Mortgage and Securitization Fraud: Where Is the Task Force?
It was almost four years ago that Ben Bernanke, Henry Paul Paulson, and Timothy Geithner ran to Congress warning that the end of the world was near. They said the banks were drowning in bad debt and without a massive bailout they would soon be forced into bankruptcy. Congress quickly coughed up the money in the form of $700 billion in TARP loans. The Fed contributed trillions more. Undoubtedly most of the bad debt was due to stupidity, which does not seem to be in short supply on Wall Street despite the high paychecks. But there was more than just stupidity involved here. There was an epidemic of mortgage fraud that was identified by the FBI as early as 2004. And yet, in its first three years, the Obama administration did almost nothing to investigate criminal practices that contributed to the bubble and the subsequent meltdown.
