PBS Frontline - Wall Street Untouchables
The Untouchables - Why No One On Wall Street has Been Prosecuted
Premiering tonight on PBS.
There are several additional interviews and articles at Frontline. They are definitely worth checking out. Especially this little beauty with Lanny Breuer.
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Part two:
Whistleblowers detail mortgage fraud witnessed before the housing meltdown.
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Part three:
Frustration in Washington - Lawmakers question executives and grow impatient with the pace of criminal investigations.
More than four years after the financial crisis, not one senior Wall Street executive has faced criminal prosecution for fraud. Are Wall Street bankers simply “too big to jail?”
In The Untouchables, FRONTLINE producer and correspondent Martin Smith investigates why the U.S. Department of Justice has failed to act on credible evidence that Wall Street knowingly packaged and sold toxic mortgage loans to investors, loans that brought the U.S. and world economies to the brink of collapse.
So, after talking with top prosecutors, government officials and industry whistleblowers, what did he find? Is there a chance some prosecutions may still take place? What do we really know about the criminal cases that could be have been pursued? And what does this investigation reveal about Wall Street and its relationship with the government?
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Conclusion:
The Justice Department Under Fire - Mr. Covington & Burling
Lanny Breuer exposed by Frontline... (must read)
Jan 22, 2013 at 11:45 PM
Reader Comments (34)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/untouchables/lanny-breuer-financial-fraud-has-not-gone-unpunished/
Lanny Breuer: Financial Fraud Has Not Gone Unpunished
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/
How do you rate it, DB?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/untouchables/lanny-breuer-financial-fraud-has-not-gone-unpunished/
You might want to participate in this later today.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/untouchables/did-wall-st-get-away-with-it-live-chat-wed-2-pm-et/
Did Wall St. Get Away With It? Live Chat With Producer Wed. 2 pm ET
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Dr. P. is alive. Good to see you, my friend.
I don't think there was a clip with the Breuer link, just the transcript. When I finish watching tonight's broadcast, it will be interesting to see how much of the Breuer stuff made the final cut.
What’s amazing is that took Frontline less than 60 minutes to do it. The forethought that went into “The Untouchables” was extensive, elaborate even, but paid out big.
Quite consciously, FL repeatedly focused on the people behind the headlines and the Names in them. When Frontline talked with Senator Ted Kaufman, for instance, they also interviewed his chief of staff Jeff Connaughton, who gave us ordinary viewers a very real and credible feel for what it was like working for the boss.
FL’s behind-the-scenes angle got even better when they focused on ground-level troops. What’s compelling here is that everyone knows it’s the soldiers who always know the real score. As it turned out, FL was about to give us the real score on the mortgage business, which the show used to tremendous advantage against the DOJ itself. Frontline’s set-up came in three stages, and it was pretty much genius.
Frontline introduced three sets of foot soldiers. First were the contract people for Countrywide who reviewed the mortgage files for quality compliance; they knew there was fraud at Countrywide. Second were the FBI agents who investigated mortgages during Bush 43; they knew there was fraud throughout the mortgage industry. Third were the workers inside Bear Stearns who spoke about the company’s mortgage frauds to Nick Verbitsky, who was able to find these whistleblowers with next to no effort—working part-time and for the most part alone.
FL explained what happened in each case of these frauds:
--Countrywide’s contractors were overruled by their bosses, and the bad mortgages kept pumping through. The credibility of these contractors, incidentally, was buttressed by Richard Bowen, one of Citi’s chief risk officers who testified that 60-80% of Citi’s mortgages didn’t meet Citi’s own loan quality guidelines.
--The 1000 FBI agents who were all over the mortgage fraud were re-assigned by higher-ups.
--Bear Stearns imploded, but the whistleblowers, who’d been so easily discovered by a film director, were never contacted by anyone at the DOJ.
