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The obscene greed-and-arrogance stories emanating from Wall Street
are piling up so fast, it's getting hard to keep up. This one is from
last week, but I missed it – it's about the foreclosure/robo-signing
settlement that was concluded earlier this year.
The upshot of this story is that in advance of that notorious
settlement, the government ordered banks to hire "independent"
consultants to examine their loan files to see just exactly how corrupt
they were.
Now it comes out that not only were these consultants not so
independent, not only did they very likely skew the numbers seriously in
favor of the banks, and not only were these few consultants paid over
$2 billion (over 20 percent of the entire settlement amount) while the
average homeowner only received $300 in the deal – in addition to all of
that, it appears that federal regulators will not turn over the
evidence of impropriety they discovered during these reviews to
homeowners who may want to sue the banks.
In other words, the government not only ordered the banks to hire
consultants who may have gamed the foreclosure settlement in favor of
the banks, but the regulators themselves are hiding the information from
the public in order to shield the banks from further lawsuits.
Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
To recap: in the foreclosure deal, 13 banks agreed to pay a total of
$9.3 billion to settle their liability in a number of areas, including
robo-signing, which is just a euphemism for mass-perjury – robo-signing
is the practice of having low-level bank employees sign documents
attesting to full knowledge of case files in court foreclosure actions,
when in fact they were signing hundreds of files per day, often having
no idea whether the paperwork was correct or not.
It was done across the industry and turned housing cases across
America into nightmares of jumbled and/or forged paperwork, in which
even people who did not deserve to be thrown out of their homes were
uprooted thanks to systematic errors by faceless bureaucrats who cut
legal corners purely to save money.
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