By William K. Black
Posted on August 16, 2013
EXCERPT...
The FBI was desperate to address the mortgage fraud catastrophe in 2007. The irony was that it was vulnerable to political attack because it had been so right, so early about mortgage fraud. The FBI warned publicly in September 2004 that mortgage fraud had become epidemic and predicted that it would cause a financial crisis if it were not stopped. By 2007, however, the FBI had assigned only 120 FBI agents nationwide to investigate the epidemic of mortgage fraud that had grown massively since the FBI warnings. As I have explained on many occasions (and will reprise briefly in my fourth column in this series) that pittance of agents was assigned to relatively minor mortgage frauds because, as I describe below, the (Mortgage Bankers Association) conned the FBI into defining out of existence the control frauds. With no assistance from the banking regulators, and an industry collapsing in an orgy of mortgage fraud that the FBI had warned about but could not understand or effectively stop given the death of criminal referrals by the financial regulators an overwhelmed FBI turned for industry expertise to the MBA. It was a disastrous choice and the FBI has refused to end the partnership with the perps.
SNIP...
Given the fact that the CEOs of large fraudulent lenders are criminally liable for tens or even hundreds of thousands of acts of mortgage fraud we should be seeing our prisons overrun with elite white-collar criminals. Instead, the DOJ has no convictions of the elite bankers who led the control frauds that caused the crisis.
CONTINUED...
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/08/the-incredible-con-the-banksters-pulled-on-the-fbi.html