I can no longer say that not a single senior executive of one of the major nonprime lenders whose frauds hyper-inflated the housing bubble and caused the Great Recession has been convicted of his frauds. A single senior executive of one of the hundreds of fraudulent nonprime lenders was convicted yesterday, April 19, 2011. A jury found Lee Farkas, Chairman of the Board of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker (TBW), guilty of fraud. TBW was a large mortgage banking firm that made many nonprime loans, but the prosecution does not address the fraudulent nonprime lending.
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Third, note that while a Colonial Bank officer pleaded guilty for assisting these frauds against Colonial Bank, no one has pleaded guilty at Freddie Mac. The critical question is whether TBW actually delivered the key loan documents to Freddie Mac. Did Freddie Mac obtain an enforceable security interest or was it defrauded by TBW? Was Colonial Bank the only victim of the double sale/pledge?
Earlier today, I did a podcast with Shahien Nasiripour from the Huffington Post on the current state of the justice system in America. The full transcript is on it’s way.
NEW YORK — After the last major banking crisis, some two decades ago, roughly 3,800 bankers were prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms, by the Justice Department’s count. Yet this time, some four years after the economy descended into the most punishing financial crisis since the Great Depression, the public still waits for the Obama administration to deliver a similar kind of justice.
The 2007-’09 financial crisis was “avoidable,” a bipartisan, congressionally-appointed panel concluded last week. Mortgage fraud “flourished” in the run up to the collapse. Securities fraud was apparently widespread.
“Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities,” the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote in its report on the causes of the collapse. About $1 trillion worth of home loans made from 2005 to 2007 were “fraudulent,” the commission said, citing testimony from experts. The Illinois Attorney General, Lisa Madigan, told the commission that she defined fraud to include lenders’ “sale of unaffordable or structurally-unfair mortgage products to borrowers.”
And yet, the perp walk so many Americans crave — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner once referred to it as the “very deep public desire for Old Testament justice” — hasn’t occurred. Wall Street figures have largely gone untouched. Bank directors kept their jobs. In a sign that perhaps the fallout from the crisis has passed, outsized compensation is back.
“People need to go to jail,” said Liz Ryan Murray, policy director of National People’s Action, an advocacy organization that helped launch the website CrimeShouldntPay.com. “If you steal something, you go to jail. If you falsify documents, you go to jail. Why doesn’t that apply to big bank executives?”
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