Two of Britain’s biggest oil companies British Petroleum (BP) and Royal Dutch Shell have been raided by European regulators over allegations of manipulating the oil price since 2002.

According to the reports, officers from the European Commission’s competition authority searched the London headquarters of the two companies for possible evidence of price manipulation.

BP and Shell are suspected of oil price rigging since 2002. Over more than ten years, the price of a litre of petrol has risen dramatically by more than 80 percent to about £1.35 a litre.

“Even small distortions of assessed prices may have a huge impact on the prices of crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels purchases and sales, potentially harming final consumers.” the European Commission said.

The Guardian:

Lord Oakeshott, former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the alleged rigging of oil prices was "as serious as rigging Libor" – which led to banks being fined hundreds of millions of pounds.

He demanded to know why the UK authorities had not taken action earlier and said he would ask questions of the British regulator in Parliament. "Why have we had to wait for Brussels to find out if British oil giants are ripping off British consumers?" he said. "The price of energy ripples right through our economy and really matters to every business and families."

RAC technical director David Bizley said the allegations were "worrying news for motorists" who are already suffering due to the high cost of keeping a vehicle.

"Motorists will be very interested to see what comes of these raids. Whatever happens the RAC will continue to campaign for greater transparency in the UK fuel market and for a further reduction in fuel duty to stimulate economic growth."

Four months ago the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) ruled out an investigation into petrol price fixing after finding "very limited evidence" that pump prices rise quickly when the wholesale price goes up but fall more slowly when it drops.

The European Commission described today’s raid as “a preliminary step to investigate suspected anti-competitive practices”. Offices owned by price-reporting agency Platts, and Norwegian oil Company Statoil were also raided as part of the commission’s investigation.

By Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica

This was co-published with The Washington Post.

President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in July 2010, hailing it as an overhaul to prevent the kind of crisis that hit the world economy in 2008 and one of the signature achievements of his first term. Almost three years later, much of the big stuff the law calls for is on hold, under legal and legislative assault, or still working its way through the regulatory intestines. According to a law firm that tracks the legislation, only 38 percent of the 398 Dodd-Frank rules have been imposed, while regulators haven't yet publicly put forward versions of almost a third of them.

Is this the face of success? A new book, "Act of Congress," by Robert Kaiser, an associate editor and senior correspondent for The Washington Post, gives that question a qualified yes. "The story of Dodd-Frank does demonstrate that Congress still can work," he writes, "and it shows how, but only in extreme circumstances."

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In yet another disgusting episode of "Too Big to Fail," this time from the NYT:

"Government investigators have found that JPMorgan Chase devised “manipulative schemes” that transformed “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers,” and that one of its most senior executives gave “false and misleading statements” under oath."

Yes, we're all shocked...again.

"The findings appear in a confidential government document, reviewed by The New York Times, that was sent to the bank in March, warning of a potential crackdown by the regulator of the nation’s energy markets."

What's with the secrecy? As if we don't know that we're being screwed by the banks.

"The possible action comes amid showdowns with other agencies. One of the bank’s chief regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is weighing new enforcement actions against JPMorgan over the way the bank collected credit card debt and its possible failure to alert authorities to suspicions about Bernard L. Madoff, according to people who were not authorized to discuss the cases publicly."

Suuuure they are.

"In a meeting last month at the bank’s Park Avenue headquarters, the comptroller’s office delivered an unusually stark message to Jamie Dimon, the chief executive and chairman: the nation’s biggest bank was quickly losing credibility in Washington. The bank’s top lawyers, including Stephen M. Cutler, the general counsel, have also cautioned executives about the bank’s regulatory problems, employees say."

Good Lord. A banker losing credibility in Washington! I'm shocked that Jamie Dimon has any credibility left to lose.

So, what exactly is the Big Bank in trouble for this time?

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In part one of a two-part series, PBS NewsHour Science Correspondent Miles O'Brien travels to Hinkley, Calif. -- the town whose multi-million dollar settlement for groundwater contamination was featured in the movie "Erin Brockovich." Now, almost 30 years later, O'Brien explores the reasons why the groundwater in Hinkley still has dangerous levels of the chemical chromium and its link to cancer.

More than 80,000 chemicals are on the market in the United States, with hundreds added each year. The Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators are supposed to protect the public from contaminants in air, water and consumer products that can cause cancer and other illnesses. But the chemical industry's sway over science and policy is powerful. Toxic Clout explores how the industry's actions create uncertainty and delay, threatening public health.

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon greeted with noisy protests as he prepared to testify before the Senate Banking Committee in 2012. "This man is a crook and needs to go to jail!" yelled one man.

A new Senate report shows that last year JPMorgan Chase, the country's biggest bank, manipulated documents and ignored internal controls as they built up trading losses. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, also withheld information from regulators. The 300-page report was released the day before the Senate plans to question bank leaders and regulators at a hearing, and "it may also foreshadow a criminal case against employees at the heart of the troubled wager," according to the NYT. “While we have repeatedly acknowledged significant mistakes, our senior management acted in good faith and never had any intent to mislead anyone," a spokeswoman for the bank said.

NYT:

Mr. Dimon, whose reputation as an astute manager of risk has been undercut by the trading losses, comes under the harshest criticism yet from the Senate investigators. The chief executive signed off on changes to an internal alarm system that underestimated losses, seemingly contradicting his earlier statements to lawmakers, according to the report.

He is also accused of withholding from regulators details about the investment bank’s daily losses — and then raising “his voice in anger” at a deputy who later turned over the information.