That background was interesting all on its own, but more importantly it set a rock solid foundation for what followed. FL next turned to Lanny Breuer, the head of criminal enforcement at the DOJ, for some answers. FL asked Breuer if the DOJ’s army of law enforcers even looked for whistleblowers that Nick Verbitsky found in abundance working part-time?
Breuer couldn’t tell the truth, of course, because then the whole wide world would know that the DOJ hasn’t lifted a finger to prosecute anyone on Wall Street—which FL had confirmed already, through the evasions of Lanny Breuer himself, by establishing that the DOJ had never used any wiretaps in its “incredible” efforts to root out fraud on Wall Street.
So Lanny Breuer had to lie instead and say that the DOJ had searched high and low for Bear Stearns whistleblowers, the falsity of which couldn’t have been any more glaring. The delicious gloss on top of it all was Lanny’s body language, which screamed “I AM A LIAR AND I AM PAID WELL BY MY MASTERS TO LIE ON TV EVEN THOUGH EVERYONE KNOWS I AM LYING WHEN I TELL MY RIDICULOUS LIES.”
And with that, Frontline exposed Lanny Breuer as the total liar and the DOJ as a servile Wall Street joke.
So now you know, America, who the Justice Department is working for, and it most definitely isn’t you.
Kudos to Frontline’s writers and producers. That was the most masterful unmasking I can remember seeing on TV.
You know, one piece of information that we released were documents from Clayton Holdings, who performed due diligence for two dozen banks, who were buying mortgages from the Countrywides, the Ameriquests, the New Centurys, packaging those loans up and selling them to investors.
And if you look at the reports of Clayton Holdings, they’re in black and white, and they’ve got numbers. And what they show is in each of these banks they were buying loans, … Clayton Holdings was finding that a substantial portion of the loans, I think overall from January of 2006 to March of 2007, that 28 percent of the loans did not meet the standards of the lender or of the bank buying those loans.
And notwithstanding that very clear evidence in black and white, in numbers, bank after bank after bank, here’s what those banks did. They took those loans, they knew they were defective, and notwithstanding that, they never told the investors. In fact, they told investors quite the opposite. When they knew that they didn’t meet the appropriate standards, they told the investors that in fact they did.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/untouchables/phil-angelides-enforcement-of-wall-st-is-woefully-broken/
Fraud. The term “fraud” was used repeatedly throughout the interviews with the Countrywide loan quality contractors. Unfortunately, it came up in connection with dubious incomes claimed by borrowers, which might have left open the impression that the problematic fraud stemmed from the borrowers.
It didn’t, nor could it have, since one legal requirement of establishing fraud is reasonable reliance on the misrepresentation by the defrauded party. It’s virtually impossible for a bank to be defrauded on a loan since its reliance on any data from a borrower—if it could happen at all—could never be reasonable given the banks’ access to so much data.
Frontline could have eliminated all doubt on this score by asking Richard Bowen why a bank would make a loan that it knew would fail. Or it could have shown the 2004 FBI study that said 80% of all mortgage fraud involved collusion by industry insiders.
S&L prosecutions. FL stated that over 1000 people were prosecuted and that 1/3 of these were executives. This is error. The actual numbers are well over 3000 total, more than 1000 of whom were executives.
FL should have added that the conviction rate during the S&L crisis was over 90%, and that the total cost of that crisis was $125-50 billion. But that would have necessitated a correction of FL’s statement that the current crisis has cost Americans “hundreds of billions.” That’s woefully wrong. The most conservative current estimate I’ve seen came from Dennis Kelleher, who admitted he pulled punches in arriving at a figure of $12.8 trillion.
The salient point with the S&L crisis is this: in terms of cost, the current crisis dwarfs the S&L crisis by a factor of 100-to-1. This begs the question: why are there not 100,000 financial executives in jail for the current crisis?
