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In reply to the discussion: 2008 Meltdown Was Worse Than Great Depression, Bernanke Says [View all]Octafish
(55,745 posts)24. How can you claim to be a reporter when you won't even get a second source, stevenleser?
Here's what the FBI man said:
FBI saw threat of loan crisis
A top official warned of widening mortgage fraud in 2004, but the agency focused its resources elsewhere.
August 25, 2008|Richard B. Schmitt | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, was starting to attract shady operators and billions in losses were possible.
"It has the potential to be an epidemic," Chris Swecker, the FBI official in charge of criminal investigations, told reporters in September 2004. But, he added reassuringly, the FBI was on the case. "We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis," he said.
Today, the damage from the global mortgage meltdown has more than matched that of the savings-and-loan bailouts of the 1980s and early 1990s. By some estimates, it has made that costly debacle look like chump change. But it's also clear that the FBI failed to avert a problem it had accurately forecast.
Banks and brokerages have written down more than $300 billion of mortgage-backed securities and other risky investments in the last year or so as homeowner defaults leaped and weakness in the real estate market spread.
SNIP
Most observers have declared the mess a gross failure of regulation. To be sure, in the run-up to the crisis, market-oriented federal regulators bragged about their hands-off treatment of banks and other savings institutions and their executives. But it wasn't just regulators who were looking the other way. The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, are supposed to act as the cops on the beat for potentially illegal activities by bankers and others. But they were focused on national security and other priorities, and paid scant attention to white-collar crimes that may have contributed to the lending and securities debacle.
Now that the problems are out in the open, the government's response strikes some veteran regulators as too little, too late.
Swecker, who retired from the FBI in 2006, declined to comment for this article.
But sources familiar with the FBI budget process, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the growing fraud problem, say that he and other FBI criminal investigators sought additional assistance to take on the mortgage scoundrels.
They ended up with fewer resources, rather than more.
CONTINUED
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/25/business/fi-mortgagefraud25
Sometimes it's a good idea to get a lot of sources, stevenleser, especially when it comes to the banksters, crooks and traitors who stiffed the American people with a $16 trillion IOU to the Wall Street casino.
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I know some like to think so, but it wasn't. That doesnt mean they didnt exploit it once it happened
stevenleser
Aug 2014
#7
I don't have to read 3rd hand articles. I've talked to several folks in the industry here in NYC.
stevenleser
Aug 2014
#23
How can you claim to be a reporter when you won't even get a second source, stevenleser?
Octafish
Aug 2014
#24
Anyone Wall Street installs as our President will do the same as Obama did, "Look forward,
Dustlawyer
Aug 2014
#38
not if u were one of the corporations that raped the nation with dems/repubs assistance nt
msongs
Aug 2014
#2
Even though probably more people in the depression were living on "nothing"...
cascadiance
Aug 2014
#5
Then it's a good thing we threw all those bankers in jail, and re-regulated the banking industry.
tclambert
Aug 2014
#6
Isn't it nice that the bankers learned their lesson and they won't do that again?
Autumn
Aug 2014
#8
People with bank savings accounts are losing money every day with connivance of the Fed.
AdHocSolver
Aug 2014
#33
Look...No deposit account went from X to zero during the financial crisis....
A HERETIC I AM
Aug 2014
#35