No officers who authorized and directed the torture and detainee abuse, either in that prison, at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere around the world, ever faced trial. But Lynndie England became a symbol for the sorry state of the rule of law in America, where a few small “bad apples” get held to account, and the higher-ups who devised and directed the criminal activity get off scot-free.

There’s a Lynndie England for the financial crisis, too.

Meet Lorraine O. Brown, an individual singled out for actual jail time for her role in the massive mortgage document fraud that plagued this nation. Like England, she stands alone among the multitudes of fraudsters, including those at the highest reaches of the financial industry.

Brown was the President of DocX, a company that created and processed mortgage-related documents, first as a stand-alone unit, and later as a subsidiary of the document processing giant Lender Processing Solutions (LPS). And like Lynndie England, Brown committed a series of legitimate crimes. From 2003 until 2009, DocX routinely forged mortgage documents.

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The failure-to-vacate law was used to bring charges against more than 1,200 Arkansas tenants in 2012 alone. This figure greatly understates the total number of people impacted by the law. The vast majority of tenants scramble to move out when faced with a 10-day notice to vacate rather than face trial — and with good reason.

Making matters considerably worse, the law strongly discourages accused tenants from pleading not guilty. Those who do are required to deposit the total amount of rent they allegedly owe with the court, which they forfeit if they are found guilty. Tenants who are unable to deposit the rent amount but plead not guilty anyway face substantially harsher fines and up to 90 days in jail. Tenants who plead guilty face none of this.

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Every day, it seems a new report comes out praising the ongoing housing recovery. In Georgia, home prices are up 5 percent over last year, a year in which we also had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. Seems a little odd, doesn’t it? Don't foreclosures usually drive down the market?

That’s because the housing “recovery,” as they’re calling it, is fueled almost entirely by Wall Street private equity firms, hedge funds and the Fed's unwavering support. After creating a massive bubble in home prices that eventually burst and caused our economy to go into a tailspin, these guys have decided to come back for more, and figured out a way to profit off their destruction -- by turning foreclosed homes into rentals and securitizing the rental income.

Many are claiming this is the “private-sector solution” for the recovery we need to get the economy going again. The argument goes that investors snapping up these homes and fixing them up does more for the community than letting the houses just sit there, blighting the neighborhoods and lowering values.

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A project called My Micro NY from a design team comprised of Monadnock Development, Actors Fund Housing Development Corp. and nArchitects beat out 33 other proposals to win the competition.

Construction at 335 East 27th Street will start by the end of this year, with move-ins slated for September 2015. In addition to being downright tiny, the building will be the first multi-family building in Manhattan to use prefab construction. The shipping container-esque prefab modules, which will be manufactured by Capsys at its Brooklyn Navy Yard factory, will snap together to form the building.

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Boiled down, the new rules force lenders to take responsibility for the loans they write. It will no longer be possible for lenders to say a customer bears all the responsibility for what they sign. This could curtail overly pushy salesmanship and other lending practices that enabled mortgage lenders to write risky loans before getting them off their books. After the economy cratered there were numerous reports of lenders offering "liar loans" that required minimal or no documentation from customers or deceptively low teaser rates that exploded soon after the loans were signed.

According to the agency the Ability to Repay rule requires that:

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An estimated $3.75 billion of the $10 billion will be distributed in cash relief to Americans who went through foreclosure in 2009 and 2010. Another $6 billion will be directed toward homeowners who are in danger of losing their homes after falling behind on their monthly payments. The deal follows a week of feverish negotiations, and it almost fell apart over the weekend. Some officials at the Federal Reserve threatened to scuttle it unless the banks agreed to pay an additional $300 million for their role in the 2008 financial crisis that torpedoed the housing market and led to millions of foreclosures.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

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There are about 17.2 million adult children living in their parents’ homes this year, compared with around 15.3 million in 2007, the year the recession began ... And the numbers show that the greatest increases are accounted for by unemployed adult children who have moved in with parents. In 2007, 1.3 million unemployed adult children were living in their parents’ homes. This year, the total is about 2.5 million.

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The video below highlights the strength of this trend; housing developers are designing houses under the premise that a young person or grandparent will be moving back in. Watch below (via NewsFix):

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It was the second-consecutive monthly decline in filings, although there remains a sharp divergence along state lines, according to a report Thursday by foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc.

On a national level, overall foreclosure filings last month — including home repossessions — fell 7 percent from August and 16 percent from September 2011. There were 180,427 foreclosure filings reported for September, the fewest since July 2007 in the midst the housing market bust.

The number of homes entering the foreclosure process, so-called foreclosure starts, fell to 87,066 in September, down 12 percent from August and 15 percent from a year earlier. It was the second-straight month of declines following three months of increases, Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac reported.

Foreclosure starts since peaked in April 2009 at around 203,000. But the current level is still well above the 34,000 starts recorded in May 2005, before the collapse of the housing market.

Overall foreclosure filings include notices of defaults on mortgages, scheduled auctions and repossessions. Foreclosure starts are either default notices or scheduled auctions, depending on the state's legal process.

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U.S. consumer confidence jumped to its highest level in seven months in September as Americans were more optimistic about the job market and income prospects, a private sector report showed on Tuesday.

