Jamie Dimon, whose eight years atop JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) have made him one of Wall Street’s most powerful leaders, said he’ll start treatment for throat cancer, raising new questions about succession plans at the biggest U.S. bank.

Dimon, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, told employees and shareholders in a memo his condition is curable and that he’ll continue running the firm “as normal” during eight weeks of radiation and chemotherapy. The treatment will start soon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, limiting his travel, the CEO said.

“The cancer is confined to the original site and the adjacent lymph nodes on the right side of my neck,” he wrote. “Importantly, there is no evidence of cancer elsewhere in my body.”
The illness will revive questions about how the panel would theoretically handle his succession, said Ralph Cole, a portfolio manager at Ferguson Wellman Capital Management Inc. in Portland, Oregon.

Southern states are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. After more than five years of watching their cities and towns suffer foreclosure and mortgage abuse from the biggest firms on Wall Street, rigged Libor swaps impoverishing local governments, and massive stock losses to municipal workers’ pensions, the South is rising up and suing Wall Street over its latest fleecing scheme – high frequency trading.

Snip.......one of the key Southern lawyers involved is Michael Lewis. That’s not bestselling author Michael Lewis; that’s Big Tobacco Cartel suing and winning lawyer Michael Lewis who mightily assisted in bringing the tobacco cartel out of the shadows and changed the health of a Nation forever.

Even more problematic for Wall Street and its hideously shrewd lawyers is that one of the smartest programming brains in U.S. markets, Eric Hunsader, is cooperating with the Southern lawyers.

Why is Hunsader who runs a successful data business involving himself in what is likely to be the biggest legal free-for-all of the century? Andrew Smith of the Guardian shares this with us:
“When Hunsader’s finance friends pointed out that nobody was driving busloads of children over cliffs, he would grab their wallet and remove a $20 bill, then hand the wallet back. ‘Does anyone in the world really care what just happened there?’ he would ask.
‘It makes no difference to anyone but you, and even then not much. It’s just that in a civilised society, we don’t tolerate that. Civilisation breaks down when people don’t follow the rules, because nobody can trust anybody else.’ ”

Pretty soon there won’t be any General Motors vehicles left on the roadways that haven’t been part of a 2014 recall. On Monday, the company announced the recall of 7.6 million vehicles in the United States – 8.4 million worldwide– most of them for the same inadvertent ignition key rotation that has been linked to at least three fatalities.

In the first campaign, GM is recalling 6.8 million sedans because the ignition switch may inadvertently move out of the run position if the key is carrying extra weight and experiences a jarring event such as hitting a pothole or crossing railroad tracks.

Affected vehicles include:
•1997-2005 Chevrolet Malibu
•1998-2002 Oldsmobile Intrique
•1999-2004 Oldsmobile Alero
•1999-2005 Pontiac Grand Am
•2000-2005 Chevrolet Impala and Monte Carlo
•2004-2008 Pontiac Grand Prix

The second announced recall includes 554,328 model year 2003-2014 Cadillac CTS and model year 2004-2006 Cadillac SRX vehicles for the same unintended ignition rotation issue.
Monday’s additional recalls include:

•181,000 model year 2005-2007 Buick Rainier, Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy, Isuzu Ascender, Saab 9-7x vehicles, and the 2006 Chevrolet TrailBlazer EXT and GMC Envoy XL SUVs were recalled for a possible electrical short in the driver’s door module. The short could disable the power door lock and window switches and, in rare cases, overheat the module.

The self-described “Un-carrier” has been accused in federal court of making hundreds of millions of dollars off of so-called “premium” text-messaging subscriptions that were often never requested by subscribers.

According to the complaint [PDF] filed by the Federal Trade Commission in a U.S. District Court in Seattle, T-Mobile allowed third parties to participate in what’s known as “bill cramming,” the placing of often-questionable charges for premium services on a phone customers’ bill.

The FTC alleges that T-Mobile received anywhere from 35-40% of the total amount charged to consumers for subscriptions (mostly $9.99/month) for things like “flirting tips, horoscope information or celebrity gossip.”

Making matters worse, the government claims that T-Mobile sometimes continued to bill customers for these services even after being made aware that they were being operated by scammers.

The settlement set aside for payments to Ocwen borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012. Those eligible include borrowers who had mortgages serviced by Ocwen, Homeward Residential Holdings LLC (also known as American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc) or Litton Loan Servicing LP.
Ocwen Financial Corporation and its subsidiary, Ocwen Loan Servicing, agreed to the $2.1 billion joint state-federal settlement to resolve allegations of mortgage servicing misconduct resulting in premature and unauthorized foreclosures, violations of homeowners’ rights and protections, and the use of false and deceptive documents and affidavits. In addition to the $125 million payment fund, the settlement also provides for $2 billion in the form of first lien principal relief with an estimated $342 million being provided to Florida homeowners.

Packages including a cover letter, claim form, and instructions are being mailed to eligible borrowers beginning last week. A reminder mailing will be sent out the week of Aug. 11. All claims must be submitted by the Sept. 15 deadline. Payment checks should be mailed starting Dec. 3.

People who have questions can call 866-783-5382 for assistance in either English or Spanish. Claimants can file their claims electronically at the website below or submit claims to the address below:

www.nationalmortgagesettlement.com

National Ocwen Settlement Administrator
P.O. Box 1917
Fairbault, MN 55021-7172