The Scandal That Won't Go Away

Despite the efforts of our public officials and bankers to ignore it, downplay it, paper it over or make it disappear, the fraud surrounding the mortgages at the heart of the financial collapse is the scandal that won’t go away.

Two big stories breaking over the past week showed what strong legs the scandal has. First, Huffington Post reported on a series of confidential audits that showed five of the country’s largest mortgage companies defrauded taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans.

Then the New York Times and others trumpeted an investigation of the mortgage securitization process by New York’s new state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. This investigation won strong praise from two of the toughest watchdogs on the financial beat, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone and Robert Scheer at Truthdig, who portrayed Schneiderman as a hared-charging prosecutor who unlike the feds and other state attorney generals, is not intimidated by Wall Street.

But Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon argued that confidential audits, which were turned over to the Justice Department were a much bigger story than Schneiderman’s investigation.

Until Schneiderman’s investigation bear some fruit, I think history suggests we should be skeptical of officials who claim they are going to get tough on the banks and protect consumers.

Salmon pinpoints the real significance of the Schneiderman investigation – the continuing cracks in the state attorney general’s 50-state coalition that was negotiating with the banks to settle claims of mortgage fraud. Some Republicans had already criticized the state attorney generals for being too tough on the banks, referring to a proposed settlement as a shakedown. Other critics have raised questions about whether the attorney generals are being too soft, having sat down to negotiate without having done robust investigations first to gather ammunition.

Whatever the outcome of these on-going investigations’s, the week’s news guarantees one thing – the mortgage fraud scandal, and its offspring the foreclosure scandal, are not going away any time soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around the Web / Foreclosures / Martin Column - 05/19/2011

Quotable-Neil Barofsky

"My view of financial institutions is colored by my years as a prosecutor...None of this surprises me. They are profit-driven corporations that seek to maximize profitability without much regard to social gain."

Neil Barofsky
former inspector general, TARP

 

Homepage Content / Quotable - 05/12/2011

Real Fraud, Faux Enforcement

The number one question people ask me when they find out I write about the financial crisis is: “How come nobody has gone to jail?”

I think I have found an explanation. His name is Robert Khuzami and he works as chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division.

He is not the literal reason. SEC enforcement is civil, not criminal. So he’s not responsible for putting people in prison.

But focusing on Khuzami puts into sharp focus the conflicts at the heart of the government’s efforts to regulate and hold accountable the big banks.

Khuzami is a former federal prosecutor. But he came to the SEC from a high-profile position he took after his stint as a lawman: he served as general counsel to Deutsch Bank, one of the world’s largest investment banks, which had a massive business in the securitized mortgage loans, and was the recipient of nearly $12 billion in “backdoor bailout” federal funds funneled through AIG.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Khuzami was the first SEC enforcement chief to come directly from a big bank. He is one in a long line of Obama economic appointments with strong ties to the financial industry, who either worked for the banks directly or in their interests by favoring deregulation that was one of the major causes of the economic collapse.

Now Khuzami’s former employer, Deutsch Bank, is in hot water with the feds, who sued the bank earlier this month alleging that the “bank committed fraud and padded its pockets with undeserved income as it repeatedly lied so it could benefit from a government program that insured mortgages,” Business Week reported.

For the SEC, it’s all kosher because its stringent recusal policy assures that Khuzami won’t work on any Deutsche Bank cases.

Remember that Khuzami was not just a guy punching a clock. He was the bank’s general counsel, so he supervised legal issues for the firm.

So here was a former federal prosecutor who, in the midst of the go-go real estate boom, apparently thought it was OK for his bank to commit mortgage fraud. Zero Hedge dug up his financial disclosure statement, which reveals he was compensated nearly $4 million in salary and bonuses between 2006 and 2009, and may lose money if Deutsche Bank suffers as a result of the government’s lawsuit.

The president and the SEC, knowing what kind of mischief the too big to fail banks were engaged in during the boom, and how Khuzami had profited from it, thought it was a terrific idea to appoint somebody like him to go after his former cronies.

Khuzami’s tenure at SEC has been marred by accusations that he gave two Citibank executives preferential treatment in agreeing to drop charges against them after he met secretly with their lawyer. In January, the SEC’s inspector general said it was investigating the matter.

Is there no one but former bankers available to work in the financial sector? The president, with $1 billion to raise to fund his reelection effort, has been unwilling to dig into the fraud at the heart of the financial collapse. Until he does, the economic recovery will be built on quicksand.

 

AIG / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) / Too Big To Fail - 05/11/2011

What Would Pecora Do?

There have been lots of positive comparisons between Phil Angelides and Ferdinand Pecora, who led an earlier investigation of Wall Street excesses that led to the Great Depression.

Pecora was a no-holds barred former prosecutor who ran his hearings with meticulous preparation and theatrical flair, and his work galvanized public support for widespread reforms.

Some have been impressed by Angelides’ reputation as a reformer from his days as California treasurer, when he tried to use the power of the state’s investments for socially worthy causes and implemented some protections for shareholders. Angelides was widely praised after public hearings earlier this year for his understanding of high finance and his scolding of the head of Goldman-Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, comparing him to a used –car dealer.

I’ve been less impressed by Angelides, who doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the opportunity he has to marshal support for real financial reform. And he’s too cozy with a Democratic leadership that’s been soft on Wall Street in the wake of the financial meltdown.

I’m also suspicious of Angelides, the politician and former real estate developer who unsuccessfully ran for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, because of his close ties to the Democratic Party elite. In addition, I’m wary of the impact of Angelides' main job running a coalition promoting green technologies. That’s certainly a laudable goal, but Angelides and his Apollo Alliance aren’t going to get very far without lobbying the Obama administration and the Democrats, who would not be happy with a hard-hitting report.
Whatever drama Angelides manages to muster at any given moment, I’m concerned that his multiple roles and background will cause him to soft-pedal his investigation. Those concerns were only heightened after Angelides surfaced as part of a curious SEC report last week that cautions firms about “pay to play” in the state investment business.
According to the SEC, when Angelides was running for treasurer in 2002 he hit up a top J.P. Morgan official to co-chair a fundraising event. It wasn’t just an honorary position. The price tag for the co-chairmanship? $10,000.

According to the report, the official didn’t co-chair the event but donated $1,000 to Angelides” campaign personally ­– and helped raise $8,000 more. In asking other J.P. Morgan brass to contribute to Angelides, the official noted that that the state of California was an important client for the firm.

Just how important became clear in the next couple of years, when J.P Morgan received about $37 million in fees from the state on more than 50 bond offerings totaling $15.8 billion – overseen by Angelides as state treasurer.

In the SEC’s curious take on the matter, neither Angelides nor J.P. Morgan is accused of doing anything improper.  Angelides isn’t even mentioned by name. The agency merely uses its report to caution finance officials about not running afoul of SEC regulations.

OK, so the SEC doesn’t think Angelides did anything wrong soliciting funds from J.P. Morgan and then giving them the state's business. But the report serves as a bitter reminder that those who we’re counting on to get to the bottom of the financial meltdown are steeped in the toxic brew of cash and politics that has seeped into the core of our government.

I hope I’m proven wrong about Angelides; that his intimacy with this unseemly world has left him with a sense of sustained outrage and not empathy for it.  But it will take more than a few zingers to convince me. I mean, let’s be serious. Would Ferdinand Pecora have solicited money from J.P Morgan? Not much chance. After Pecora grilled the son of the legendary banker, J.P. Morgan, Jr. described the investigator as having “the manners of an assistant prosecuting attorney who is trying to convict a horse thief.”

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission / Martin Column - 03/23/2010