Editor's note: Morning Scan will publish next on Jan. 3, 2017. Happy holidays from all of us at American Banker and SourceMedia.
Receiving Wide Coverage ...
Off to court: Having failed to reach a settlement following its long-running investigation into the British bank's alleged role in selling toxic mortgage-backed securities, the U.S. Justice Department is suing Barclays PLC. "It is highly unusual for the Justice Department to sue a bank, rather than reaching a settlement," the Wall Street Journal noted. The DOJ charges that between December 2005 and December 2007, before the global financial crisis, the bank "engaged in a fraudulent scheme to sell tens of billions of dollars of residential mortgage-backed securities in which it repeatedly deceived investors about the characteristics of the loans backing those trusts." Many of the securities sold by Barclays "proved to be catastrophic failures," the lawsuit claims, as "more than half of the underlying loans defaulted."
In an accompanying article to its main story, the Journal says the DOJ "seeks to paint Barclays as a bank where
Settled: The U.S. government did, however, manage to reach multibillion-dollar settlements with
Wall Street Journal
More trouble: Rising interest rates are making it even harder for marketplace lenders to find buyers for their loans. Dealstruck, for example, stopped making new loans last month. "They don't want to buy anymore," Ethan Senturia, the company's CEO and co-founder, said about its hedge-fund backers. "We got caught. This is something that happens in specialty finance all the time. If you are not in a position to get lower cost of funds it
Icahn's thinking: Based on his past and more recent comments, Carl Icahn, President-elect Trump's new regulatory adviser,
Picking his brain: Things are getting even creepier at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest, most successful hedge fund. According to the Wall Street Journal, engineers are working on a secret project with a goal to create a software program that would automate most of the firm's management. "It would represent a culmination of [founder Ray] Dalio's life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical openness—and a place that can endure without him," the Journal reports. "The system remains under development, and the exact details of its operations are still being debated inside the firm," it says, but one employee described the project as "like trying to
Financial Times
Upping the ante: The fierce battle among U.S. credit card issuers to
Washington Post
Redemption: The paper profiles hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, who it says "is widely expected to be the
Quotable ...
"It is an amazing time to be a consumer.