David Dayen
Newly appointed American Prospect executive editor David Dayen, who will be joining the magazine June 1, is a contributing writer to Salon. He also writes for The Intercept, The New Republic, and The Fiscal Times. His first book, Chain of Title, about three ordinary Americans who uncover Wall Street's foreclosure fraud, was released by The New Press in 2016.
Recent Articles
A Chance to Remake the Fed
Apr 21, 2014
Janet Yellen has only chaired the Federal Reserve for a few months, but you could forgive her if she feels like the new kid in school that nobody wants to sit with at lunchtime. With the resignation of Jeremy Stein earlier this month, there are only two confirmed members of the seven-member Board of Governors: Yellen and Daniel Tarullo. Three nominees—Stan Fischer, Lael Brainard and Jerome Powell, (whose term expired but has been re-nominated)—await confirmation from the Senate. Another two slots are vacant, awaiting nominations. One consequence of the shortage of Fed governors is that regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents, chosen by private banks, now outnumber Board members at monetary policy meetings, allowing the private sector to effectively dictate monetary policy from the inside, and creating what some call a constitutional crisis . The need for two more nominees, however, provides an opportunity to reunite the progressive coalition that prevented Larry Summers...
Wall Street’s Subsidy Safety Net
Apr 04, 2014
Financial reformers in both parties have insisted for years that the largest banks remain too big to fail, and that Dodd-Frank did not cleanse the system of this reality. You can mark down this week as the moment that this morphed into conventional wisdom. In successive reports, two of the more small-c conservative economic institutions, without any history of agitating for financial reform—the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund—both agreed that mega-banks, in America and abroad, enjoy a lower cost of borrowing than their competitors, based on the perception that governments will bail them out if they run into trouble. This advantage effectively works as a government subsidy for the largest banks, allowing them to take additional risks and threaten another economic meltdown. With institutional players like the Fed and the IMF both identifying the same problem, Wall Street grows more and more isolated, setting up the possibility of true reform. The idea...
The Home Mortgage Business, Where Cheaters Always Seem to Prosper
Feb 26, 2014
Ocwen is a little company with a dream: to become the nation’s largest mortgage servicer. If they weren’t so uniformly terrible at mortgage servicing, they might even achieve that goal. And while state and federal investigations, multi-billion-dollar fines, and legal threats would seemingly throw a wrench in most companies’ high-minded plans for success, Ocwen is different. Because in America, rank incompetence need not impede a corporate quest, at least not in the financial services industry. As cracks in its public image continue to surface, Ocwen is attempting to pull off one of the most brazen schemes in recent memory: getting what amounts to a cash advance for the very work they can’t seem to do properly. Let’s take a step back. Ocwen is the biggest of a group of “non-bank” servicers, which don’t originate loans themselves. They merely handle the day-to-day accounting of loans for other owners, usually big institutional investors...
The Ink-Stained Wretches of Wall Street
Feb 11, 2014
Last year, upon the 10 th anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, newspapers and magazines filled with soul-searching essays from journalists rethinking their advocacy of the invasion, documenting lessons learned and errors made. But a few months later, on the 5 th anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, the unofficial beginning of the financial crisis, virtually nobody wrestled with their failure to anticipate the Wall Street wrecking ball. Indeed, to date, no major news organization has apologized for missing the biggest economic story of the decade, and most business journalists defend their profession, arguing that they sounded the alarm about financial industry greed and the makings of a catastrophe. “The government, the financial industry and the American consumer—if they had only paid attention—would have gotten ample warning about the crisis from us,” said Diana Henriques of The New York Times in 2008. Neither she nor her colleagues have really...
The Government Guide to Screwing Poor Homeowners
Jan 08, 2014
AP Images/Carlos Osorio The December 28 th expiration of extended unemployment benefits, which cut off payments to 1.3 million recipients—and will cut off 3.6 million more over the next year—has dealt a painful body blow to the most vulnerable members of our society. Rolling back unemployment insurance to a maximum of 26 weeks when the average duration of unemployment is still 36 weeks puts millions of families’ lives in jeopardy. Another recently expired provision could cause comparable damage to the same population, but it has yet to trigger similarly urgent attention from lawmakers. The end of the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, which lapsed December 31, means that any type of debt forgiveness on a mortgage will result in a giant tax bill—one that a stressed homeowner cannot usually afford. Even homeowners entitled to compensation for past abuse by the mortgage-lending industry would be subject to unfavorable tax treatment. This will lead to more...
