A Bank Crisis Whodunit, With Laughs and Tears

TRULY startling revelations were few in the voluminous report, published last Thursday by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the origins of the financial panic. This is hardly a shock, given the flood-the-zone coverage and analysis of the crisis since it erupted four years ago.

For those of you who’ve wondered why there have been so few prosecutions of mortgage fraud during this epidemic, your answer is on Page 164. “The terrible thing that happened,” said William K. Black, a former fraud investigator in the savings-and-loan crisis who is a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, “was that the F.B.I. got virtually no assistance from the regulators, the banking regulators and the thrift regulators.”

Finally, if it’s comic relief you’re after, turn to Page 105 for an interview with Angelo R. Mozilo, former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, a lender that profited by roping unsuspecting borrowers into poisonous loans.

Mr. Mozilo, the commission said, described his company as having “prevented social unrest” by providing loans to 25 million borrowers, many of them members of minority groups. Never mind that throngs of these loans have resulted in foreclosures and evictions. “Countrywide was one of the greatest companies in the history of this country,” Mr. Mozilo maintained, “and probably made more difference to society, to the integrity of our society, than any company in the history of America.”...

The obama administration doesn’t care if they did we would see perp walks. Those crooks at the TBTF global banks who invented those toxic loans in the first place just dumped their bad loans on investors and tax payers.

Banks accepted and bundled ‘deficient’ loans
Mortgages rejected by due-diligence firm were lumped in, crisis panel says

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/banks-accepted-rejected-loans-crisis-panel-2011-01-28?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Fannie and Freddie’s biggest deadbeats

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/31/fannie-and-freddies-biggest-deadbeats/

Barack’s Wall Street Problem is Now America’s

http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/09/21/baracks-wall-street-problem-is-now-americas/

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Donates Serious Cash to Democrats

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/07/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-donat.html

JPMorgan Chase Asked to Stop Funding ACORN

http://nlpc.org/stories/2009/09/15/jpmorgan-chase-asked-stop-funding-acorn

Not only weren't the government regulators interested in catching the bank robbers. They also (metaphorically speaking) provided, and continue to provide, the getaway cars.

If a package of supposedly-high-quality mortgages contains reverse-amortization NINJA loans, someone involved in the transaction between the loan origination and the final sale committed major and obvious fraud. Without going into detail, it may not be clear who should be prosecuted, but the government regulators' efforts have been primarily directed at obscuring who did what. I don't see how any sane person can trust the financial markets when the crooks who stole boatloads of money and caused the original crisis are still out there--most likely continuing to steal even more money.

Hey, yeah. Let's focus on the bankers and ONLY on the bankers.

Did greedy bankers cause the housing bubble?

excerpts from John Stossel's special, "Top 10 Politicians' Promises Gone Wrong"
.

John Stossel:	These experts on the housing bubble point out: not only did our [national housing] policy cost taxpayers billions, it also
Russell Roberts:	...killed neighborhoods; it's ruined peoples' lives; it gave people an illusion they could afford something they couldn't afford, rich and poor.
John Stossel:	I'm told greedy bankers caused the bubble.
Howard Husock:	Government exaggerates, rather than minimizes, the age-old impulse to greed. *The government* made it harder for bankers to do the right thing
John Stossel:	...because if a banker stayed with safe loans, he missed out on profits he could have made selling lots of high-risk loans to [government-controlled mortgage agencies] Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Howard Husock:	If he was making good loans he might only be earning 8% rather than 20%. Maybe he loses his job as CEO.
John Stossel:	The most damage was done through the bundling of bad loans and Fannie and Freddie, but some was done by a law that required banks to lend to disadvantaged people. ... Congress told banks: make loans in poor neighborhoods or we may not let you merge with other banks. ...

Russell Roberts is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center, and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Howard Husock is vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he is also director of its Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. He is a City Journal contributing editor.

John Stossel is, well, John Stossel. He's unique. And you already know who he is.

"Scratch the surface of an endemic problem ... and you invariably find a politician at the source." -- Simon Carr, in his review of The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

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