DealBook: JPMorgan Reaches Deal With Agency Over Loans

Powell Law Firm Must Pay Back Defaulted Loans, Court Rules

The law firm of one the key figures in the Luzerne County "kids-for-cash" scandal - attorney and businessman Robert J. Powell - must pay back multiple business loans plus interest and attorney fees, totaling in the millions, as a result of the loans going into default, the state Superior Court has ruled.

Fair Game: Find the Loan Behind the Loans

Last month, for example, the New York attorney general followed other states’ regulators in suing Western Sky Financial and its affiliate Cash Call Inc. The lawsuit contended that rates charged to borrowers by the companies — from 89 to 343 percent, depending on loan size — far exceed the caps determined by the state’s civil and criminal usury laws. A borrower receiving $1,000 could wind up owing almost $5,000 in finance charges, fees and principal over two years, the complaint said.

Last Tuesday, Western Sky suspended operations, saying it was a victim of regulatory overreach, though its affiliate, Cash Call, was still functioning. Katya Jestin, a lawyer at Jenner & Block who represents the companies, said that because Western Sky operated on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in Eagle Butte, S.D., New York officials had no jurisdiction over it.

“We will be moving to dismiss the suit against Cash Call and the other parties,” Ms. Jestin said in an interview on Thursday. “Consumers voluntarily entered into the loans and agreed when they signed the loan agreements to be bound by the laws and the courts of the Cheyenne River tribe. The A.G.’s lawsuit is an attempt to sidestep these agreements and is an infringement on the tribe’s inherent sovereign rights and the rights of its members.”

It is unclear what more might happen with the New York attorney general’s case. But here’s a suggestion: When prosecutors pursue payday lenders, why not go further? Investigators should track down — and disclose — the institutions and individuals who make these operations possible by providing the capital that such companies need to conduct their business.

The capital needs of companies like Western Sky are crucial because, unlike banks, they don’t take in deposits that they can turn around and lend. They have to rely on financing from other sources.

According to the attorney general’s complaint, Western Sky makes loans for which Cash Call, based in Anaheim, Calif., provides funding. Cash Call also acts as the servicer on Western Sky’s loans, collecting interest and principal payments from borrowers.

The question that the complaint doesn’t answer is this: Who is willing to provide the capital that enables Cash Call to finance what regulators say are predatory loans?

When asked if the office was investigating who was financing the company, Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the New York attorney general, declined to comment. He said the investigation was continuing.

I’ve found a preliminary answer. Documents from a 2007 lawsuit show who was providing financing assistance to Cash Call in previous years. The institutions included Deutsche Bank Securities and a unit of Citigroup, known as the CIGPF 1 Corporation.

That lawsuit was brought by Cash Call against CIGPF in Federal District Court in New York. It related to a dispute over the bank’s financing arrangement with Cash Call. The suit was subsequently dismissed, but the court documents remain — and they provide a glimpse of the relationships between Cash Call and its bankers, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup.

Cash Call, the lawsuit said, obtained financing for its lending business from two credit facilities. The so-called senior facility, totaling as much as $1 billion, provided capital for about 90 percent of Cash Call’s consumer loans, the lawsuit said; a junior facility covered the rest.

Deutsche Bank Securities led the senior facility, or line of credit, which was backed by a variety of lenders, including CIGPF. The lawsuit said that this Citigroup unit had $20 million invested in this lending facility.

The smaller line of credit also involved both Deutsche Bank and the Citigroup unit. According to the suit, CIGPF invested $30 million in this facility.

Under these credit agreements, money repaid to Cash Call by its consumer borrowers first went to Deutsche Bank, which deducted “its interest and other earned fees.” It is unclear what Deutsche Bank earned from this arrangement.

After the bank deducted what it was owed, the lawsuit said, the remaining money was divvied up among other investors in the credit facility, including CIGPF.

I asked representatives of Citigroup and Deutsche Bank why the banks would want to provide backing for companies making high-cost and possibly predatory loans. Renee Calabro at Deutsche Bank said only that the bank ended the relationship with Cash Call in 2007. That was before the Cash Call unit began operating on the Indian Reservation.

The Haggler: At Quicken Loans, a Culture Geared to Customer Service

REMEMBER the recent column about DailyCandy, the e-mail service for discount deals, and the customer who sent e-mails for six maddening months, trying to get an $85 refund?

Well, after the matter was thoroughly investigated, we learned that an employee at Group Commerce, which handles DailyCandy’s order fulfillment, had marked the refund as paid, even though it wasn’t.

