Kudos to this Judge and many of us here have asked the same thing over and over.
There is an answer though - You have to begin at the top and that would be the Freddie/Fannie execs who cooked the books and lied to congress to preserve there mega-bonuses prior to the collapse. Many of them were diehard Clintonistas and elite progressives so they had top-cover. The statute of limitations is now expired on this stuff.... Issa missed his chance for a most meaningful series of hearings and one can only conclude they are all in on it.
Enron costs the public very little people went to jail - Fannie/Freddie cost our nation trillions and nobody went to jail. Go figure.
The banks would also have an interesting defense that they were only doing what congress and the DOJ demanded they do - increase diversity in their portfolios regardless of the ability of the loan recipient to pay. The banks gave the politicians enough sugar to be able to originate the loan making a bit of money and then dump the bundled crap on the government supported entities. Pretty soon, everyone to include Freddie/Fannie began to package this crap as mortgage backed investment instruments and the Feds/congress/bankers told the whole world how shiny these turds were and they were backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. and the rest is history.
If you think I am wrong, why did the Fed give so much of TARP to foreign banks? Hint - look at how heavily they were invested in our mortgage backed securities.
The Fed didn't do TARP, that was the Treasury.
What foreign banks got TARP money? You have a list?