trapped in high-interest-rate mortgages.

Freddie Mac has an  "information wall" designed to separate the employees running Freddie Mac's investment strategy from those designing and carrying out its policies that impact the mortgage market, such as programs aimed at helping people refinance or making it more difficult for them to do so. The inspector general's report says that it found "no evidence" that the wall had been breached.

Yet, the inspector general noted that FHFA has not conducted any independent testing of Freddie's information wall. And the inspector general limited its own investigation of the wall to interviewing Freddie executives and FHFA officials and reviewing policy documents. The inspector general "did not independently evaluate the efficacy of Freddie Mac's information wall policy," the report states.

The report emphasizes that there are indeed "tensions between policies aimed at homeowners refinancing and Freddie Mac's retained investments." But it says that such tensions are not unique to inverse floaters but are "inherent throughout [Freddie and Fannie's] various business lines."

At the end of 2011, Freddie held about $5 billion worth of inverse floaters, according to the report, or less than one percent of its $653 billion investment portfolio.

The report also notes that the company hedges to balance its interest-rate risk, meaning that it places many different bets so that no matter whether interest rates rise or fall, its investments will be close to "net flat" — stay roughly the same, recording neither large profits nor large losses. Freddie does not try to balance the risk of each individual investment, but rather hedges "on its portfolio as a whole."   The report explains:

In the context of inverse floaters, although Freddie Mac may on the one hand benefit from a trend of low interest rates and reduced prepayments by homeowners, on the other hand, Freddie Mac's other investments may equally suffer from such a trend. Thus, the end result, if perfectly hedged on interest rates, is that Freddie Mac's overall position will remain the same regardless of prepayments.  

The inspector general did not independently evaluate Freddie's hedging strategies. When ProPublica and NPR first reported on these deals, it was unclear what kind of hedging, if any, Freddie Mac had performed.

The company is also supposed to be reducing its investment portfolio as part of the terms of its government bailout. In a footnote, the inspector general's report mentions that Freddie Mac told the Securities and Exchange Commission that selling the floating rate securities was a way to reduce its balance sheet. But most Freddie and FHFA officials interviewed by the inspector general said that reducing its balance sheet was not the motivation for Freddie to create inverse floaters, even if that was the result.

Separately, the way Freddie structured the inverse floaters leaves Freddie with nearly all of the risk of the assets that no longer show up on its balance sheet. The reason: As the guarantor of the mortgages that back the securities, Freddie is already on the hook if the homeowner defaults. With inverse floaters, it also retains the risks that homeowners might refinance and that overall interest rates might rise. Indeed, independent analysts told ProPublica and NPR in January that Freddie may actually have increased its risk, because inverse floaters are illiquid and hard to sell.

In its written response to the inspector general's report, the FHFA did not address Freddie Mac's statements to the SEC. When contacted by ProPublica, an FHFA spokesperson declined to comment.

The report said that FHFA issued misleading statements to the public on when it ordered Freddie to stop creating inverse floaters. According to the report, in the spring of 2011, the FHFA began a review of Freddie Mac's mortgage securities operation, in large part to determine whether the company held too many complex and risky mortgage products, including inverse floaters.

But an executive at Freddie didn't suspend inverse floaters and certain other complex securities deals until January 6, and FHFA didn't explicitly order Freddie Mac to stop selling inverse floaters until January 30, 2012, after ProPublica's story was published. In fact, according to the report, that day marked "the first time that FHFA's senior leadership met to discuss the Agency's position with respect to inverse floaters."

By then, however, Freddie had long since stopped selling floating rate securities — not because of any order from FHFA but because the market for them dried up in spring 2011 when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that interest rates would remain low for at least another year.

That's not how FHFA described what happened after our story broke. In a statement released in response to ProPublica and NPR's reports, the agency said that staff met with Freddie in December 2011 and came to an agreement then to suspend inverse floater trades. The inspector general's report concludes that statement was misleading: "prior to January 2012, neither Freddie Mac nor FHFA made a decision to halt Freddie Mac's creation and investment in inverse floaters; the market for reciprocal floating rate bonds simply disappeared. Had the market reappeared and Freddie Mac found the economics were again profitable, [Freddie] would have been free to structure floating-rate and inverse floating-rate investments."

In a response to the report, the FHFA disputed the inspector general's reading of the public statement, saying that it did not claim "that there was a specific, well-articulated FHFA policy and agreement" in December. The agency also emphasized that it did not take a position on inverse floaters only in reaction to media reports. While acknowledging that "the key stakeholders" had met together for the first time on January 30th, the day ProPublica and NPR released their original stories, the FHFA emphasizes that it had been in communication with Freddie on inverse floaters over the previous year.

The inspector general's report was requested by Senator Robert Menendez, D-NJ, last January, after our story brought the issue to light.

