Paul Kiel

Jonathan Schienberg, Jaime Davila, & Jamil Sunsin on “Colossus.” Paul Kiel & Jesse Eisinger on  on who gets audited. T. R. Reid on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

As the government's largest effort to compensate victims of the banks' foreclosure practices comes to a close, ProPublica's Paul Kiel reports that it won't be much of an ending: roughly 3 million borrowers will receive no more than $500. He goes into the history of robo-signing and other aggressive practices that caused homeowners who weren’t behind on their mortgage payments to face foreclosure. His latest article is "For Most Homeowners, Gov’t Foreclosure Deal Brings A Few Hundred Bucks."

On Thursday the government approved a $26 billion settlement for homeowners who’ve been foreclosed upon or are currently at risk. Approximately two million Americans will get a $1,800 settlement check, which is a lot of people but not a whole lot of money: the Joint Economic Committee of Congress found that the average foreclosure in 2008 cost $7,200. This money also won't cover losses accrued by local governments who lost tax revenue, or neighbors whose own property values fell.

We check in on the current congressional wrangling between the Whitehouse and Congress over the FISA bill with Paul Kiel, a reporter-blogger at TalkingPointsMemo.com, and Siobhan Gorman, an Intelligence and Homeland Security Correspondent from The Wall Street Journal.