This is nice to hear:
The New York attorney general has requested information and documents in recent weeks from three major Wall Street banks about their mortgage securities operations during the credit boom, indicating the existence of a new investigation into practices that contributed to billions in mortgage losses.
Officials in Eric T. Schneiderman’s, office have also requested meetings with representatives from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. The inquiry appears to be quite broad, with the attorney general’s requests for information covering many aspects of the banks’ loan pooling operations. They bundled thousands of home loans into securities that were then sold to investors such as pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies.
It is unclear which parts of the byzantine securitization process Mr. Schneiderman is focusing on. His spokesman said the attorney general would not comment on the investigation, which is in its early stages.
Several civil suits have been filed by federal and state regulators since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, some of which have generated settlements and fines, most prominently a $550 million deal between Goldman Sachs and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Better late than never, I guess.
gizmo
Here’s my favorite paragraph from that article:
“By opening a new inquiry into bank practices, Mr. Schneiderman has indicated his unwillingness to accept one of the settlement’s terms proposed by financial institutions — that is, a broad agreement by regulators not to conduct additional investigations into the banks’ activities during the mortgage crisis. Mr. Schneiderman has said in recent weeks that signing such a release was unacceptable.”
kwAwk
For the life of me I can’t figure out what the title has to do with the citation….
ChrisS
I guess … but it’s not like the underlying problem will go away anytime soon. And as far as anyone can tell, all the cash that was locked up in mortgage-backed securities for a quick profit is sloshing around elsewhere, blowing up bubbles in everything.
And supporting a pile of wingnuts trying lie hell to tear apart the social safety net (which gets thinner and thinner by the year).
cleek
@kwAwk:
i assume this is the reference…
ChrisS
@kwAwk:
Former NY Gov Eliot Spitzer used to be a knight in armor against the greedy bastards of wall street … then his proclivity for spendy prostitutes hit the news.
kwAwk
@cleek:
Thanks. I needed that.
eemom
iffen I didn know better, I’d think Cole was trying to spark an Elliot Spitzer flame war.
Naaaaah….
goblue72
Goldman Sachs posted a $2.7bn net profit is the first QUARTER of 2011. And those quarterly profits were 20% lower than previous quarter due to GS buying back $5bn of shares from Warren Buffett.
Put another way, a $550MM penalty to GS is 5% or less of their annual net profits. Not net revenues – net PROFITS.
They are laughing at us.
eemom
Just in case: fuck anyone who says that hypocritical, law breaking asshole was “set up.”
cbear
@eemom: He was set up.
Hunter Gathers
This guy better not have any skeletons in his closet. Our Galtian overlords are going to be all over him like stink on shit. I am also looking forward to the tons of articles printed in the WSJ and the WaPo that will attack him for not showing our upper class betters the deference that they deserve, and how he is nothing but a power mad partisan for daring to go after our poor, beleaguered financial sector. Why does Schneiderman hate job creators?
Poopyman
Cole wasn’t the only one thinking of the hookers.
(That didn’t come out right.)
eemom
@cbear:
bull. shit.
Cat Lady
Schneiderman’s a good guy. He hired a couple of white collar crime heavy hitting defense attorneys as deputy AGs, so he could make this really interesting. I too hope there isn’t a kiddie pr0n stash on his hard drive somewhere.
eric
@eemom: I would never say anything categorical one way or the other…..to say it was categorically untrue, it has to be your position that a hooker would not take money to proverbially screw her john while literally screwing him…. ;)
Poopyman
@eemom: Aaaaaand, they’re off!
eemom
“Bitch set me up.” — Marion Barry
mds
@cbear:
Eh. “Set up” implies to me that events were arranged to trap him. This was more “taking advantage of” then “setting up.” The bank (possibly) smelled opportunity in the just-under-the-limit withdrawals, and the feds definitely grabbed the chance to invoke a dusty, little-enforced statute to publicly go after exactly one of the love brokerage’s clients. Then, rather than prosecute and jail him for his wicked criminality, they did a deal whereby he simply resigned from office with his political future destroyed. But the key item is that none of this would have happened if the idiot hadn’t actually been frequenting prostitutes. That’s why he wasn’t “set up.”
