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Easy Street

Easy Street: Uncle Sam and Your Mortgage

Heidi Moore May 17, 2011

Easy Street is Marketplace’s daily roundup of the most interesting news stories and commentary about Wall Street, Washington and the curious world of finance. You can see more of what we think are the biggest stories of the day on our News in Brief page. Every day, you can download Marketplace’s daily show on iTunes and follow us for more headlines at twitter.com/mktplaceradio. If you want to listen to Marketplace on the radio, find out [which stations carry us and what time we’re on](().

The Traders

LinkedIn’s IPO may value the company at as much as $4 billion.

Warren Buffett spends half his day in the office reading. Just reading. Then he delegates. This is how you get to be an Oracle, children. No word on whether his reading material lately included any warnings on the exact definition of insider trading.

The Bankers

Secret, internal government audits indicate that banks including Bank of America and Wells Fargo allegedly defrauded Uncle Sam on mortgages.

Jamie Dimon apologizes for his bank’s treatment of some foreclosure failures.

Related: Banks are snapping up large amounts of mortgages from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. Then the banks will bundle them and sell them to large investors. Then….stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The Economists

Wages have fallen below inflation.

The Politicians

Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, is taking aim, vaguely, at banks who may or may not have done something undefined with giant mortgages, perhaps, but it’s shadowy right now and sketchy on details. As it were.

Recreational Reading

Conde Nast is moving to the World Trade Center.

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