How can we take any of this serious if no one is going to do a perp walk? How can Wall Street take anyone serious if they only get to settle these fraudulent acts?
Reuters On The Case-
It would be so easy to be cynical about the suit New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman brought Monday night against JPMorgan Chase, seeking to hold the bank liable for the alleged mortgage securitization fraud committed by Bear Stearns before JPMorgan acquired Bear in March 2008. I could start with the political expediency of the 31-page complaint, which, on the eve of the first presidential debate, provides the Obama administration with an answer to critics who have accused regulators of going easy on big banks. Indeed, the case is so politically charged that, according to Reuters, Schneiderman’s federal colleagues on the administration’s mortgage fraud task force were peeved that the New York AG filed the suit Monday, ahead of a joint federal-state press conference Tuesday.
Then, of course, there’s the content of the complaint. I’ve been carping for a long time that regulators were years behind lawyers representing bond insurers and private investors in mortgage-backed securities. Beginning in 2008 and 2009, private lawyers marshaled evidence from their own discovery and, later, from Congress’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report and the Levin-Coburn Report to produce damning, detailed complaints against JPMorgan and the other banks involved in securitization. The New York AG’s new complaint cited the FCIC report and the JPMorgan suit filed in August 2011 by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but the AG really owes his biggest debt of gratitude to the monolines Ambac, Syncora and Assured Guaranty and their counsel at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. Patterson has been relentless in its pursuit of Bear Stearns and, by extension, JPMorgan. Just look at the amended complaint Ambac filed in New York State Supreme Court in February 2011 against JPMorgan and the Bear mortgage arm, EMC. It’s 160 pages of brutal accusation, documenting the same theories put forth by the New York AG — but in much more detail.