Let's sue Bernanke then.

Qui Tam for fun and profit. We do this quite a bit when we uncover Medicare/Medicaid fraud.

Vitchilo - As torture has been viewed as a policy choice, not requiring investigation or prosecution, the tyrannical policies of the Fed cannot possibly be crimes. Note also that this "settlement" did not result in an admission of wrongdoing. God, I love this country.

bilge

Beautiful, just beautiful. This post put a smile on my face.

One question: if the banksters have captured the courts and regulatory agencies, what are the chances a whistleblower will prevail?

Edit: And, in the era of TBTF bailouts, are the payouts from Qui Tam settlements ultimately paid by the taxpayer? Would be sad if they were.

Makes you wonder how many non-existent mortgages the Fed has on their balance sheet and off balance sheet (maiden lane I II III). I also wonder how many of those non existent mortgages are being service charged every month. Which also makes we wonder what % of the banks earning is due to monthly serivce charges on non-existent and foreclosed houses....

^^ I'll go with that

I've called the IRS fraud hotline several times to complain about the lack of investigation on the REMIC fraud. I don't have insider knowledge though. Wish someone who does would come forward on that, but of course it would be swept under the already existing (mountainous) rug of fraud. Is there any estimate in dollar amounts as to how much REMIC fraud? The penalties and interest must be staggering.

A Tickerforum Qui Tam Team? I'm in. I'll quit my job now and did complex litigation paralegal work for a long time.

Anyone else want in?

Did that $25B penalty included some immunity from further prosecution or litigation? It usually works something like that.

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A Tickerforum Qui Tam Team? I'm in. I'll quit my job now and did complex litigation paralegal work for a long time.

I'd love to join, but I'm already part of another international Qui Tam team. It deals in another area of business (large multinational manufacturers) but I'll check.

Glad to see Gen finally caught on to this one.

The immunity from prosecution or litigation (aside from the whistleblowers) is a not part of the FCA Qui Tam case.

Remember, your contribution has to be indispensable to the case and you have to be first in line to report it.

How I would LOVE to see this particular post go viral!

So why haven't there been more of these whistleblowers come forward? Or maybe there are, but we aren't aware of them yet.

I just tweeted this one.

hmmm... I reported it when an international fugitive sold property here in the Hamptons. Of course I reported it to a former SEC prosecutor, not the government. Still irks me...although any recovery would not make it worth losing my job.

I'm wondering about the fraud on the shareholders of the banks. Looks like the customers got screwed and the fiduciaries that own the companies got screwed as well. When are the people that own these companies going to demand an investigation into who stole their money? Isn't there some kind of fraud that covers publicly traded companies?

This mother is going to blow again. I just heard Art Cashin call China a potential black swan. I have been calling China a bomb since at least 2008 and would have before if I was paying any attention to what was going on there. I didn't know how all this stuff was done, but I knew WFC, C, JPM and BAC were bombs because I knew they were making a massive number of mortgages and I knew the conventional market would go down with the subprime market, because I was in the real estate business here in the 1980's. In fact, I was glad and sad I wasn't more involved, because getting a million or so at a time out of a flip of land financed on both ends by an S&L would have been really fun for a guy in his late 20's. Handcuffs and jail wouldn't have been fun at all. The China of today is a country full of Dallas and Houston Texas of the mid 1980's. Empty buildings constructed after empty building. This is part of my experience

I wrote a post in 2001 that got posted in a few places on the net that predicted the death of the GSE's, GM and I believe GE, once we had a freeze in credit. I didn't even know what a credit crunch was, but I had read Manias, Panics and Crashes. No one saw that coming. Doug Noland wrote about it for close to 10 years before it became reality.

