Consumerist-

A nasty four-year legal battle between the Justice Department and Bank of America over a massive mortgage-related scam run by Countrywide Financial has come to a whimpering conclusion, with the DOJ opting to not appeal its most recent defeat in the case.

Let’s take a quick spin back a decade to the final years of the adjustable-rate mortgage boom, when shady mortgage lenders — Countrywide being the most prominent — were writing home loans to applicants who would likely be unable to keep up with the payments, and then reselling those poorly underwritten loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without disclosing that they might as well have been signed by kittens using invisible ink.

Countrywide had a name for this process — the High Speed Swim Lane (HSSL or “Hustle”) — that deliberately removed many of the underwriting roadblocks intended to prevent lenders from writing toxic loans, and resulted in Fannie and Freddie buying billions of dollars in loans from the company.

[CONSUMERIST]

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