This explanation, of course, explains very little. What we still want to know is why so many companies, in similar circumstances, fail to deliver. Time and again, you get the sense that these companies are filled with employees who are trained to keep their heads down and keep stamping. Or perhaps communication has broken down. Or it’s always someone else’s job.

How did so much customer service become so wretched? It’s a mystery that hangs over nearly every one of these columns.

Not long ago, the Haggler got an idea of what is going wrong after a close look at a company that is getting it right. It was during a trip to Detroit where the Haggler — or, rather, his duller, windier alter ego — reported a story about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans, a privately held mortgage lender. The article looked at Mr. Gilbert’s efforts to revive downtown Detroit, but while there, the Haggler got a close look at a company that has thought seriously about how to keep customers happy.

The thinking has paid off. Quicken Loans was rated highest in customer satisfaction among mortgage originators in 2010, 2011 and 2012, according to J. D. Power & Associates. The company has also been ranked in the top 30 of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” for 10 consecutive years.

What is Quicken Loans doing to earn such accolades? It boils down to culture.

Mr. Gilbert and Bill Emerson, the chief executive, spend a lot of time and energy instilling a very particular work ethos into employees. For newcomers, this involves a daylong speech/indoctrination led by Mr. Gilbert, who, on the day the Haggler caught his act, spoke for eight hours, with a break for lunch, wearing a clip-on red bow tie. (Presenting the serious in the guise of the slightly comic, with plenty of punch lines, turns out to be one of his specialties.) The speech occurs once every five weeks or so and is delivered to recent hires, usually in a conference room of a hotel.

You can learn a lot about Quicken Loans from this presentation, which revolves around the company’s “isms,” a set of pithy summations of principles. Some, like “Responding with a sense of urgency is the ante to play,” are self-explanatory. Others, like “Every client. Every time. No exceptions. No excuses,” come with their own wittily phrased elaborations. (“Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”)

And many, like “We’ll figure it out,” make sense only with elucidation: “Not everything comes with a set of instructions. The innovators of the world are often exploring uncharted territory.”

Let’s stipulate that none of these ideas are blazingly original, and some are so obvious that one wonders why it’s necessary to say them aloud. (“It’s not about who is right, it’s about what is right.”) But what Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Emerson have done is create a set of expectations as well as a sense of community and mission. Employees at Quicken Loans have it hammered into them: care about the customer, sweat every detail, improvise when you need to, always deliver.

These employees are also encouraged to enjoy their jobs; they work in an atmosphere so buoyant that the Haggler was not surprised to find a karaoke machine in a room filled with a few hundred mortgage bankers.

“If you don’t create a culture at your company, a culture will create itself,” Mr. Emerson said in a phone interview. “And it won’t be good. I sometimes hear people say ‘We don’t have a culture at our company.’ They have one. But if it hasn’t been nurtured, if no one has spent on any time on it, you can assume it’s the wrong culture.”

THE Haggler can think of a dozen problems brought to this column that it’s hard to imagine could have emerged from Quicken Loans. And here is just one small piece of evidence:

A few weeks back, when the Haggler was trying to get the attention of DailyCandy, he turned to Twitter. Using his Haggler account, he sent a post into the ether, asking someone at DailyCandy for a call. No one ever replied.

Last month, the same experiment was tried with Quicken Loans, though the Haggler raised the degree of difficulty a little. A post was sent from a Twitter account opened by the Haggler with a name that was not the Haggler’s — or that of anyone he knows. The post had no hashtag and was not sent to Quicken Loans’ Twitter account. The message read:

“I am not happy with Quicken Loans! And you can tell because I used an exclamation point.”

A response arrived within hours. “How can I help?” wrote a Quicken Loans employee, identified as Bianca. “Please send me an e-mail,” she added, providing her e-mail address.

This turned out to be Bianca Mutti, part of a team that monitors the Twittersphere for Quicken Loans-related comments. The Haggler sent her an e-mail last week, from his Haggler e-mail account, and explained: “That tweet was a test. And you passed.”

“Thanks for solving this mystery for us!” she wrote back. “I mean it, and you can tell because I used an exclamation point.”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

A Vulnerable Age: Pension Loans Drive Retirees Into More Debt

But these offers, known as pension advances, are having devastating financial consequences for a growing number of older Americans, threatening their retirement savings and plunging them further into debt. The advances, federal and state authorities say, are not advances at all, but carefully disguised loans that require borrowers to sign over all or part of their monthly pension checks. They carry interest rates that are often many times higher than those on credit cards.

In lean economic times, people with public pensions — military veterans, teachers, firefighters, police officers and others — are being courted particularly aggressively by pension-advance companies, which operate largely outside of state and federal banking regulations, but are now drawing scrutiny from Congress and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The pitches come mostly via the Web or ads in local circulars.

