Naked Capitalism on the Citibank Sellout
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It hasn’t been hard to notice that the Administration has been engaged in a series of bank settlements with multibillion dollar numbers attached. As we’ve argued, the sudden show of a smidge more seriousness is undoubtedly meant to impress voters in the runup to the Congressional midterms as to the Democratic party’s bona fides in the “tough on banks” category.
The latest pact, a nominally $7 billion mortgage settlement over misrepresented residential mortgage backed securities, falls into the predictable pattern of first, there being much less there than meets they eye, and two, as a result, the agreement being a gimmie for the bank and its executives. We’ll go over that briefly in a bit.
But the Citi mortgage settlement was so obviously defective in other respects that Litigation Daily roused itself to shellack it. As Susan Beck wrote, the deal had some particularly unsavory features. One was that it was structured so as to avoid court review. Clearly, no one wanted to risk Judge Rakoff-styple probings, particularly of the factual basis for the settlement. And as Beck notes, there was clearly pointed effort to say squat about what exactly Citi had done:
http://seniorsforademocraticsociety.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/naked-capitalism-on-the-citibank-sellout/
WARNING: If you are a diehard Obama fan, you better not read this ...
