Contrarian Pundit

ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten has the scoop, with comment from our own Richard Charter:
On Thursday BP began using the chemical compounds to dissolve the crude oil, both on the surface and deep below, deploying an estimated 100,000 gallons. Dispersing the oil is considered one of the best ways to protect birds and keep the slick from [...]

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums was for a pay cut before he was against it:
Mayor Ron Dellums told reporters last spring he would take a 10 percent pay cut as a small gesture to help Oakland balance its troubled budget.
But records show he never did.
Salary data obtained by the Oakland Tribune through a public records request [...]

The Hill is reporting that Senate Democrats have embraced a bold new Orwellian plan for immigration reform:
Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.
The proposal is one of [...]

I’m just getting over a bout with the flu.  Blog operations should start returning to normal.
That is all.

There are only eight Bay Area banks left to watch from Calculated Risk’s list of problem institutions, after the failures of Tamalpais Bank and Innovative Bank earlier this month. I recently reviewed the serious problems at Pacific State Bank of Stockton. Now we can add another bank to the possible failure watch: Sonoma [...]

On April 12, I posted about the injection of capital received by Tri-Valley Bank from an investment group led by Robert Hirt, CEO of RPM Mortgage.  I also wrote about several lawsuits that named RPM Mortgage and/or its mortgage-banking division, NL, Inc. (formerly Najarian Loans).
Today I received a letter from James W. Brody, a legal [...]

Reuters has the goods on WellPoint’s horrific “rescission” program:
Shortly after they were diagnosed with breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. …
The women paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, neither had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by [...]

On April 16, Tamalpais Bank of San Rafael and Innovative Bank of Oakland became the third and fourth Bay Area banks to fail during the recent wave of collapses, which began in 2007. What about the eight other local institutions that made it onto Calculated Risk’s unofficial problem bank list?
Commenter Jean has alerted us [...]

When Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, municipal retirement funds as close to home as the Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Association and as far away as the Government of Guam Retirement Fund lost millions of dollars.
On Friday, these investors added Lehman auditor Ernst & Young to their lawsuit against the investment bank for failing to [...]

Readers of the Valukas Report (i.e. masochists) may recall that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York conducted three, increasingly easier “stress tests” on Lehman Brothers in March 2008, all of which the teetering investment bank failed.  Then the Fed asked Lehman to conduct its own test that … surprise … it passed.
And now we [...]