The news confirms what media outlets have been reporting for weeks: Romney is fighting a rising tide of economic good cheer. That's dire news for Mitt, since his entire campaign strategy is built on the premise that voters will blame Obama for high unemployment and stagnant economic growth.

But it also poses a bit of a puzzler. Because, er, unemployment is still stubbornly high and economic growth is very slow. The available data do not support a slam dunk case for brightening economic prospects. Gas prices are up, manufacturing has been slumping for several months, the last monthly jobs report was a disappointment and the number of new jobless claims has risen over the last two weeks.

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National home prices increased 1.2 percent in July, compared to the same month last year, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller index released Tuesday. That’s the second straight year-over-year gain after two years without one.

The report also says prices rose in July from June in all 20 cities tracked by the index. That’s the third straight month in which prices rose in every city.

Steady price increases and record-low mortgage rates are helping drive a housing recovery.

In the 12 months ending in July, prices have risen in 16 of 20 cities. In Phoenix, one of the cities hardest hit by the housing bust, prices are up 16.6 percent in that stretch. Prices in Minneapolis and Detroit have risen more than 6 percent.

“We are more optimistic about housing,” David Blitzer, chairman of the S&P’s index committee. “Stronger housing numbers are a positive factor for other measures, including consumer confidence.”

Prices fell from a year earlier in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Las Vegas.

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The challenger's attempts to get his campaign back on track ran into new difficulty in the form of criticism from rank-and-file Republicans concerned about their own election prospects in the fall.

"I have a very different view of the world," said appointed Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, taking issue with Romney's dismissive comments about the 47 percent of all Americans who pay no income taxes. Separately, Senate GOP leaders avoided answering questions about their presidential candidate at a news conference in the Capitol.

After days of virtually nonstop political damage control on issues foreign and domestic, Romney assured an audience at a Miami forum that "my campaign is about the 100 percent in America."

Earlier in the day, at an Atlanta fundraiser, Romney said: "The question of this campaign is not who cares about the poor and the middle class. I do. He (Obama) does. The question is who can help the poor and the middle class. I can. He can't."

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Six years after the foreclosure crisis began in earnest, as former Congressional Oversight Panel vice chair and current AFL-CIO general counsel Damon Silvers put it, "it's impossible to get reliable, comprehensive information on foreclosures." The government is still not effectively measuring the single biggest weight on the American economy, the foreclosure epidemic that has claimed millions of homes.

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For example, Bloomberg published an interesting article today detailing bankers' resistance to the White House effort to help underwater homeowners refinance their mortgages. Much to nearly everyone's surprise, the most recent revamping of the administration's homeowner rescue plan is actually showing some healthy signs of progress -- at least if you compare it to the woeful performance of the stillborn White House initiatives prior to the new rollout. Bloomberg reports that by May of this year as many homeowners had already taken advantage of the new rules to refinance their homes as did in all of 2011. A little late in the game to change perceptions that Obama hasn't been doing all he can for homeowners, but still, better late than never for the people who are finally getting some breathing room.

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But I have noted some signs that the housing market just might be carving out a bottom.  And that said, I’ve also noted that any improvement in prices will help ameliorate one of our serious outstanding problems: negative equity in your home.  So, it was with great interest that I read this today, from CoreLogic:

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Some commenters on Doig’s article seized upon Renn’s assertion that Indianapolis had some vague, inscrutable quality that made it family-friendly.

When city officials invoke family-friendliness in their advertising strategies, what aspects of the city are they basing that claim on? Arguments from readers fell into three camps: It could be the availability of urban amenities like zoos, museums and public pools that the whole family can enjoy together. Or it might be a dog whistle alerting homebuyers and other in-migrants to the presence of a prevailing conservative cultural sentiment, reminiscent of a kind of “family values” rhetoric. Or it could be suburban-style development with the space and creature comforts demanded by a middle class that’s slowly moving back into cities.

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Last November, banking regulators launched a process to force the big banks to compensate homeowners victimized by their foreclosure abuses. Many crucial details remained unclear, including how much victims might receive.

More than seven months later, regulators finally released a “framework” that shows some of the possible outcomes. It’s a list of thirteen mortgage servicing “errors,” each with its own associated form of compensation. In addition to fixing the bank’s errors, remedies include cash payments ranging from $500 all the way up to $125,000.

It turns out that, for homeowners seeking compensation for those errors and abuses, it’s crucially important just how the servicer messed up. The logic for the differences in payment isn’t always apparent and in some instances seems to defy common sense.

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The Libor may be one of the most important financial market statistics you’ve never heard of.  It’s the rate at which banks trade with each other, but it’s come to be used as a benchmark interest rate on literally trillions of dollars of financial instruments—everything from derivatives, like interest rate swaps, to US mortgages.

For years, there’s been suspicion that the Libor was being manipulated by the banks that set it each day.  Now, according to the NYT, regulators released evidence supporting those suspicions:

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I don’t, but I’ve got some indicators that are suggestive that national prices are stabilizing and that supply and demand are better aligned.  That’s not to say you can’t find places that are still over-supplied where prices are declining.  It’s not to say we’ve cleared out the foreclosure pipeline.  And millions remain underwater.

It’s only to say that we’re finally bumping along the bottom and I’m somewhat confident that national prices have stabilized and will eventually begin to rise. (The NYT takes a similar view today…)

Here’s why.

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