Proving criminal intent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Breuer, you’ve told us 100 times how darn hard it is to prove. Frontline should ask Breuer if William Black had a team of sorcerers working for him when they jailed 1000+ executives with a batting average of .900 plus after the S&L crisis.
HSBC. I haven’t watched the supplemental interview stuff, but two points jump out here. First, HSBC admitted to criminal behavior. So the question for Breuer is this: were you lying about the burden of proof being so high, or are your excuses for failing to prosecute a game of whack-a-mole? Additionally, HSBC said that most of the people involved in the bank’s admitted money-laundering operations had already left. How can prosecuting these people, who are outside this allegedly “systemic” bank, possibly jeopardize the banking system? Whatever answer follows—which won’t be the truth since Breuer lies all the time—is just another round of whack-a-mole.
1000 FBI agents. They were re-assigned, yes, but FL didn’t make it clear that they were re-assigned to anti-terrorism detail. This should lead to questions about the true nature of the anti-terrorism campaign, namely, that it’s completely fake, invented for the sole purpose of diverting resources and attention away from the real terrorists, who steal billions every day on Wall Street and threaten to destroy the economy when caught. But mom and pop aren’t the only ones who aren’t ready to wrap their heads around that fact, so major passes get handed out here.
Mortgage fraud. The focus was entirely on fraud involving mortgage quality (AAA ratings, etc.) That’s not only the hardest fraud to prove, it’s not even close to being the worst one. The worst fraud in the mortgage securitization process was the failure by mortgage originators and securitizers to convey ANY PROMISSORY NOTES AT ALL. Thus, rather than talking about a loss of 60-80 cents on the dollar, frauds in this class all involve the loss of 100 cents on the dollar. Moreover, this fraud enabled companies like Bear Stearns to sell the same note to multiple buyers. This should lead to questions like, when someone sells the same thing many times over to separate buyers, what possible inference is available OTHER than an intent to defraud? Why has the DOJ never, not once, ever prosecuted anyone for these frauds, which cause the most damage and are the easiest to prove?
To end on a positive note, “The Untouchables” did touch on a great many important issues. The most critical one was raised by someone who mused, sometimes I wonder if we should start focusing not so much on Wall Street’s crimes but on why the Department of Justice is so disinterested in these crimes.
Indeed. Without expressly saying as much, Frontline amply demonstrated that the real crisis underway is not a financial crisis at all, but a legal one. To paraphrase Mark Twain, that’s a difference between a lightning bug and lightning itself.
And that’s the real problem with the bailouts. They didn’t fix the crisis at all, they only covered up the crimes that caused it. The next implosion will make 2008 look like a picnic.
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It's going to be a debt implosion, and you will notice when Treasuries spike. It's still at least 2-3 years away but once $20 trillion starts to get close (where the national debt will be in 2015), things are going to get a little crazy with rates. That's my first negative call on Treasuries since I launched 4 years ago. I've been long a bunch of treasuries for a long f-cking time, and am looking for an exit point this year.
Wachovia CEO Robert Steel bought Wachovia’s stock in a breach of trust, confidence and his fiduciary duty to my clients and shareholders while in possession of material, nonpublic information.
On July 9, 2008, Robert Steel became president and CEO of Wachovia after working for Goldman Sachs from 1976 to 2004 and the US Treasury under former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson from October 10, 2006 until July 9, 2008. Mr. Steel was “the principal adviser to the secretary on matters of domestic finance and led the department's activities regarding the U.S. financial system, fiscal policy and operations, governmental assets and liabilities, and related economic matters,” according to Wikipedia’s biography. Mr. Steel most likely knew about other firm’s borrowings via his time spent at the U.S. Treasury Department.
On July 22, 2008, Mr. Steel personally purchased 1,000,000 shares of Wachovia’s stock as the company’s TAF borrowing reached $12.5 billion, which appears not to have been disclosed in securities filings audited by KPMG.
