The Wall Street Lawsuits

Making a new thread for this story. The questions are, of course:

• Are the suits likely to succeed?
• Are they charging too much? Or not nearly enough?

For summary:

I'm all for it.

Could you imagine if FHFA won? All that money? Good lord.

I may be overestimating the wealth of these corporations, but somehow that doesn't seem like a whole lot. At least some action is being taken.

Thirty three BILLION dollars doesn't seem like a lot to you? Wow, how much money do you have, Professor?

What this looks like to me is the government essentially... punishing another part of the government, considering some if not all of these banks got their money from the Federal Reserve. I don't understand all the details (I am by no means any kind of financial whiz) but... I guess what I'm hoping for is tighter regulations more than current monetary recompense at this point. I mean, if they win, what exactly will the complainants do with all this money? Is the Agency going to give the money back to the initial investors or do something else with it?

I think he means that it's not that much compared to what these companies most surely have to take.

OK let's see, add 2 billion Carry the One....$196,132,000,000 approximate value. Compared to Congress' spending habits that is chump change.

196.1 Billion could be used to hold under old mortgages, though I doubt Congress will have any say over this money. Of course, if you're implying they should be sued for MORE, then hell I'm all ears.

Well, I suppose I'm more concerned about putting the money to use for the citizens rather than getting more of it, at this point. Again, not knowing all the details, it seems to me they're already suing these organizations for a pretty fair amount. If I understood more I might well be saying they should sue for more. But at this point, they might just be suing for amounts they think they can reasonably get should they win the lawsuits.

edited 12th Jan '12 5:25:38 PM by AceofSpades

So, less than $200 billion compared to the, what, $1,800 billion given as bailouts?

This is chump change.

Yeah this is mostly saving face while trying not to damage them all that much.

In terms of damage...yep, pure wrist-slap.

Of course, damaging them would defeat the point of bailing them out (which is either to win campaign money or to save the economy from the disastrous consequences of default, depending on your view).

What about both?

That's entirely too sane to ever be true.

Varying extents of both for each politician in question.

If we want a deterrent, than huge punishing fines aren't what we need, but rather an end to tax loopholes, a tax on capital gains, and a financial transaction tax.

Does every action the government takes have to be a quid pro quo with corporations?

Is anyone here acquainted with civil law? Maybe there is a legal reson they can't sue for more.

edited 12th Jan '12 11:49:26 PM by TheProffesor

^ Damage caps in many jurisdictions (including Federal) owing to the inability to enact cruel and/or unusual punishment on anyone or anything.

That total might be all they can think they can get away with without falling victim to them being illegal in their seizure attempts. (The Federal government has a losing record when it comes to defending harsh actions in the Supreme Court. A very losing record.)

It seems rather perverse to me that fining large banking conglomerates a fraction of their profits after they've used taxpayer money to award exuberant bonuses to their executives is considered "cruel and unusual". But again, the function of the fines is to recover some losses. Deterrence will have to achieved with different policy, not one-off punitive fines.

Bumping this thread because I don't know what other topic this would fit in.

Hernando de Soto on the cost of financial ignorance. HDS is a Peruvian economist and all around smart fellow. He's correctly pointed out how the wealth of the Western world was dependent on the good management of financial information so that we could record and perform transactions with property, and that capitalism worked fine until people started rigging the systems responsible for that information so that they began to lie to us.

It's a great article, but HDS misses one point: this rigging was a deliberate fraud and the people responsible for it are trying to hide the act.

Man I hope these suits go through and stronger stuff follows.

UPDATE: And the FHFA is sued in turn!

Interesting article on the Financial Crisis. What both your articles forgot is that the securities that were the source of the crisis (ultimately bundles of sup-prime mortgages) were rated by the so-called "Big Three" ratings agencies, ratings that were the basis of the trading value of those securities, the right to allow pensions and other low-risk funds to invest in them, the basis of "credit default swaps" (an agreement by a seller to pay a buyer if the security lost value- creating a cascade of debt obligations), and finally the market pressure to push out more sub-prime mortgages than otherwise would have been sold, were based on extremely poor reporting standards, which in turn were the result of allowing the rating agencies to bill the banks that they were creating the ratings for, thus creating an incentive for covering up poor risks. All this the result of the Bush admin's faith in the Market to police itself.

I did a review of a book about all this "All the Devils Are Here" by Bethany Mc Lean and Joe Nocera on my website.