bank

Just last week we reported that Wells Fargo was reintroducing 3% down mortgages on its own, without going through the FHA. The reason we said, was that due to Wells' mortgage origination pipeline drying up, the bank was desperate to find new and innovative ways to boost lending.

Now we have direct confirmation that indeed Wells Fargo is desperate, and the plan to boost mortgage lending is to... drum roll... lure millennials out of the comfort of their parents home and into a house of their own.

The problem with China's Wealth Management Products, or WMPs, is not new: we have covered this pillar of China's shadow banking system on various occasions over the past three years, usually just before and after the time of the latest spectacular WMP fund blow up, which promptly becomes headline news and then fades again until the next such collapse.

In his latest letter to investors, OakTree Capital's Howard Marks goes political (slamming Trump's tariffs and Bernie's minimum wage machinations), shedding some blinding light on the economic reality of America, the dismal failure (and increasing impotence) of central bankers, and the ongoing "tryanny of the majority" warning that if everyone wants to tax-the-rich, soon there will be no rich to tax.

As reported yesterday, adding insult to injury to a bank that just hours earlier admitted that in addition to rigging everything else it has also been caught engaging in "stock fraud" at the same time as a new mortgage probe was launched against it, Deutsche Bank's senior debt rating was downgraded by Moody's to Baa2, just two notches above junk. For the bank with the tens of trillions in derivatives, being seen as an increasingly more distressed counterparty was not good news and explains why the CEO took the unexpected step of having to defend his firm following the downgrade.

South Africa's Standard Bank has confirmed that it is the latest bank to be hacked into, admitting that it had credit card data stolen and used in an elaborate scheme carried out in Japan.

On May 15th, between 5am and 8am, more than 100 people withdrew $13 million from 1400 ATMs across Japan in less than three hours. The coordinated heist involved forged credit cards, and data stolen from South Africa's Standard Bank. As The BBC reports,