A Massive Bank Fraud that Calls for Jail Terms By Jim Freeman

[Demeter]

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jim_free_071213_a_massive_bank_fraud.htm




Not a Mortgage Meltdown, Not a Sub-Prime Crisis



It is a federal crime (under the RICO Act) to aid, abet or participate in criminal activity as part of an ongoing criminal organization. What part of that does the Sec-Treas and Fed-Chairman not understand?

The balloon that has not yet gone up is public (and media) recognition of the extended and complicit fraud committed by lenders, mortgage packagers, hedge funds and others who, for purposes of personal greed, created a whole class of liar-loans. They were even called that in the trade—liar-loans. That complicity does not necessarily (but may well) include either outright collusion or a creative blind-eye on the part of federal regulating agencies...The public is confusing (and being encouraged to confuse) the housing bubble of the last half-dozen years with the sub-prime mortgage fraud. They are different animals and the criminals of the latter are trying mightily to cover themselves with the blanket of the former.

The ‘housing bubble’ is like other recent enthusiasms for investments that seemed ever to increase in value, to a point where they attracted a ‘bandwagon’ effect. You were a fool if you didn’t buy a second home, flip it for profit and buy another. Getting sucked in to a bubble may be bad judgment, but it’s not a crime. Like all other investments, you roll the dice, take a chance, maybe win and maybe lose.

The invention of the sub-prime mortgage as an investment vehicle, carried to the extremes it was, then sliced and diced into opaque securities to entice investors is quite obviously criminal. The purpose was not to create a broader base of homeowners. The intent was to fraudulently expose a new (and invented) class of borrowers. Those with no credit and no assets, would be introduced to a bait and switch of monumental proportion. The purpose was to steal money.

What probably makes this a criminal activity under the RICO Act is the extent to which lenders colluded in the fraud, the interstate and international processing of those fraudulent loan documents, including the transfer of vast quantities of cash and (most damning of all) the intent to cover the fraud by salting otherwise worthwhile investments.

This blatantly criminal activity is being characterized by our president, Secretary of the Treasury, Fed Chairman and mainstream media as a “difficulty in which millions of Americans may lose their homes.”

It is not that. It is an extended and multi-level scheme whereby lenders extended fraudulent credit (in the form of mortgages) to un-creditworthy borrowers, for their own profit. Conflict of interest doesn't even begin to describe their crimes against the corporate assets of third parties...

MORE AT LINK...



Authors Bio: Jim Freeman’s op-ed pieces and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald-Tribune, CNN, The New York Review, The Jon Stewart Daily Show and a number of magazines.

[indepat]

1. That criminality/racketeering oozes from every pore of this scheme is evident on its face

[flashl]

2. "The invention of the sub-prime mortgage as an investment vehicle"

Have you ever noticed that financial vechicles that benefit the few are regularly "invented"?

Yet, after these "inventions" have created massive debt its become a tax burden for taxpayers?

If a "vehicle" can be "invented" to create debt, why isn't there a means to create a "vehicle" to pay the debts OTHER THAN taxpayers?

[yurbud]

3. a credible accusation when you think back to S & L scandal

they loaned depositors money to friends, friends defaulted, taxpayers bailed depositors, and friend and S & L owner split the dough.