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Gary Edwards

Judge Blocks Citigroup Settlement With S.E.C. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ects-sec-accord-with-citi.html

Banksters Judge-Rakoff SEC-CitiGroup

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Nov 11
     
    The greatest theft in the history of mankind, and a posse of one Judge and a few State Attorney Generals is all we have on the hunt.  Pathetic.  But thank God for Judge Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan!   The Federal Government is so corrupt and politicized that regulatory agencies are bagmen for the worst kind of crony capitalism ever seen.  I would rather shut down these corrupt and crony laden regulatory agencies and replace them with legislation requiring full transparency and reporting to the PUBLIC.  A process that would enable lawyers and Courts to sift through the mess, and let contract law, legal settlements, class actions and lawsuit penalties be the instruments of regulatory oversight.  Judge Rakoff should be the next Supreme Court nominee.
Gary Edwards

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone - Matt Taibi - 2 views

www.rollingstone.com/...t-wall-street-in-jail-20110216

Banksters financial-collapse Matt-Taibi

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Mar 12
     
    Must read stuff.  Very lengthy Bankster expose, this time involving Bankster connections to Obama, the political establishment, and the corruption of the DOJ, SEC and other regulatory agencies.  Very lengthy.  Includes stories about the misfortunes of those few honest individuals who tried to do the right thing in a sea of thieves, liars and crooks. excerpt: Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people. This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18. The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom - an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities - has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions - from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before hi
Paul Merrell

The Blotch on Eric Holder's Record: Wall Street Accountability | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...ord-wall-street-accountability

financial-collapse DoJ Holder too-big-to-jail banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Thursday he is stepping down from the post he has held for nearly six years—making him one of the longest-serving attorneys general in American history. Holder was the first African-American to hold the position and will surely be remembered as a trailblazer for civil rights.
  • But there is one area where Holder falls woefully short: prosecution of Wall Street firms and executives. He came into office just months after widespread fraud and malfeasance in the financial sector brought the American economy to its knees, and yet no executive has faced criminal prosecution. Beyond the crash, Holder established a disturbing pattern of allowing large financial institutions escape culpability. “His record is really badly blemished by his nearly overwhelming failure to hold corporate criminals accountable,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Five years later, we can say he did almost nothing to hold the perpetrators of the crisis accountable.”
  • Advocates for financial accountability often point to the Savings and Loan crisis as a counter-example: despite much smaller-scale fraud, 1,000 bankers were convicted in federal prosecutions and many went to prison. Holder has tried to explain his lack of prosecutions relating to the 2008 collapse by claiming the cases were too hard to prove—but many experts disagree. The Sarbanes Oxley Act, for example, would provide a straightforward template: it makes it a crime for executives to sign inaccurate financial statements, and there is ample evidence that Wall Street CEOs were aware of the toxicity of the sub-prime mortgages sold by their firms.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Late last year, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Federal District Court of Manhattan wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books bluntly titled, “The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?” He suggested a doctrine of “willful blindness” at Holder’s Justice Department and said “the department’s claim that proving intent in the financial crisis is particularly difficult may strike some as doubtful.” A federal judge will generally not proclaim people guilty outside the courtroom, but Rakoff came close with that statement. The fact he wrote the essay at all stunned many observers. In recent years, the Justice Department has obtained some large-dollar settlements with Wall Street firms like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. But the headline-grabbing amounts end up being significantly less after factoring in tax accounting and credits for actions already being undertaken by the bank. There is also a lack of transparency around how these penalties are being paid to aggrieved consumers. Holder himself suggested in Senate testimony last year that some firms really are too big to jail:
  • “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” Holder said. He later walked that back in subsequent testimony, saying “Let me be very, very, very clear. Banks are not too big to jail.” But the data suggest otherwise.
  • Public Citizen did an analysis of these agreements at the Department of Justice and found that Holder made them a routine affair:
  • There isn’t much transparency over which bad actors are awarded deferred prosecution, and which are not, and advocates are alarmed by the precedent. “[Holder] ensconced the de facto ‘too-big-to-fail’ doctrine by which large financial institutions were effectively immunized form criminal prosecution simply by virtue of being so big,” said Weissman.
Paul Merrell