“Convert your pension into CASH,” LumpSum Pension Advance, of Irvine, Calif., says on its Web site. “Banks are hiding,” says Pension Funding L.L.C., of Huntington Beach, Calif., on its Web site, signaling the paucity of credit. “But you do have your pension benefits.”

Another ad on that Web site is directed at military veterans: “You’ve put your life on the line for Americans to protect our way of life. You deserve to do something important for yourself.”

A review by The New York Times of more than two dozen contracts for pension-based loans found that after factoring in various fees, the effective interest rates ranged from 27 percent to 106 percent — information not disclosed in the ads or in the contracts themselves. Furthermore, to qualify for one of the loans, borrowers are sometimes required to take out a life insurance policy that names the lender as the sole beneficiary.

LumpSum Pension Advance and Pension Funding did not return calls and e-mails for comment.

While it is difficult to say precisely how many financially struggling people have taken out pension loans, legal aid offices in Arizona, California, Florida and New York say they have recently encountered a surge in complaints from retirees who have run into trouble with the loans.

Ronald E. Govan, a Marine Corps veteran in Snellville, Ga., paid an interest rate of more than 36 percent on a pension-based loan. He said he was enraged that veterans were being targeted by the firm, Pensions, Annuities & Settlements, which did not return calls for comment.

“I served for this country,” said Mr. Govan, a Vietnam veteran, “and this is what I get in return.”

The allure of borrowing against pensions underscores an abrupt reversal in the financial fortunes of many retirees in recent years, as well as the efforts by a number of financial firms, including payday lenders and debt collectors, to market directly to them.

The pension-advance firms geared up before the financial crisis to woo a vast and wealthy generation of Americans heading for retirement. Before the housing bust and recession forced many people to defer retirement and to run up debt, lenders marketed the pension-based loan largely to military members as a risk-free option for older Americans looking to take a dream vacation or even buy a yacht. “Splurge,” one advertisement in 2004 suggested.

Now, pension-advance firms are repositioning themselves to appeal to people in and out of the military who need cash to cover basic living expenses, according to interviews with borrowers, lawyers, regulators and advocates for the elderly.

“The cost of these pension transactions can be astronomically high,” said Stuart Rossman, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group that works on issues of economic justice for low-income people.

“But there is profit to be made on older Americans’ financial pain.”

Fannie-Freddie in Venture to Securitize Home Loans

“The overarching goal is to create something of value that could either be sold or used by policy makers as a foundational element of the mortgage market of the future,” the regulator, Edward DeMarco, who is the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in remarks prepared for a conference.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were bailed out by the government in 2008, help finance about two-thirds of new home loans. Mr. DeMarco is seeking to shrink them and reduce risks to the taxpayers who support the mortgage giants.

Since they were seized by the government in the bailout, the companies have drawn nearly $190 billion from the Treasury to stay afloat.

By creating a new securitization company, the Federal Housing Finance Agency intends to pave the way for a single securitization platform, forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to abandon their current separate systems. Mr. DeMarco said the goal was to build a single infrastructure to support the mortgage credit business.

The new company would be structured as a joint venture owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Mr. DeMarco told reporters in a conference call to discuss his agency’s plans.

In the long term, he said, policy makers will most likely decide how the securitization platform is operated, and whether it should be privatized.

“We are on a path to replace the outdated proprietary operational systems of Fannie and Freddie,” Mr. DeMarco told reporters. “It could be turned to some form of a market utility.”

Consumer Debt Increases on Car and School Loans

WASHINGTON (AP) — American consumers borrowed more in November to buy cars and attend school, but they stayed cautious about using their credit cards.

The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that consumers increased their borrowing in November by $16 billion from October to a seasonally adjusted record of $2.77 trillion.

Borrowing that covers autos and student loans increased $15.2 billion. A category that measures credit card debt rose just $817 million.

The sharp difference in the borrowing gains illustrates a broader trend that began after the recession. Four years ago, Americans carried $1.03 trillion in credit card debt, a high. In November, that figure was 16.5 percent lower.

At the same time, student loan debt has increased significantly. The category that includes auto and student loans is 22.8 percent higher than in July 2008. Many Americans who have lost jobs have gone back to school to get training for new careers.

The November increase also reflected further gains in auto sales, which rose 13.4 percent in 2012 to top 14 million units for the first time in five years. The need to replace vehicles lost to Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast may have also contributed to the gain.

Consumer spending rebounded in November, helped by lower gas prices and solid job growth that carried over into December. Employers added 155,000 jobs in December and 161,000 in November.

