One of the most frustrating things about Obama (next to his not going after the torturers from the Bush administration) has been his unwillingness to make the banks pay for their misdeeds in the financial crisis. He continues to characterize their misdeeds as mistakes rather than criminal actions. He and Holder have done this without any evidence from any actual investigation. They simply take the banks at their word ... just as they took Bush's claims at his word that they did not torture (despite clear evidence ... to anyone with open eyes ... to the contrary).
The current rush to give the banks waivers from their possible past crimes as part of a mortgage settlement agreement, without any real investigation into what the banks did or did not do, is a clear case in point.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, one of the few people out there that seems to understand what has happened and the extent of the banker crimes ... and who is willing to stand up and scream that it was criminal, is out with a great post that shows how even Matt Taibbi may have been hoodwinked over the latest Schniederman appointment (Please read the whole article ... it is worth it).
If the Administration had really changed its stance on bank misdeeds, you’d see it putting the settlement on hold until the investigations led by Schneiderman had been concluded. The fact that the mortgage settlement is proceeding on schedule says this the Administration is, as before, trying to cover up its bank-favoring actions with better propaganda.
and more specifically:
In addition, the consensus view among the boosters is that robosigining is not such a big deal, so we ought to be happy to waive that in isolation. But look at how Catherine Cortez Masto is using that abuse to go in a very systematic manner up the servicing ladder, from managers of robosigners that she is prosecuting criminally to Lender Processing Services. As we have argued repeatedly, LPS served as a liability shield for the major servicers. If Masto gets to discovery on LPS, the odds are high that she will be able to establish that servicers were well aware of the abuses that LPS was engaged in as their agent and the banks were effectively colluding with LPS.
In other words, clear cut, institutionalized abuses are a great way to engage in the classic mob prosecution strategy of targeting the foot soldiers to get them to give you the dirt on the entire network. Why would you give up such a valuable chip when you don’t know the extent of the abuses?
The after effects of the financial crisis live on and will continue to live on until there is real reform that prosecutes wrongdoing (and puts those convicted in jail). You absolutely need to have real prosecutions if you want to have a deterring effect on future actions by the banks. That this has not been done ... and more criminally, that no real investigation has been done to establish the degree of misbehavior involved in and of itself speaks volumes about the degree to which the administration has drunk and continues to drink the bank kool-aid.
Where are the real investigations???????? Laws are of little value if there are no penalties for breaking them! You would think a Law Professor would know this.
Oh and why is Corzine (ex of MF Global) still a free man. Usually when you steal $1 billion dollars there are some consequences.