Wells Fargo fails to end U.S. mortgage fraud lawsuit | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ge-fraud-idUSBRE98N0WT20130924

banksters fraud Wells-Fargo litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • A federal judge has rejected Wells Fargo & Co's bid to dismiss a U.S. government lawsuit accusing the nation's largest mortgage lender of fraud, a victory for federal investigators pursuing cases tied to the recent housing and financial crises. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan said on Tuesday that the government may pursue its key federal claims that Wells Fargo lied about the quality of mortgages it submitted to a government insurance program, costing hundreds of millions of dollars over roughly a decade.In particular, Furman sided with the U.S. Department of Justice's interpretation of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, a law adopted after the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis that lets the government sue for fraud affecting a federally-insured financial institution.Wells Fargo said the FIRREA claim should be tossed because the only institution affected by its conduct was itself.But Furman concluded otherwise, following the lead of two colleagues on the Manhattan federal court, Jed Rakoff and Lewis Kaplan, in cases against Bank of America Corp and Bank of New York Mellon Corp, respectively
Paul Merrell

Bank Of America's $17 Billion Mortgage Crisis Settlement Could Be A Total Bust | ThinkP... - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...bank-of-america-deal-shrinkage

economic-collapse litigation BoA settlement criminal-fraud

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Bank of America has agreed to a legal settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to avoid prosecution for the hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage loans that it and its subsidiaries sold to unwitting investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, according to multiple new reports. The total on-paper cost of the deal is reportedly at least $16 billion and perhaps as high as $17 billion, which makes it the largest corporate legal settlement with the government in U.S. history. But that record price tag is deceptive. The deal is unlikely to cost Bank of America anywhere close to that amount.
  • “If you let a thief buy his way out of jail, you should really make sure the check doesn’t bounce,” HDL national campaign director Kevin Whelan said in an email. “Even a record $17 billion settlement is a small fraction of the damage done by B of A and Countrywide. But it could do real good for a lot of families,” Whelan said. “The fact that the JP Morgan Chase settlement has not delivered any noticeable relief to families makes us skeptical.”
  • the government’s decision to pursue civil settlements rather than criminal cases against banks that inflated the toxic mortgage bubble means that shareholders pay the price while executives who oversaw the misconduct earn large bonuses.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even at face value, the reported settlement is minuscule compared to the harm caused by Bank of America companies. The on-paper cost of the deal is less than 7 percent of the value of the mortgage deals Bank of America and its subsidiaries Countrywide and Merrill Lynch made before the crisis that have since gone bad. (Bank of America bought Countrywide and Merrill Lynch at the height of the crisis.) Those three companies issued just shy of a trillion dollars in mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial collapse, and $245 billion of those products have gone bad, according to Bloomberg. Bank of America had pushed for a much smaller settlement for months, arguing that it should not have to pay for the sins of the firms it bought at bargain-bin prices when the economy was reeling. But a court ruling last month regarding Countrywide’s most notorious mortgage swindle caused the bank to change its tune, according to the New York Times. Judge Jed Rakoff ordered the bank to pay about $1.3 billion for one tranch of defective mortgages sold under a program that Countrywide nicknamed “Hustle” because of its fraudulent nature. Having lost one court case over Countrywide’s notorious misdeeds, the Times says, Bank of America decided to stop resisting federal officials’ settlement demands.
  • After tax deductions, the settlement could easily shrink below the roughly $15 billion in profits the company has reported since 2011. And because the financial crisis sucked something like $14 trillion out of the economy and destroyed tens of trillions of dollars in wealth for homeowners, the DOJ can hardly claim to have delivered a proportional response. The department’s claims about the Bank of America settlement are likely to draw political scrutiny. A bipartisan bill from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) would require government officials to state the full tax deductibility and true cost of corporate legal settlements in all public statements about them. That bill, inspired by the revelations that JP Morgan’s sweetheart deal with the DOJ didn’t come close to the portrait that Attorney General Eric Holder painted of it, was passed out of committee late last month.
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