Banks Win Mortgage Settlement From Regulators [View all]

[JReed]

Banks Win Mortgage Settlement From Regulators
By: DSWright
Tuesday January 8, 2013 6:32 am

In what can only be described as a slap to the face of victims of the housing crisis and an insult to even the vaguest notion of the rule of law, the banks responsible for the mortgage meltdown and subsequent financial crisis and recession have once again escaped justice. After criminal cases were dropped despite massive evidence the civil cases are now settled with regulators and its a slam dunk for the banks. Total victory:

In two of the biggest civil settlements since the financial crisis, the nation’s biggest banks agreed Monday to cough up nearly $19 billion to resolve federal allegations of mortgage misdeeds.

Bankers saw the settlements as a major step in providing more certainty for their balance sheets and possibly foreshadowing an end to the era of billion-dollar mea culpas and open-ended regulatory probes.

In one case, 10 banks settled with regulators for $8.5 billion. In the second, Bank of America Corp. agreed to pay almost $10.4 billion to Fannie Mae, the giant loan buyer that the U.S. seized and propped up with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

The deals come three years after prosecutors dropped criminal investigations against such subprime-mortgage kingpins as Countrywide Financial Corp.’s Angelo Mozilo in favor of pursuing civil fines.

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http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/01/08/banks-win-mortgage-settlement-from-regulators/


US Banks Win Mortgage Fraud Settlement, Borrowers Lose
by Pratap Chatterjee

Ten major U.S. banks settled charges of illegally kicking people out of their homes for pennies on the dollar, under two agreements with the government announced this week. The biggest beneficiary is Bank of America which will win a get-out-of-jail free card for selling fraudulent loans to two government-sponsored mortgage finance companies.

Bank of America sold bad mortgages that led to numerous foreclosures via subprime mortgage lenders Countrywide Financial Corporation and Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. that it acquired in 2008. “Through a program aptly named ‘the Hustle,’ Countrywide and Bank of America made disastrously bad loans and stuck taxpayers with the bill,” said Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York when he sued the company for $1 billion on behalf of the government last October.

Under the new settlement Bank of America will buy back $6.75 billion in residential mortgage loans sold to the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and give the government an additional $3.6 billion in cash. The other banks - which include Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo - will pay out $3.3 billion in direct payments to people who lost their homes plus another $5.2 billion to others who are threatened with possible eviction for not being able to pay their loans. This is in addition to the $26 billion that many of the same banks agreed to pay out last February under a separate deal with 49 state attorneys general, the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Despite the large sums involved, most consumer advocates say that the settlements are far too little for those who lost the most. “Communities of color were particularly hard hit by abusive mortgage practices,” said Debby Goldberg, special project director at the National Fair Housing Alliance. "The $8.5 billion and other settlements are not comparable to the trillions of dollars in wealth sucked from communities," added Sasha Werblin, senior program manager at the Greenlining Institute.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/09-3