Steady hiring may have encouraged consumers to keep borrowing and spending, despite concerns about the sharp tax increases and government spending cuts that were scheduled to occur at on Jan. 1.

Still, some analysts expect borrowing and spending may have slowed in December as budget negotiations in Washington intensified. Congress and the White House did not reach a deal to avert sharp tax increases until Jan. 1. And they delayed tougher decisions about spending cuts for two more months.

Consumer confidence fell in both November and December, which may slow spending in December. Consumer spending drives about 70 percent of economic activity.

Settlement Expected With Banks Over Home Loans

Under the settlement, a significant amount of the money, $3.75 billion, would go to people who have already lost their homes, making it potentially more generous to former homeowners than a broad-reaching pact in February between state attorneys general and five large banks. That set aside $1.5 billion in cash relief for Americans.

Most of the relief in both agreements is meant for people who are struggling to stay in their homes and need the banks to reduce their payments or lower the amount of principal they owe.

The $10 billion pact would be the latest in a series of settlements that regulators and law enforcement officials have reached with banks to hold them accountable for their role in the 2008 financial crisis that sent the housing market into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. As of early 2012, four million Americans had been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and a huge amount of abandoned homes swamped many states, including California, Florida and Arizona.

Federal agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department are continuing to pursue the banks for their packaging and sale of troubled mortgage securities that imploded during the financial crisis.

Housing advocates were largely unaware of the latest rounds of secret talks, which have been occurring for roughly a month. But some have criticized the government for not dealing more harshly with bankers in light of their lax standards for making loans and packaging them as investments, as well as their problems with modifying troubled loans and processing foreclosures.

A deal could be reached by the end of the week between the 14 banks and the nation’s top banking regulators, led by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, four people with knowledge of the negotiations said. It was unclear how many current and former homeowners would receive money or when it would be distributed.

Told on Sunday night of the imminent settlement, Lynn Drysdale, a lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid and a former co-chairwoman of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, said: “It’s certainly a victory for consumers and could help entire neighborhoods. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and for those people who have had to totally uproot their lives because of eviction it may still not be enough.”

In recent weeks within the upper echelons of the comptroller’s office, pressure was mounting to negotiate a banner settlement with the banks, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The reason was that some within the agency had started to realize that a mandatory review of millions of bank loans was not yielding meaningful examples of the banks’ wrongfully evicting homeowners who were current on their payments or making partial payments, according to the people.

Representative of banking regulators did not return calls for comment on Sunday.

The biggest action against the banks for foreclosure-related abuses has been the $26 billion settlement between the five largest mortgage servicers and the state attorneys general, Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development after allegations arose in 2010 that bank employees were churning daily through hundreds of documents used in foreclosure proceedings without properly reviewing them for accuracy.

The same banks in that settlement — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial — are included in the current negotiations.

Under the terms of the settlement being negotiated, $6 billion would come from banks to be used for relief for homeowners, including reducing their principal, helping them refinance and donating abandoned homes, the people said.

The proposed settlement would also halt a separate sweeping review of more than four million loan files that the comptroller’s office and the Federal Reserve required the banks undertake as part of a consent order in April 2011.

Under the terms of the order, the 14 banks had to hire independent consultants to pore through the loan records to determine whether the banks illegally charged fees, forced homeowners to take out costly insurance or miscalculated loan payment amounts. Consultants initially estimated that each loan would take about eight hours, at a cost of up to $250 an hour, to go through.

The costs of the reviews have ballooned, though, according to people with knowledge of the reviews, in part because each loan file is taking up to 20 hours to review. Since its inception, the reviews have cost the banks about $1.5 billion, according to those people.

Pressure to reach a settlement with the banks has been building, particularly within the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, amid widespread frustration that the banks’ mandatory review of loan files was arduous and expensive, and would not yield promised relief to homeowners, according to five former and current banking regulators.

In private meetings with top bank executives, these people said, regulators have admitted that the reviews had gone awry. At one point this month, an official from the comptroller’s office said the agency had “miscalculated” the scope and requirements of the reviews, according to the people with knowledge of the negotiations.

When the settlement discussions heated up this month, some banking executives said they felt they would be vindicated by the regulators. These executives said that they had raised objections to the reviews early on, but those concerns were largely dismissed by regulatory officials, according to the people with knowledge of the negotiations.

Instead, officials from the comptroller’s office, these people said, have used the loan reviews as a negotiating tool, telling banks that they can either sign on to a large settlement or be forced to pay billions over several more years until the consultants finish the reviews.

When regulators approached the banks to broach a settlement this month, they met first with Wells Fargo and proposed that the banks pay $15 billion, according to the people familiar with the discussions. After negotiations, though, the regulators agreed to $10 billion.

