BankThink

Judge Jonathan Lippman, regulator Benjamin Lawsky and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman are standing up to an industry intent on forgetting that the foreclosure crisis affects real people, real lives and real families.

You can be certain BofA has been happy to bid good riddance to as many low-balance, single-service households as possible. A good deal of those, to whom five bucks a month means something, have shown up at credit unions' doors.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Repurposing REOs: A story on the front-page of the Sunday Times reports that in Merced, California, "the downturn in the real estate market has presented an unusual housing opportunity for thousands of college students," namely foreclosed McMansions now available for rent on the cheap. This development has rubbed salt in the wounds of local homeowners who owe more than their similarly luxurious houses are now worth. "Everybody on this street is underwater and can't see any relief," says "an out-of-work English teacher who paid $532,000 for a house that is now worth $221,000," who tells the Times that the area "was supposed to be an edge-of-town, Desperate Housewifey community … These students are the reverse." Living the student life in the ruins of someone's subprime suburban dream "sounds like fun - and definitely better than the dumps I lived in going to college," comments the Calculated Risk blog. "Unfortunately these might be the nicest homes they live in for a number of years ..." (More on that below.) Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that in Las Vegas, "America's foreclosure capital," a number of abandoned properties are being repurposed as marijuana grow houses. What a shame. We bet that unlike previous occupants, many of whom undoubtedly lied about their incomes on loan applications (either voluntarily or under pressure from salespeople), the pot growers might actually generate enough cash flow to cover a monthly mortgage payment. Hey, maybe there's a solution in this to the "shadow inventory" that's hanging over the housing market. It can even be summed up in a catchy slogan: "Legalize it … then monetize it."

In a capitalist economy there is one market which is more important than any other — the market for capital. What can be more vital than the efficiency of the process by which the price of capital in all its various financial forms is determined — whether long or medium-term fixed-rate loans or equity?

Thieves attempted to get cash out of an ATM by filling it with explosive gas and then detonating it. Though they caused massive damage to the machine and its surroundings, they did not get any cash.

If you’re looking for lessons on risky business and recidivism, MF Global has them in spades.

Valve Corp., the company that provides the popular PC game platform Steam, disclosed Thursday that it suffered a data breach this month.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Messy MF: Regulators looking for that missing $600 million have a big problem, the Journal reports this morning. It turns out that MF Global’s recordkeeping was “in shambles,” as an executive from Interactive, the brokerage that almost rescued Jon Corzine’s firm, puts it. People who’ve examined the books have found “incomplete transactions, numbers that didn't seem to add up and other inconsistencies,” the Journal says. Meanwhile, the CFTC has decided to audit every futures trading firm “to verify that customer money is protected,” the Times’ “DealBook” says. We certainly hope so, for the sake of all those goldbugs who thought they were flocking to safety by investing in gold futures. The FT has a neat video in which one of its journalists reminds us that the CFTC proposed a year ago to restrict the range of options for investing customer funds – including a pullback from, you guessed it, foreign sovereign debt. Now Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner, wants to revive this plan, and has cleverly branded it the “MF Global rule.” (The other fun part of the video is the interview footage of Corzine from last summer, in which he sounds like Rip van Winkle talking about how much the financial system had changed during his hiatus as a politician.) Incidentally, we made a judgment error in yesterday’s Scan and picked the wrong MF Global story to mention. It’s yesterday’s papers, as they say, but if you want a link to the story we should have told you about, and an explanation of our goof, click here.

We assumed the story on the front of Section C of the Journal was more important than the one inside. Dead wrong.

The title of Javelin Strategy & Research's blog entry today nearly says it all: "Occupy Oakland deposits $20,000 with … Wells Fargo."