CPD IN THE NEWS

El Diario - February 24, 2015, by Cristina Loboguerrero - Legisladores estatales y grupos que abogan por los derechos de los inmigrantes pidieron ayer al gobernador Andrew Cuomo que apruebe fondos para implementar un programa que daría defensoría legal gratuita a los inmigrantes indocumentados que afrontan un proceso de deportación.Los asambleístas Francisco Moya y Marcos Crespo, junto a representantes de varias organizaciones hicieron su pedido frente a la Corte federal de inmigración en el bajo Manhattan."El derecho de acceder a un abogado es uno de los derechos más importantes", precisó Moya, asambleísta de Corona, Queens, quien estima que hacen falta $4.5 millones para implementar el programa en todo el estado.Su colega Marco Crespo, por su parte, indicó que la iniciativa permitiría mantener unidas muchas familias y traería además beneficios "sociales y económicos".Ambos legisladores pusieron como ejemplo el programa Unidad Familiar Inmigrante de la Ciudad de Nueva York (NYIFUP, por su sigla en inglés), que con un financiamiento de $5 millones otorgado por el Concejo Municipal opera a pleno desde noviembre pasado. Según la abogada Ángela Fernández, directora de la Coalición de Derechos de los Inmigrantes del Norte de Manhattan, NYIFUP ha beneficiado a unos 900 inmigrantes."Hay 1,300 inmigrantes en el estado que por no poder pagar a un abogado están en riesgo de ser deportadas", dijo Fernández.

Los lunes, martes y miércoles, tres jueces revisan los nuevos casos en sus oficinas del piso 11 de la mencionada Corte, 201 de la calle Varick. Se estima que cada magistrado ve entre 7 a 15 casos por día; el resto de la semana lo dedican a los casos ya presentados.

Cada sala tiene unas pocas sillas, destinadas a la familia del procesado. Delante de las sillas hay un pequeño escritorio donde se sienta el acusado, vestido con el uniforme de recluso; a su izquierda, un intérprete; a su derecha, el abogado defensor. Enfrente, un representante del gobierno argumenta por la deportación.En el centro de la pequeña sala, el juez escucha atentamente a las dos partes. El acusado no puede dirigirse directamente al juez.Los abogados llegan temprano en la mañana para entrevistar a los detenidos y revisar sus casos antes de presentarlos en la corte durante las horas de la tarde.Oscar Hernández (21) fue detenido en 2011. Gracias a la ayuda legal del grupo de Servicios de Defensores de Brooklyn pudo salvarse de ser deportado y ahora está en proceso de legalizar su situación migratoria."No es lo mismo cuando uno está representado por un abogado, porque al desconocer las leyes y no poder pagar a alguien se está desorientado en todo el proceso", dijo el hombre, que vino a Estados Unidos hace siete años escapando de la violencia de su país

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As the country reeled from news that Donald Trump Jr. apparently tried to collude with Russia against former Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton, his father, President Donald Trump, announced a decision that will have ripple effects on the American economy for years to come.

Trump, distressing advocates of tough financial rules and pro-worker monetary policy, on Monday nominated veteran Wall Street lawyer Randal Quarles to serve as the Federal Reserve’s top finance regulator.

Read the full article here.

The controversial federal program that clouded the HUD secretary's VP prospects gets a timely overhaul.

Julian Castro’s Housing and Urban Development Department announced significant changes Thursday to a federal program that sold delinquent mortgages to private investors — a move that mollified progressive critics who threatened to undermine his vice presidential prospects.

With three weeks remaining until the Democratic convention and Hillary Clinton’s campaign narrowing down its list of potential ticket mates, the U.S. housing agency said it is changing a controversial program to give delinquent homeowners a new chance to reduce the principal they owe on their mortgage. The changes also prohibit financial firms from giving up on trying to sell or recuperate decrepit properties the businesses would rather walk away from.