Dissatisfied with the country’s worsening economic troubles and displeased with proposed austerity measures, thousands of demonstrators clashed with police in Madrid Tuesday. The protesters formed a human chain around the parliament building while police fired bullets at and beat the most violent in the crowd with truncheons. At least 22 people were arrested while 32 were injured, including four policeman. The protest was timed to the new 2013 budget, which will be announced by the government Thursday and includes cuts in inflation-linked pensions, taxes on stock transactions, the implantation of green taxes, and the elimination of several tax breaks. The region of Catalonia, which is responsible for 20 percent of the national output, called for an early election on Nov. 25 that could lead to a referendum on secession.

Yves at Naked Capitalism has a good run down on the situation in Spain. And this Daily Kos diary does a pretty good job of showing the consequences of the banker control going on in Europe.

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest adds this:

The job of bankers is to assess risk. They are supposed to look at all the factors, and price a loan accordingly. If you have a credit card with very high risk, you might pay in the 20% range! This way the banks can lend out the money, and even if a large percentage of the borrowers default, they still do OK. They are expecting a certain default rate, they price accordingly, they do OK on the loan portfolio.

Same for when they lend to countries. They price loans according to the default risk, and over the lifetime of the loans they are supposed to get their money back plus some return, even with the expected defaults. If the banks screwed up and didn't price their loans correctly, this doesn't make the people of Greece lazy, etc. it makes the bankers incompetent.

OR the bankers did price correctly, and over the lifetimes of all of their loans they are getting their money back and a return, AND they are also taking advantage of the situation to get more, make a killing, force privatization, force wages down, get rid of that pesky democracy that has been in the way, etc.

So here we are again, with the elites in the position of being either stupid (incompetent) or evil. And with the people in misery as a result, while the elites do just fine for themselves. With the added bonus for the elites that the experiment of wresting control from the elites and to the people -- democracy -- ending.

The 'Economic Suicides':

“I have no solution in front of me." -- Antonis Perris of Greece, unemployed for two years before he took the hand of his 90-year-old mother and climbed to the roof of their apartment building and leapt to their death.

In his last note on an online music discussion site, Perris wrote that his mother had Alzheimer’s disease and that he had recently learned he was ill. He had not expected a recession, so he had not saved money. His credit cards were maxed out. He had started selling his family’s possessions but saw no permanent solution to his problems. He blamed the “powerful of this Earth” for his situation.

Giuseppe Campaniello of Italy set himself on fire outside a government tax office in Bologna on March 28 after his company collapsed.

“I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.” — Retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas, 77, who shot himself in Athens’s central square on April 4.

“Violence is to work 40 years for peanuts and to wonder if you’ll ever get to retire. . . . Violence is unemployment.” — Savvas Metoikidis, 44, who hanged himself in his father’s warehouse in Thessaloniki on April 21.

“I hope my grandchildren will never be born in Greece.” — A 61-year-old electrician who hanged himself from a tree in Athens on May 30.

To date there have been 7,387 Occupy protesters arrested in the United States alone. Bankers? Zero.

More articles on economic suicide:

Death by Foreclosure

Wells Fargo Drives Homeowner to Suicide

'Dying for Work' Billboard's Dangling Dummy Disturbs Drivers

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Frontline:

FRONTLINE’s four-hour epic on the global financial crisis — the first two hours of which aired Tuesday evening — goes inside the struggles to rescue and repair a shattered economy, exploring key decisions, missed opportunities and the unprecedented and uneasy partnership between government leaders and titans of finance.

“Money, Power and Wall Street is demanding — this isn’t Finance for Dummies,” Evans writes in the review. “But it’s a compact and thorough lesson.”

In the first hour, FRONTLINE takes you inside the rapid rise of credit default swaps, including the voices of those who created them. With the real estate market booming, bankers successfully tweaked the credit default swap to bundle up and sell home mortgage loans to eager investors. But despite the money flowing into banks’ coffers, credit default swaps also loaded the financial system with lethal risk. And when the housing bubble burst, the credit default swaps — originally designed to stabilize the system — brought the global economy to its knees. Regulators, who had often stood on the sideline and allowed Wall Street to police itself, saw the ugly consequences rapidly unfold before them.

In the second hour, FRONTLINE investigates the largest government bailout in U.S. history, a series of decisions that rewrote the rules of government and fueled a debate that would alter the country’s political landscape. It offers play-by-play accounts of several secret meetings that permanently altered the financial system.

“The program feels fresh and vivid — and takes no prisoners,” writes Evans. “FRONTLINE finds plenty of blame to go around (Goldman Sachs and CEO Lloyd Blankfein take a particular bruising), but is most devastating in its dissection of the chummy collusion between bankers and the government leaders who should have been watch-dogging them.”

Part Two:

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part Two on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

You can read the interviews at the heart of Frontline's "Money, Power, and Wall Street" online here.

"Money, Power and Wall Street" continues next Tuesday, May 1st, with an inside look at how the Obama administration, including a divided economic team, has handled the crisis and how the financial world has returned to many of the practices that created the meltdown in the first place.