Thursday, October 27, 2011

U.S. Government sues 17 banks to recover losses to Fannie/Freddie from bogus RMBS

I recently ran across a blog entry entitled "The FHFA lawsuit league table."  The author assigns "scoring points" to each of the 17 banks sued by the Fed Government to see who is in trouble the most.  The two close winners are BOA and JPMorgan.

Of course, one would ask (at least in my world), why bail out the banks and then sue them, if you can just let them fail in the first place and not double-spend taxpayer money first on bailouts and then on mass litigation?  To this day, I don't buy the "too big to fail" myth that states that the world will collapse if we let the financials fail.  I don't think most financial industry insiders buy it either, but there's certainly a ton of money to be made by promoting the myth.

Another question to ask is: why take the risk out of the marketplace through government guarantees and then seriously expect that the banks will play by the rules?  Again, of course, most people in-the-know likely did not really expect anyone to play by the rules.  Instead, such people likely realized that the government will do something that "feels good" (provide the guarantees in the name of promoting home ownership), the banks will do something that will make them a lot of money (dump bogus RMBS on the taxpayer), and the government will then do another feel-good thing -- the lawsuits that will take a (small) chunk of the banks' previous "killing" profits while creating the appearance that the U.S. continues to be governed by the rule of law.  What a wonderful system.

In any event, those interested in the lawsuits can track them via the FHFA's site here.

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