As HUD secretary since 2014, Castro had been under attack from by at least 11 Latino and populist groups for his oversight of the department’s “distressed asset stabilization program,” which sold struggling homeowners’ mortgages to hedge funds. Castro, they alleged, failed to deliver on a HUD promise to sell more mortgages to non-profit community groups instead of financial firms.

Started in 2012, the program’s two stated objectives are to help struggling residents while also clearing billions of dollars of bad debt off the agency’s books. But liberals have argued the program undermines homeowner protections, especially for people in low-income neighborhoods, as HUD sold mortgages to the same financial firms that exploited borrowers in the lead-up to the 2008-2009 recession.

The changes came not long after Castro surfaced on Clinton's short list of vice presidential candidates — along with Sens. Tim Kaine and Elizabeth Warren — leading to immediate speculation about the HUD secretary’s political motivations.

Warren was among those calling for major reforms to the program.

 “Given that Secretary Castro has only spent a brief time on the national stage, the black mark caused by the distressed asset issue stands out prominently on his record,” said Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research for Compass Point Research & Trading in Washington. He covers housing policy.

“There is no question that the left’s attack of this program generally — and Secretary Castro specifically — lowered the odds of him being tapped,” he said.

As severely-delinquent mortgages accumulated after the recession, the Federal Housing Administration, a division of HUD, needed to reduce debt liabilities to the government.

Under the program, delinquent loans held by banks but insured by the FHA are sold to new buyers, including hedge funds, private-equity firms and non-profit community groups. Through May 2016, HUD sold more than 105,000 FHA-insured loans valued at $17 billion, according to a report by the National Consumer Law Center.

Castro has not said much publicly about the program, which in recent weeks erupted into a politically-charged issue for the Obama administration, said sources with familiar with the situation.

The program was supposed to give struggling homeowners another chance to avoid foreclosure. But researchers following the program said that financial companies have used it to circumvent homeowner safeguards.

“If you have an option of selling your loan through [the] DASP, then you don’t have to go through state foreclosure procedures that have the consumer protections in them and actually help enforce FHA rules,” said Geoff Walsh, author of NCLC’s report. He previously worked as an attorney with Vermont Legal Aid, Inc. and specialized in housing, consumer and bankruptcy areas. “A lot of damage has been done,” he said.

The liberal groups held Castro responsible for the program’s flaws, even though it started before his tenure at HUD. But the groups immediately applauded HUD’s new changes to the program that they had advocated for.

Their website attacking Castro was still live on Friday, though it will be updated to reflect HUD’s changes, said Matt Nelson, managing director of Presente.org, which claims to be the largest U.S. online Latino organizing group.

Housing experts acknowledged that pressure from advocacy groups — which used the issue to question Castro’s progressive credentials — played a role in the revisions.

“But for his potential to be vice president, these changes probably don’t get made,” said Edward Gorman, head of community development for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, whose members include nonprofits that buy DASP loans.

“It was the specific targeting of the secretary on this issue and the gathering of liberal senators in support that caused the [Obama] administration and the secretary particularly to take another look at this issue,” he said. “This will be fodder for Republicans. This will become a political issue.”

For Castro, it had already metastasized into an issue that clouded his vice presidential prospects. Widely regarded as one of the Democratic Party’s rising Latino stars, the former San Antonio mayor was targeted by a coalition of activist groups that recognized the leverage afforded to them by a presidential primary fight colored by questions about Clinton’s ties to Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ populist, anti-Wall Street rhetoric.

“HUD has continually enhanced the DASP program by making improvements before every sale since 2014,” an agency spokeswoman said in a statement. “As a result, tens of thousands of families have been able to remain in their home or avoid foreclosure through the program.”

Maurice Weeks, a housing staffer at the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the groups supporting the attack on Castro’s handling of the DASP, said he is grateful to see the changes HUD announced. But his group will want to make sure the changes actually result in better conditions for communities.

“It became a political problem for Castro since he’s the head of that department,” Weeks said. “We didn’t set out to determine if Castro was a good VP candidate or not. Our focus was on homeowners across the country.”

