The finance lobby wants to weaken the Volker rule that limits proprietary bets by regular banks. They find the weakest link in the regulatory chain and ride that link to achieve their ends. And the weakest link is usually the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, colloquially known as the Office of Bank Advocacy.

The White House appears finally ready to make a number of financial regulatory picks, readying nominees to replace the heads of the FDIC and the OCC, who have left or are in the process of leaving.

Maybe the foreclosure crisis hasn’t been fully solved. But at least we have those consent orders on the top mortgage servicers. At least federal regulators will lay down the law and we’ll get to see those independent reviews of each mortgage company and the wrongful foreclosures they initiated. I mean, at least there will be some transparency and discovery, right? right?

We definitely need strong federal servicer standards, and CFPB is a great place to house them. All the more reason to recess-appoint Elizabeth Warren as soon as possible.

The rhetoric is tough: the Fed calls the deficiencies from the servicers “significant and pervasive compliance failures” which constitute unsafe and unsound practices. In Fed-speak, that sounds serious enough.

It’s not.

Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase are leeches. Why don’t they move to Singapore?

I enjoyed the 60 Minutes story last night on the mortgage mess, because it actually went beyond robo-signing and touched on some of the more fundamental ways in which banks have committed fraud on state courts. Sheila Bair, in suggesting that individual homeowners could be paid off as a make-good for this trouble, and also suggesting that the banks could somehow cure this problem if they put enough time and effort into this, either displayed a misunderstanding of the issues or a not-very-credible recitation of the Administration line. In fact, some of these things cannot be fixed retroactively. The individual homeowner would have to give up due process rights for a cash payout that would result in them leaving their own home, and I simply don’t know who would agree to such a setup in the real world.

I wrote yesterday about the disquiet many Democratic attorneys general and consumer advocates had with the initial offer of a global settlement to mortgage servicers for their role in foreclosure fraud. A lot has happened since then. First, the bank-friendly federal regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency may be going rogue and offering their own settlement to the banks. Now, Shahien Nasiripour writes that the initial offer in the term sheet, which would have included principal reductions and loan modifications for as many as 3 million borrowers, has been scaled back.

There’s more about a potential settlement in the foreclosure fraud scandal, which once again looks to be a civil rather than criminal matter. This hasn’t stopped bank executives from whining and screaming about it, however. And they’re joined by the OCC, which might as well be the “Office of Bank Advocacy” at this point.

Apparently, the banksters think that $20 billion is just a “crazy figure” that will never be imposed. The actual homeowners affected by the banksters’ crime, however, believe it is “chump change.”