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Yet another investigation, and potential lawsuit, for the nation's biggest banks.
[COLOR=#0000ff]The New York Times' Louise Story reports that New York State's Department of Financial Services (DFS) is probing major banks — JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup — to see if they steered homeowners to over-priced insurance policies called "forced-place" insurance.[/COLOR]
Basically, the DFS has already found instances where these banks pushed homeowners, who were already having problems paying their mortgages, into insurance policies that cost up to ten times what they should have been paying.
And on top of that, according to Story's inside source, some of these policies were offered by bank affiliates (meaning conflict of interest). If companies weren't bank affiliates, sometimes they provided banks with kick backs.
The most important part of all of this is that because some of these policies were tied to home loans, they made it harder for homeowners to refinance. That means they may have stymied recovery in the housing market. If a lawsuit, and subsequently a deal for homeowners, comes out of this, it could help the economy all around.
Read more: New York State Is About To Go After Banks For Selling Over-Priced Home Insurance
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