STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 7 February 2012

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36. Battlegrounds for bringing Wall Street to justice

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120206a1.html

NEW YORK — What shall we make of the surprise pronouncement in President Barack Obama's State of the Union address that a belated investigation has been launched into the role of fraud in the financial crisis?

This much is clear: Despite rampant illegalities, bank fraud and countless cases of perjury, the response to date — at the federal level and from most, but not all, states — has been underwhelming, cowardly even.

A few principled holdouts — the attorneys general of Delaware, New York, Nevada and California — refuse to rubber-stamp a pre-investigation settlement with banks, but that's all.

So, four years after the great financial collapse, three years after the recovery began and in the last year of Obama's term — and the president has finally decided to investigate the role of fraud in the great global financial crisis. Hence, this new task force — the unit of Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses — begins behind the curve. The statute of limitations is, in many cases, close to elapsing.