The one thing that I don't understand is why some of the CEO's of these failed mortgage lenders are not doing a perp walk in FBI handcuffs. Under regulations enacted by the Republicans, a CEO is legally responsible for the financial statements made by his or her Company. Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and a whole slough of mortgage lenders engaged in deception and fraud.
If I took a couple of wrecked cars, cut them up welded them together, did a bit of bodywork and repainting, and then sold that car as "near-new, mint condition", would I be committing fraud? Well, as Sarah Palin would say, you betcha! And if that car came apart in an accident and killed somebody, I would probably end up in jail.
So how is it different when executives of WaMu, Countrywide and other lenders, knowingly extended mortgages to people with no ability to pay - well - anything, let alone a mortgage, and then packaged up that mortgage and sold them to investors both domestic and foreign as if they were AAA mortgage-backed securities (MBS)? These lenders were not lending money to prospective home-owners, so much as defrauding the buyers of MBS.
Uhh, shouldn't someone be calling the FBI or something? That's the SOP when there's massive fraud, right? The FBI has a large fraud division, right? Why aren't they taking names, slipping on the 'cuffs? Invoking RICO?
All I can say is that, if somebody doesn't get prosecuted soon, Charles Keating is going to start looking like the victim of unnecessarily harsh treatment. In the S&L meltdown of the late 1980's, another amazingly unpredicted failure of abandonment of financial oversight, people were actually prosecuted and convicted of fraud, embezzlement and theft. Are we going to see the crooks who ran WaMu, Countrywide, etc just walk away like a drunk from a wrecked car?