While people close to the matter dispute whether the outburst actually happened, it illustrates a broader problem at JPMorgan: after emerging from the financial crisis in far better shape than rivals, the bank saw itself as being above its regulators. The bank was so filled with hubris, Senate investigators said, that an executive once screamed at examiners and called them “stupid.”

The bipartisan report, citing some of the same private documents that F.B.I. agents are now poring over, also highlighted how JPMorgan managers “pressured” traders to lowball losses by $660 million, a previously undisclosed figure, and then played down the problems to authorities.

With this line from the Times' report, you may start to think that the "too big to fail" could be falling..."After examining hundreds of e-mails and hours of taped phone calls, the people said, federal investigators also plan to interview top JPMorgan executives in the coming weeks, including Mr. Dimon."

But then the next line is a big let down, "While authorities do not suspect the chief executive of wrongdoing, the meetings signal that the case is at an advanced stage."

What a charade.

There is one highlight to come from this; Beginning at 9:30am Friday, Matt Taibbi will be live-blogging a hearing held by Senator Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations who will be grilling J.P. Morgan Chase executives and high-ranking federal regulators in a get-together entitled, "J.P. Morgan Chase "Whale" Trades: A Case History Of Derivatives Risks And Abuses." Bring your popcorn and be there.

Once again, Senator Elizabeth Warren asks the most obvious question -- why aren't banks prosecuted? -- only to get the same incredulous responses. What? Prosecute the banks? No way!

Warren took bank regulators to task on Thursday about the fact that British bank HSBC is still doing business in the U.S., with no criminal charges filed against it, despite confessing to what one regulator called "egregious" money laundering violations.

The Justice Department’s record $1.9 billion settlement with HSBC exposed the continuing ability of drug cartels, rogue nations and terrorist financiers to move billions of dollars through the international and U.S. banking systems.

Money laundering was a major focus of U.S. counterterrorism policy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Patriot Act of 2002 included provisions that required the Treasury Department to identify banks and individuals suspected of links to terrorism. And the law instructed banks to strictly monitor and report potentially illegal transactions.

"They did it over and over and over again across a period of years. And they were caught doing it, warned not to do it and kept right on doing it, and evidently making profits doing it," Warren said of HSBC. "How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?"

The regulator she was questioning, David Cohen, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, repeatedly refused to answer the question. Like other regulators at the hearing, he said that his department has no authority to shut down a bank unless the Justice Department convicts the bank of a crime.

Warren said: “If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidentially, if you laundered nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violated our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night -- every single individual associated with this. And I just -- I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”

The issue is part of a broader debate over large financial institutions and whether they are too big to be broken up. The Massachusetts senator’s comments come after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged Wednesday that some of the largest banks are too big to prosecute and that prosecution could have a negative impact on the U.S. and global economies.

Speaking before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder said he is concerned that the size of some of these institutions “becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”

Holder added that “I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”

It is far past time for someone to "indicate" to Mr. Holder that he needs to prosecute the criminal banks, or someone will show him to the door.

Short sales end with the homeowner out of the home. This is the most common "penalty" on banks in the mortgage settlement.

Bloomberg News:

While the banks are stepping up efforts to help borrowers stay in their homes, they are still spending most of the settlement on short sales and forgiveness of home-equity loans that allow them to take bad loans off their books. Profits from new lending are increasing even as regulators enforce penalties for modification missteps and foreclosures pursued with fraudulent or missing documents. Last year, mortgage revenue at the four largest lenders -- Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), and U.S. Bancorp --surpassed the amount they spent on consumer settlements and investor demands they buy back faulty loans.

“The banks have shown a knack for sidestepping government attempts to have them redress their role in the foreclosure crisis and keep people in their homes,” said Arthur Wilmarth, a law professor at George Washington University in the nation’s capital. “A lot of these efforts end up helping the banks, not the homeowners.”

Lets recap: The Big Banks pay a small (Small in Banker dollars, anyways) "penalty" *cough* to the DOJ for fraudulent foreclosure practices, and agree to review their own foreclosures and decide which homeowners will receive aid from the "penalty" funds paid to the DOJ that are allotted to homeowner aid. Then typically, the Banks are going to punish the homeowner with a short sale of their home that A) Results in the homeowner losing their home, and destroys their credit. B)Helps the Bank complete their obligation to the DOJ. and C)Allows the Bank further forgiveness by erasing home equity loans from their books.

The Big Banks have struck a Trifecta with Eric Holder's Department of in-Justice. For troubled homeowners, there is homelessness and despair, and just a small glimmer of hope.

The Big Banks accused of abusing homeowners will now help to decide who gets foreclosure aid dollars. What could possibly go wrong?

Via:

Washington is seeking help from an unlikely group in its effort to distribute billions of dollars to struggling homeowners in foreclosure: the same banks accused of abusing homeowners with shoddy foreclosure practices.

In doing so, the regulators are trying to speed the process after a flawed, independent foreclosure review delayed relief for millions of borrowers, according to people briefed on the matter. But housing advocates worry that the banks, eager to end the costly process, could take shortcuts as they comb through loan files for potential errors, in some cases diverting aid from the neediest homeowners.

Regulators say they will check the work. And banks have already agreed to pay a fixed amount to troubled homeowners, creating another backstop.

According to officials involved in the process, who spoke anonymously because the matter is not public, the regulators had few alternatives.

These are the same regulators who just a month ago didn't trust the banks.

Here's how this is supposed to work, the Big Banks will now have to assess each loan for potential errors -- errors they never admitted to in the slap-on-the-wrist settlements with the Justice Department -- which will then help the Big Banks determine how much money each homeowner will receive.

Wow. How about just sending bankers door-to-door and have them slap the 4 million homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure in the face?

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.