If you thought the $800 billion TARP program was the end of our government’s bailout bonanza for wayward banks, you’re wrong. If you thought the Fed’s secret $1.2 trillion loan program for foreign and domestic banks was the end, guess again. It’s like we are living in one of those late-night TV ads for Ginsu Knives, ‘But wait, there’s more!’
From Matt Taibbi’s blog, we read about another political deal and power play favoring bad banks. Fortunately, this deal has, so far, been thwarted by a lone holdout [emphasis added]:
Read Full Article »…On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.
The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.
This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline…
