2 new fraud deals show wall street's washington insiders at work

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/two-new-fraud-deals-show-wall-street-s-washington-insiders-work-1358093834

It must’ve been like old home week when the old gang of Wall Street and Washington insiders finalized a couple more cushy settlements last week.

Everybody knew the drill: Ignore the potential criminal charges and agree on settlement figures they think the public will swallow – figures that are big enough to sound impressive but far smaller than the banks’ ill-gotten gains. They’ve done this dozens of times before.

But there was an empty chair at the negotiating table.

Bank of America was there, as it has been so many times before. So were the other too-big-to-fail banks. Representatives from the Attorney General’s office were undoubtedly there, too. The Attorney General was a high-priced Wall Street attorney.

[Fumesucker]

1. This is interesting

But then, the insiders had it wired. The reviewers included Promontory Financial Group, whose CEO was Comptroller of the Currency under President Bill Clinton. Then he became a senior attorney at Wall Street defense firm Covington & Burling. Small world: The Attorney General of the United States worked at Covington & Burling too.

Promontory and the other reviewers have an underlying conflict of interest: they’re reviewing their own client base. That’s the same conflict of interest that corrupted the for-profit “ratings agencies,” leading them to rate their clients’ toxic mortgage-backed securities as “AAA.”

Promontory was also the firm that said “well over 99.9 percent” of the loans issued by Standard Chartered bank complied with the law and only $14 million of them were illegal. Then the bank admitted that $250 billion of its deals, not $14 million, were illegal. That’s 17,000 times as much illegality as Promontory found in its ‘review.’ (17857.142 as much, to be precise, but who’s counting?)

Promontory kept the foreclosure gig anyway, with no objection from Washington’s regulators or law enforcement officials.

[xchrom]

3. +1

[think]

2. Can anyone say "Collusion"? ......

[Angry Dragon]

4. the American people would like to see some prison time for these bankers

[KG]

5. well, except people who were banned by Kos.

everybody else are just griefers...