All of the 14 banks are expected to sign on.

DealBook: European Private Equity Firms Seek Nontraditional Loans Amid Debt Crisis

LONDON — As the sovereign debt crisis has slammed Europe, Cinven has had to get creative to finance buyouts.

When the London-based private equity firm wanted to buy CPA Global this year for $1.5 billion, Cinven looked beyond banks, the usual source of money. Along with debt from HSBC and JPMorgan Chase, it secured almost $200 million of higher-interest loans from nontraditional lenders. It also had to spend roughly $600 million of its own cash.

“The debt markets have been challenging since 2007,” said Matthew Sabben-Clare, a partner at Cinven. “There’s a degree of selectivity by the banks over geographies and certain industries. Banks are more regionally focused than before.”

Europe’s financial woes are forcing private equity firms like Cinven to revise their deal-making playbooks.

As banks pull back, private equity firms are increasingly turning to high-yield bonds, mezzanine loans and other types of debt that carry higher interest rates. Some are appealing directly to institutional investors like pensions and sovereign wealth funds to finance specific deals.

Given the tight credit, most firms are having to put up more capital to get deals done. Cash now accounts for more than 50 percent of the average European buyout, according to the data provider S.&.P. Capital I.Q. Five years ago, that number was 33 percent. In the United States, cash represents 38 percent of the average buyout, mainly because firms have access to a variety of financing options, like capital markets.

Private equity firms “are having to widen the net to find the loan financing they need,” said Kristian Orssten, head of European high-yield and loan capital markets at JPMorgan Chase in London. “Many lenders in Europe are getting to grips with their own funding challenges.”

The financing troubles for buyouts are reflected in the weak deal-making environment.

Although firms are raising money to buy distressed assets in Europe, many have remained on the sidelines as the debt crisis continues. So far this year, European acquisitions by private equity firms have totaled $23.2 billion, a 38 percent decline from the same period in 2011, according to Thomson Reuters.

Firms have pulled some deals altogether, fearing that asset prices could fall even further. After months of negotiations, Blackstone and BC Partners dropped their $3.2 billion bid for the frozen-food company Iglo after failing to come to terms with its private equity owner, Permira, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter who declined to speak publicly.

In  good times, European buyout firms relied heavily on cheap bank lending. Flush with cash, the Continent’s financial institutions provided almost 80 percent of financing on deals, often keeping the debt on their own balance sheets instead of selling it off to other investors.

But as the debt crisis worsened, banks curbed their lending in an effort to meet stricter capital requirements, which penalize firms for holding risky investments like debt connected to private equity deals. Firms like Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland have sold loans at a discount to other investors to shed unwanted assets.

Even when banks are willing to finance deals, they are limiting their bets. Local banks are focusing mostly on deals in their home countries, and they are often willing to finance only a portion of the buyouts.

As a result, private equity firms are often tapping multiple lenders, even when the costs of a buyout are less than $1 billion. To finance its £465 million ($749 million) acquisition of the British company Mercury Pharma, Cinven capitalized on its 20-year relationships with certain banks, securing £235 million of financing from a consortium of firms, including Lloyds Banking Group.

With banks being selective, private equity firms have had to tap other markets.

High-yield debt investors, in search of better yields, have been receptive. The European private equity firm Apax issued almost $1 billion of high-yield bonds in February as part of its $2.1 billion acquisition of the telecommunications company Orange Switzerland. Intelsat, one of the world’s largest satellite operators, owned by a BC Partners-led group, raised $1.2 billion this year in an effort to refinance its debt.

“The high-yield market in Europe is exploding,” said a partner from a leading European private equity firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s attracting a lot of institutional investors who are chasing high returns.” The amount of European high-yield bonds connected to investments from private equity firms has risen 49 percent, to $13.5 billion, since 2007, according to the data provider Dealogic.

Private equity firms are also stepping in to fill the void. The Scandinavian firm EQT Partners turned to a consortium of financial players, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, for around $510 million of mezzanine financing for its $2.3 billion acquisition of the German medical supplies company BSN Medical in June.

“As bank funding has become more expensive, it has opened up an opportunity for new types of financing,” said Sachin Date, head of private equity for Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa at the accounting firm Ernst & Young in London.

But such debt carries its own set of risks. Generally, loans from nontraditional lenders carry higher interest rates, which can be costly for companies, especially in the current economic conditions. If the financial burden became too high, it could force borrowers to default on their loans and exacerbate the region’s woes.

“The crisis has hit much harder than people had expected,” said Nicolas de Nazelle, a managing partner at the private equity adviser Triago in Paris.