… Ahem. Anyway, I do hope that Mr. Schneiderman has a pretty clean nose. Because, e.g., though he could probably wave off a bunch of unpaid parking tickets, if he’s actually dealing heroin, of course they’ll pounce on that.
Poopyman
Hey Cole! Jane wants you to give her a call!
OT, but I knew you would want to know.
zeitgeist
i care about Spitzer’s proclivities (and whether our knowledge of them was a ‘set-up’) about as little as i cared about Clinton’s.
David “Diapers” Vitter remains in the Senate, where he can use secret holds and other toys to further comfort the comfortable.
Spitzer, of the party of unilateral disarmament, resigned where he can no longer be the pit bull that the Street actually (for once) feared.
There is no calculation by which this contradictory state of, um, affairs makes the world a better place.
Church Lady
Who cares about this? Another day, another bankster will not pay any price. Instead, can we trash talk Ahhhhnold? I’m thinking that his next movie needs to be The Sperminator: The Wrath of Maria.
El Cid
This could even result in a negotiated settlement in which the audited companies will have to agree to implement some sort of program which could possibly help a few homeowners be more likely to keep their house, but maybe not, and there might be plenty of room for banks to wiggle. That would be a huge improvement.
dollared
@Church Lady: I love this. From now on, if the Governator has 14 martinis and hits a light pole with his Humvee, it will be known forever as the Kennedy Family Revenge Plot.
dollared
@eemom: Glad you’re really focused on the well being of the nation and the enforcement of its laws. And not on ranting about how casual prostitution is just as bad as cratering the economy of the entire world, and then extorting $200 BILLION DOLLARs that my children will have to repay.
Eemom. Laser focus on the common good.
Elizabelle
re your headline:
First thing I thought too, although you said it succinctly and more cleverly.
I remember the Wall Street types high fiving when Spitzer was brought down, and it was not because of his sexual proclivities.
cbear
@eemom: I know it’s a hard concept for some to grasp, but two things can be true at the same time.
1) Spitzer was breaking the law and was incredibly reckless in his behavior.
2) Incredibly powerful people were frothing at the mouth to take him down and federal investigators under the Bush Justice Department provided the means with which to nail him.
Some of us who watched an administration lie us into an illegal war, torture people, and basically eviscerate the Bill of Rights, are just a mite suspicious that Spitzer’s takedown was due only to their blind adherence to the rule of law.
Crazy, I know.
Guster
@cbear: So you’re saying that Spitzer wasn’t breaking the law and his behavior was completely responsible, right?
Otherwise, that just doesn’t compute.
OzoneR
I’m so glad my local liberal-leaning publications told me to vote for Dan Donovan because Eric Schneiderman was a dirty State Senator. I’m even more glad no one listened to them.
dollared
@Guster: Let me help CBear. Law enforcement and Justice Department personnel are supposed to do their job in an impartial way, and are supposed to focus on their assigned task. When federal prosecutors leave their regular assignments and focus on a small time call girl ring to take down a political opponent, that is an abuse of power and a violation of legal ethics. Clear enough? Doesn’t excuse the crime, but it does point out that the situation stinks of corruption on the part of the prosecutors.
AAA Bonds
Motherfucking awesome. Spitzer set the stage for this, and I’m glad Scheiderman is making the task his own.
alwhite
As a guy I am always dismayed that some men feel some need to the services provide by sex workers.
As a human I am always outraged when men that are willing to fight for the common betterment fall to this blight.
As a BJ reader I am sick to death of these sideshow arguments. Mr. Sptizers proclivities, real or imagined, are outside what this fight should be about and those of us on the right side of this fight shouldn’t waste time arguing with each other about this silly crap.
Also, lets hope the new guy is a straight arrow, Boy Scout with a pitbulls jaw and a lions heart.
cbear
@Guster:
Read much?
Frankensteinbeck (The ex-Uloborus)
I hope they did find something illegal. The problem with the collapse was that the crap they were pulling may have been immoral, but it wasn’t against the law.
Let us pray that as greedy bastards they just couldn’t resist actually going over the line for another 2%, and there’s evidence somewhere to prove it.
eemom
@dollared:
that is totally misreprenting what I said. IOW, the argument of a loser.