In an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer On Monday, September 15, 2008, Robert Steel said "I think it's really about...transparency. People have to understand the assets and really be able to say, this is what I own... Complete disclosure. ...we can work through this with transparency, liquidity and capital. ...Our strategy was to give you all the data so you could make your own model. We tell you what we're doing... ...we're raising capital ourselves by basically shrinking the balance sheet, cutting the dividend, cutting expenses. We can create more capital ourselves that way... for now, we feel like we can work through this..." After Jim Cramer asked "Should there be any sort of quick regulatory relief from the SEC that would make life easier to be able to make your bank much stronger?", Mr. Steel responded "I don't think it's about my bank."
After not reporting TAF loans, Wachovia's CEO wrote "I, Robert K. Steel, certify that: I have reviewed this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2008 of Wachovia Corporation; Based on my knowledge, this report does not contain any untrue statement of a material fact or omit to state a material fact necessary to make the statements made, in light of the circumstances under which such statements were made, not misleading with respect to the period covered by this report; Based on my knowledge, the financial statements, and other financial information included in this report, fairly present in all material respects the financial condition, results of operations and cash flows of the registrant as of, and for, the periods presented in this report" on October 30, 2008.
Mr. Steel was at least aware of Wachovia’s Federal Reserve loans since July, 2012, if not the undisclosed loans to multiples of other financial institutions.
If Mr. Steel was “the principal adviser…on matters of domestic finance and led the department's activities regarding the U.S. financial system, fiscal policy and operations”, how could he not have known and acted on undisclosed material information?
On June 22, 2010, Robert Steel was appointed Deputy Mayor for Economic Development by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after which, Steel resigned his seat on the Wells Fargo board. According to Morningstar data, Mr. Steel owned 601,903 shares of Wells Fargo in 2010, which would be worth $20,446,644.91 as of October 26, 2012.
George Hartzman
Greensboro , North Carolina
So 2-3 years is a ballpark rather than any kind of confidence interval since you're looking for an exit point this year. I know next to nothing about that market. However, in 2010 I started noticing a few articles but mostly posts in the blogosphere popping up asking why Treasury yields were so low, for example:
http://www.youngresearch.com/authors/jeremyjones/an-alternative-to-ultra-low-treasury-yields/
A year later, the bloggers' blogger, Eric deCarbonnel (who's not widely known but is/was watched like a hawk by some), did both a post and a video on this question. (And, true to form, his video is like watching water blasting out of a fire hydrant--from 1 foot away and head-on.) Bottom line, according to the author? The Fed, a la AIG's strategy with CDS, is selling put options on Treasuries to suppress yields. The blog entry, which includes the video, is here:
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2011/04/federal-reserve-is-selling-default-insurance-put-options-on-treasury-bonds-to-drive-down-yields.html
That struck many as insane at the time. However, later that year we learned from the GAO audit that the Fed had lent out $16 trillion to the usual bankrupt suspects, fully confirming the Fed's deranged desperation to prop up degenerate gamblers.
Here is more I wrote in the process of trying to hold a Congressman on the budget and appropriations committees accountable:
In June 2001 the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, published its study, "Government at the Brink.” The study describes the failure of federal government agencies to maintain reliable financial systems and/or to publish as independent annual audited financial statements as required by law. The President’s initial 2002 budget (before increases for 9-11) proposed that approximately 85% of all federal appropriations be awarded to the very same agencies the Thompson study states either (a) fail to maintain reliable financial systems, (b) fail to publish trustworthy or, in some cases, any, independent certified financial statements (as required by law), or both.
At that same time, Congressman Steve Horn (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations issues a report card regarding attempts by federal agencies to produce reliable annual audited financial statements.
