Banks, SEC in talks to settle mortgage charges: report

(Reuters) – The securities regulator is in talks with major Wall Street banks to settle fraud allegations relating to the sale of toxic mortgage bonds to various investors that helped unleash the financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The first settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could be reached as soon as next week, while some of the other deals could take months to work out, the WSJ said.

SEC’s negotiations with the banks include JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup Inc, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, now an unit of Bank of America, and UBS, according to the Journal.

Check out the rest here…

Expect another small “fine” as the cost of doing business…

As the chairman of the now defunct FCIC, Phil Angelides said yesterday in a response to the findings presented yesterday by Carl Levin in his Report | WALL STREET AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse

The conclusion is that America now has a dual justice system: “One for ordinary people and then one for people with money and enormous wealth and power.”

“To the extent laws were broken, we need deterrents. If someone robs a 7-11, they took $500 and they were able to settle the next day for $50 and no admission of wrongdoing, they’d knock over that 7-11 again. And we’ve seen time after time where people and firms have made tens, one hundreds, billions of dollars. They’ve settled charges for pennies on the dollar. At Citigroup for example they represented that they had $13 billion of subprime mortgage exposure when they really had $55 billion. The penalty to the chief financial officer who made $19 million that year, 2007, was $100,000. Goldman was fined $500 million but the date they settled their stock moved up $2 billion. There’s been no real consequence.”

So don’t expect much…

Are we ever gonna see these?

~

4closureFraud.org