By PATRICK TEMPLE-WEST

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The Federal Reserve has kept its main interest rates, which banks use to lend to one another and determine the cost of credit throughout the rest of the economy, at or near zero since December 2008. The central bank has maintained the low rates so as not to disrupt the country's recovery from the largest financial crisis and recession in decades.

But several current and former senior economic officials told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that the virtually unprecedented, prolonged period of near-zero rates risks depriving the Fed of the “ammunition” to address the next recession -- let alone another financial crisis. The Fed's primary method of economic stimulus, they note, has traditionally been cutting interest rates, something that is not possible if rates are already so low.

That could force the government to rely disproportionately on fiscal stimulus, these experts warn, holding a recovery hostage to a partisan ideological divide that has paralyzed Congress and shows no signs of abating. 

None of the officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal explicitly called for an interest rate increase in order to keep the Fed’s options open for the next crisis. The main reason that Fed officials publicly provide for a rate hike is still that they believe price inflation is on track to hit the Fed’s 2 percent target. (William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, signaled on Wednesday that the the Fed was reconsidering a September interest rate hike after several days of volatility in the stock market.)

But Fed watchers believe that a desire to replenish the Fed’s proverbial firepower for the next recession is part of the motivation of Fed officials who want to “normalize” -- i.e., increase -- rates.

Narayana Kocherlakota, the outgoing president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis,vehemently opposes an interest rate hike in the near future. Kocherlakota nonetheless believesthat his central bank colleagues’ perception that low interest rates have given the Fed less “monetary policy ‘space’” will prompt them to raise rates sooner and higher than is desirable.

Jack McIntyre, a portfolio manager and senior research analyst at Brandywine Global, a Philadelphia-based asset management firm, also said those concerns are part of the Fed’s calculus. “Yes, the [Fed would] like to remove emergency-level monetary stimulus to build up ammunition for the next slowdown in the U.S. economy,” McIntyre told The Huffington Post. “It would be a net positive to move us off of zero interest rates to build up some ammunition so they can cut them when it slows down.” 

Many economists insist, however, that these fears are misplaced. They instead argue that the best way for the Fed to prepare for the next recession is to prevent the economy from slowing down too soon in the near term.

“I would much rather have the Fed engage in slowdown and recession prevention by getting us to reach levels at which a rate hike would not be premature,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said earlier this week.

If the Fed raises rates in the coming months to give itself leeway for the next recession, Bivens warned, it risks “creating the crisis you are trying to have tools to fight against.”

Bivens is one of a number of liberal-leaning economists and activists who argue that the economy is still far from full employment. They want the Fed to wait for widespread wage growth to take hold before raising rates, and they were in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Thursday and Friday to make their case to Fed officials directly.

When the economy slows down more substantially, Bivens said, the Fed could still stimulate growth using quantitative easing, the massive asset purchasing program it initiated during the most recent recession after interest rates had already bottomed out. 

There are other even less conventional techniques available to the central bank, like instituting negative interest rates, which would effectively charge banks for depositing their money rather than lending. It is an idea that former Fed chair Ben Bernanke told The Wall Street Journal has merit.

Richard Parker, an economist at Harvard, agrees with Bivens and other economists that middle- and lower-income workers have yet to share in the gains of the current recovery, but is less worried about the damaging effect of a rate hike.

Instead, Parker believes that lawmakers and activists concerned about low wage growth should focus on changing the regulatory and fiscal policies that he believes would have a bigger impact. 

Parker supports a “retained earnings tax” that would penalize corporations for hoarding cash for stock buybacks and other actions “meant to bolster share prices (and hence bonuses)” that do little for the real economy.

And while Parker acknowledges that partisan gridlock makes the prospects of pro-growth fiscal policy dim at the federal level, he sees the success of efforts to raise the minimum wage at the state and local level as a model for incremental progress. 

“It is beginning to look like the early Progressive Era, when states were the laboratories for democracy,” he said. 

Source: Huffington Post