Congressman Horn's Financial Management Report Card
Agencies Rated D or F, Fiscal Year 2001 (Ended 9/30)
D+
•Environmental Protection Agency
•Small Business Administration
D
•Department of Health and Human Services
•Department of Housing and Urban Development
•Department of the Interior
•Department of Veterans Affairs
D-
•Department of Commerce ?Department of Education
•Department of the Treasury
•Nuclear Regulatory Commission
•Department of Justice
•Department of State
•Department of Transportation
•Agency for International Development
F
•Department of Agriculture
•Department of Defense
•Federal Emergency Management Administration
•National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Other reports from sources like agency inspectors general and government whistleblowers charge that the problems are much deeper than mere accounting: they allege stolen and missing inventory (planes, tanks, etc.) and in some cases actually admit that they rely on black budget funding (i.e., funding that is "off balance sheet” and not subject to Congressional oversight). The existence of such reports requires that we ask whether the very government officials and contractors who are paid handsomely to protect and manage our resources in accordance with the law are looting the federal government.
Total undocumented accounting adjustments for reported periods for the Department of Defense (fall of 1997 to date) amount to a whopping $3.3 trillion, or $11,700 for every American. (Many American families don’t even have $11,700 in savings in their bank accounts.) The Department of Defense has failed to produce independent audited financial statements since the requirement went into effect in 1995. HUD’s Inspector General refused to certify HUD’s fiscal 1999 financial statements. Since both agencies have refused to explain the undocumented adjustments in adequate detail for some years and declined to report or make public undocumented adjustments, we have no evidence to document that large amounts of assets or money are not being stolen.
Catherine Austin Fitts, Saving Tennessee
FRONTLINE: Marty - some viewers have wondered about whether or how the Justice Department or other government agencies have responded to the film. Any word?
Martin Smith: Frontline - Well, the justice department called and said they thought it was a hit piece, that i came with an agenda and that they will never co-operate with us in the future.
SKIN--Try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnZnkaq8Nf8
It's from user cedec0, title is: FRAUD: Federal Reserve Is Selling Put Options On Treasury Bonds To Drive Down Yields
Martin Smith: Frontline - Well, the justice department called and said they thought it was a hit piece, that i came with an agenda and that they will never co-operate with us in the future.
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That's f-ing awesome. Gotta love it when the truth hurts so bad the knives come out.
By the way, the reason links sometimes show up dead is the 's' in 'https' of the URL you post. Just delete the 's' and the link will work. I fix them in comments for folks when I see them, but I'm sure that I miss a bunch.
To say nothing of the out-and-out sycophants...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/doj-criminal-division-chief-stepping-down/2013/01/23/e4331e32-64e0-11e2-b84d-21c7b65985ee_story.html
Yes. There's no question about it.
"where he will end up next"?
Covington & Burling
"Doesn't sound like a career ended."
Maybe not. But Lanny Breuer will have a big fat shit stain next to face in the history books, and that's forever.
Make no mistake: last night was an unmitigated DISASTER for the DOJ. Obama is smart enough to see that. Whether he's smart enough to save his own legacy is very much in doubt.
Here's to FAIL, Lanny...
http://cageradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/heres-to-fail1.jpg
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/untouchables/transcript-37/
Bye, bye Breuer. I wager the punk resigned, tired of having his name sullied all over the economic blogoshpere. This dude can't stand the heat.
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George
I recall an email from you. Thanks for commenting. Bob Steel is immune from scrutiny, like so many others, Stephen Friedman at Goldman coming first to mind.
I wounder if they actualy, and firmly "belived" in this system, and its not easy to digest that, so give it time, and also so that the general heep is becaming aware and educated in what the issue is about.
The present banking system, and their crimes.
Take that away and eraze the debth, end the wars, end the FeD, and I ashure you, Americe will change, and that within just some Years, this present path is leading right into the abyss.
I have absolutly no symphaty with them at all, nada, when they are in the Bread line, or aplaying for work as WE all do, time to time, then perhaps, we see Justice done.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziRR5h3b4YU
hehe
Babylon may fall after all.
peace
Breuer is just another rat abandoning the ship he helped sink.