Countywide. Bank Of America. Citibank. Bailouts. Profits from secret bailouts.
Are the people who are supposed to investigate bank fraud actually motivated to do it?
Steve Kroft and 60 Minutes took a look at it tonight.
If you haven't seen it, you should.
It's been three years since the financial crisis crippled the American economy, and much to the consternation of the general public and the demonstrators on Wall Street, there has not been a single prosecution of a high-ranking Wall Street executive or major financial firm even though fraud and financial misrepresentations played a significant role in the meltdown. We wanted to know why, so nine months ago we began looking for cases that might have prosecutorial merit. Tonight you'll hear about two of them. We begin with a woman named Eileen Foster, a senior executive at Countrywide Financial, one of the epicenters of the crisis.
He profiles a few key whistleblowers, and what happened in their cases. The story covers how Sarbanes-Oxley could have been used.
The report is in four parts. Three aired on the show. The fourth is the "Overtime"segment detailing how the report came about.
60 Minutes producer James Jacoby wanted to find out why, and one of the first people he spoke with was Tom Borgers, a man who literally helped write the book on the financial meltdown.
Borgers was a senior fraud investigator for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a bipartisan panel set up by the Obama administration to examine the causes of the crisis. In the end, the FCIC issued a 500-page report on its findings, required reading for James and associate producer Maria Gavrilovic.
(It's also on the CBS YouTube page. Here. Here. And Here.