Wall Street Throws Another $20 Billion At Its Regulators

Monday was settlement day on Wall Street. The four largest Wall Street banks and a handful of smaller ones tossed $20 billion at their various regulators and slid home free without going to jail over egregious foreclosure abuses that have ravaged the nation and left millions of families in desperate straits.

News of big settlements with Wall Street are typically dumped on Friday to ensure the news is old hat by Monday morning. But these two big settlements, totaling over $20 billion, came at the beginning of the news week, adding the curiosity element as to why Wall Street actually wanted to create buzz around the settlements. It didn’t take long to figure that out: the buzz was to help prop up bank shares on the premise that the worst of the past misdeeds are now behind the banks. The regulators eagerly boarded this public relations train by releasing the barest of details on the settlements.

In the first settlement, ten U.S. banks including the four largest U.S. banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – agreed to pay $8.5 billion to shut down a review of individual foreclosure case files in a process established by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve in 2011. As we reported last week, that program was hopelessly compromised from the start by its structure. So-called “independent” reviewers were paid directly by the banks and had to rely on the banks for much of their information, rather than being able to speak directly to the abused foreclosure victims.

read more: http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/01/wall-street-throws-another-20-billion-at-its-regulators/