British bank HSBC has agreed to pay US$550 million to resolve US claims that it misled US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac about risky mortgage securities it sold to them before the housing market collapsed in 2007.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees Mae and Mac, announced the settlement on Friday with HSBC. London-based HSBC is Europe’s largest bank and also has extensive operations in the US. Its US division has about US$289 billion in assets, making it the ninth largest bank in the US.
HSBC sold the securities to the two mortgage companies between 2005 and 2007. Under the settlement, HSBC is paying US$176 million to Mae and US$374 million to Mac.
The settlement is the latest federal government agreement over actions related to the financial crisis that struck in 2008. The meltdown, triggered by vast sales of high-risk mortgage securities, plunged the economy into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
The securities soured after the housing bubble burst in 2007, losing billions in value.
The government rescued Mae and Mac at the height of the financial crisis in Sept. 2008, when they were on the verge of collapse. The companies received taxpayer aid totaling US$187 billion. They have since become profitable and repaid the full bailouts.
The FHFA sued 18 financial institutions in 2011 over their sales of mortgage securities to Mae and Mac. The total price for the securities sold was US$196 billion. The agency said on Friday it has now reached settlements with all but two of the banks.
A number of big banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup Inc, previously had been accused of abuses in sales of securities linked to mortgages in the years leading up to the crisis. Together, they have paid hundreds of millions of US dollars in penalties to settle civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which accused them of deceiving investors about the quality of the bonds they sold.
Goldman in 2010 agreed to pay US$550 million to settle the SEC’s charges, the largest penalty against a Wall Street firm in the agency’s history.
The US Department of Justice and state regulators have reached multibillion-dollar agreements over mortgage securities with JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America. The most recent was announced last month with Bank of America, the second-largest US bank, which is paying a record US$16.65 billion — US$7 billion of it earmarked for consumer relief.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”