Wall Street Massive Banking Perp Walk Closer to Reality?
Mega Wall Street Banks Admit Housing Fraud: Must Pay Billions

Clinton KY. Monday Jan 7 2013
By Ivan Potter
West Kentucky Journal

Editorial

Just maybe, in this year of 2013, we will witness a series of massed groups of men and women, dressed in orange jump suits and chained together doing the Federal Perp Walk down Wall Street.

As the FBI agent said to Nicolas Cage in the National Treasure movie, “Somebody has to go to jail.”

The chain of events started in 2007 and 2008.  These were the years we learned about banks that were too big to be allowed to fail. This was also after the largest bank robbery in history when the large banks put a gun to the head of Congress and said in 2008, “if you don’t bail us out of our financial holes, we will bankrupt the country.” Congress handed over 700 plus billions to make sure the top banks stayed afloat.

These were the years in which millions of middle class home owners found themselves at odds with these same banks. It was almost as if Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other mega banks declared war on the middle class.

On Monday, Jan. 7, 2013 the long reach of federal prosecutors has added another case to the mishandling of federal supported and backed housing.  Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and eight other banks and mortgage companies had been charged with massive housing fraud and foreclosure actions. Federal regulators reached a settlement of over $10 billion for these big banks to make amends on their mishandling of thousands of home mortgages.

Early Monday, Bank of America announced that it will agree to spend more than $10 billion to resolve the issue of wrongdoing by its housing and mortgage staff to defraud small home mortgage holders throughout America.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan spoke of how this action was a major step toward the bank’s handling of the legacy mortgage problems from the acquisition of Countrywide Financial Corporation from 2008. 

Bank of America said that the loans involved in the settlement have an aggregate original principal balance of about $1.4 trillion. The outstanding principal is about $300 billion.  

In October of 2012, another housing federal case broke. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan accused Wells Fargo of defrauding Fannie Mae housing program of hundreds of millions of dollars over ten years with improperly underwriting home loans.

Coming to light are the internal operational practices of how bankers ran scams, sold short on mortgages, failed to document loans according to proper federal guidelines, and in general, created a culture of greed in a stampede to take up front profits and bonuses without regard to long tern impacts upon the lives of millions who now stand at risk from a corrupt banking system.

Now, some 4 million middle class house owners have experienced a new kind of modern housing hell, where the banks have become adversarial in their rush toward large profits versus their traditional role of financial partnership with the homeowners of America. 

With each federal case brought to public awareness, there is growing a realization of just how bad the bankers misused their public trust and financial duties to watch over the money and wealth deposits of whole generations of Americans.

It is high time that somebody went to jail over this nightmare. A whole lot of “somebodies” need  to be wearing bright orange jump suits,  chained together, herded out of the big banks on their way to federal prison. This may be the right time to discuss the issue of breaking up these banks. 

The legacy of mega American banks is that they have reached almost as low a level of public confidence as Congress. They failed the American public trust and should forfeit their right to exist as portals of piracy upon the American landscape.