Don’t fucking put words in my mouth, loser.
eemom
@cbear:
two other things can also be true:
We need aggressive enforcers of the law who will prosecute Wall Street thugs.
People who break the laws they enforce against others are not fit to enforce the law.
dollared
@eemom: So, use some words. You’re the one who asked for a fight.
Stefan
As a guy I am always dismayed that some men feel some need to the services provide by sex workers.
I too am dismayed that men want to have frequent and anonymous sex. It’s quite dismaying.
jh
@Frankensteinbeck (The ex-Uloborus):
There were enough varieties of fraud going on at all levels of the mortgage backed securities industry to prosecute everyone from borrowers up to the heads of investment banks.
IOW, what was happenning was both immoral AND illegal.
goblue72
@eemom – So Pres. Clinton should not only have been impeached but removed from office by the Senate? He broke the law – he committed perjury.
I love the smell of the inflexibility of ideologues in the morning. Smells like…naivete.
eemom
@goblue72:
I love the smell of false equivalencies in the afternoon. Smells like bullshit.
Robert Waldmann
My headline would be “Do what you want with consenting adult hookers (except watch out for state lines) just don’t resign if people find out.”
maus
@alwhite:
Why? I assume you think all sex workers are human-trafficked minors with pimps.
@eemom:
You threw a fit because some people don’t see equal harm in visiting an escort and systemic banking fraud. “Hypocrite” is a strange, simplistic attempt at equivalence.
Progressive Elitist
@OzoneR: Which left leaning publications were these? I’m not from NY, but I have to know, what were they thinking? Isn’t Schneiderman actually quite progressive for a statewide candidate?
alwhite
@Stefan: @maus:
As a guy married 37 years I have never felt the need to pick up a hooker. Maybe I’m too cheap, maybe I’m just lucky & have a wife that likes to fuck as much as I do. I whatever the reason it is sad that some adults have so little control or so little self awareness that they need to fuck hookers. Thats sad really.
Yes because the girls (usually) or women that get into sex work always have someone to look out for them & always have a heart of gold & are just one john away from meeting Richard Geer who will take them away from their soul deadening existence and are just working their way through college and are totally undamaged by fucking strangers for money. Yeah, nice fantasy world.
See, I don’t give a shit if Clinton or Newtie get blow jobs from staffers if only they would actually help American do better. But I don’t think for a second that both the pitcher and the catcher get that experience for free. But human tragedy is just a joke we all can have a good laugh about.
EconWatcher
@eemom:
OK, I feel like I gotta weigh in on this Spitzer thing, though I will probably regret it.
If Spitzer only had his dalliances while Governor of New York, I would view the federal investigation and aftermath as a political hit job. It would have nothing or almost nothing to do with his duties as Governor.
But he had his dalliances while he was Attorney General, so the service he was frequenting was engaged in criminal activity that was within his jurisdiction as the state’s chief law enforcement officer. And in fact,
his office had prosecuted at least one other such service while he was in charge and bragged about it in a press release. He was personally in possession of detailed incriminating information about another such service, but apparently opted NOT to prosecute that one, when it obviously could have had dire personal consequences for him.
His conduct was a competely unacceptable violation of his duties, because it suggests that he did not faithfully and equally execute the laws due to his own personal interests. And I WANT the US Justice Department to investigate state law enforcement officers who put themselves in such a position.
It has nothing to do with the morality of his extramarital dalliances, about which I could care less. It has everything to do with maintaining the appearance and the reality of equal justice under law.
eemom
@maus:
for fuck’s sake. I thought better of you.
Show me where I said those are of “equal harm.” SHOW me.
Fucking sick of you reading-challenged assholes.
eemom
@EconWatcher:
Thank you.
Both for the clarity of your analysis and for not being a simpleminded knee-jerk idiot.
dollared
@EconWatcher: well, OK. But the Governor is the person in charge of enforcing the laws of New York, not the Attorney General.
And the federal investigation was done by people who had proven through their actions in the Bush administration as people who had not maintained either the appearance or the reality of equal justice under the law.
So…what is your point? That in utopia this wasn’t a setup?