The bankers are doing it again. AAPL at $600. The cell phone/hand computer is going the way of the regular PC. It might be 2 or 3 years or 5 years, but there will be a new thing from someone besides AAPL and it will be at a new price, cheaper. Ditto the pads. I'm guessing that bar a sudden bear, they could get AAPL to $1 trillion, but the longer this runs, the more of the losses are going to be in the hands of the public. They probably won't split AAPL until they get it in the Dow, as the stock would make up nearly 1/3 the index. The Dow is up from its high nearly 1000 points on the back of IBM and MCD alone. This means the other 28 stocks are down at least 2000. I can't think of a single split, save maybe MSFT that didn't add points to the Dow and in reality, if you merely held these 30 stocks from the 2000 peak instead of adjusting to splits, thus reducing the divisor before the prices went down, we would probably not be any higher on the Dow than the 2000 high. Try it, if you don't believe me. GE was trading around $160 when it split, an adjusted $54 or so.

The point being, we are being sold gains in the market that aren't there. These losses won't be reflected in the academic studies. Neither will the real percentage losses and gains, as a 50% loss takes a 100% gain to erase. The sins of Wall Street, the banks and all the others go way beyond, rigging papers to process a foreclosure that in legitimate terms should happen in some fashion. They go all the way to the hallowed halls of Ivy League schools with their bull**** studies, to the White House with their wipeout of debt that was held mostly by little old ladies on GM. To the pump and dumpers on CNBC. Even to the newsletter of stock advisors, some of who sell doom and gloom while bulling stocks in another section. That way, they can tell you how they got you onto a great gain, while on the other side of their newsletter or the prior and the next they are telling you to prepare for the world to end.

In fact, I subscribed to one of these letters last year because my mother was interested. Among this guys stock picks in the past was JDSU, which he recommended on the way up in 1999. Now if you check JDSU, it is the classic Christmas tree and skirt form of a bull**** stock that was hyped to the moon and went back to earth, a legitimate piece of dog****. How many billions of this crap did Wall Street dump on the Mom and Pop mutual funds before it went round trip? The stock today is trading about where it was in 1996, roughly 1% of what it brought on the top. There is only 1 cent between 1% and nothing. The CDO's did better than that. Most people, when stuck in a trade like that, hold on and hope, so the public is likely still holding that stuff most likely from a price higher than mid range. The gains are in the pockets of the insiders who sold and Wall Street who pumped and dumped. I wrote this guy an email and asked him why his greatest claim to fame was recommending a total piece of dog ****. Forget the price, the company was a hollow log and the reasoning behind its increase was a pipe dream. I got back a form email saying so and so had too many emails to answer at this time.

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Still irks me...although any recovery would not make it worth losing my job.

So you're a willing enabler of the corruption? Lovely.

Working in the Hamptons, I'm sure you deal with scamsters all day long. But the money must be nice enough that you couldn't bother to lose your job. Wonderful. And people wonder why this nation is ****ed.

Antone... willing enabler?? not quite, as I mentioned, I asked a former SEC prosecutor who I should report it to. I never got an answer.

Please...enlighten me. To whom should I have gone? what should I have risked to have the "government" get a piece of this sale? After all... the guy is on the lam from the USA, UN, etc. etc. and has already proven that he is capable of atrocities against humanity.

perhaps I should have said that it still irks me...although any recovery would not make it worth losing my LIFE!

oh...and **** you, too!

Hmmmm.... I might be calling a lawyer. It will be digging up some memories from just a little bit under 7 years old. Be interesting to see if they still have the records. Wondering what my liabilities might be if I'm dismissed.

PLS wrote..

A Tickerforum Qui Tam Team? I'm in. I'll quit my job now and did complex litigation paralegal work for a long time.

Anyone else want in?

I'm in.

This is all good fun and all, but you are talking about 4 and 5 and 7 year (or more) efforts to get judgements in these cases, and while a final payout of $10 million or so would seem to be magnificent compensation, you get NOTHING during those multiple years of waiting and struggling with bizarre document assemblage, every piece of which costs money. I'm engaged in a small-time (ha) lawsuit and I probably have $3,000. in Xerox fees and private investigator fees and paralegal fees where I send something in to the para, she forwards it to the attorney (that's $35) the attorney looks at it for 10 minutes ($150) and thanks the para for sending it to her (another $35) and the para thanks me for sending it to her (another $35) very frankly, I get the feeling like I am financing the entire legal system and paying about $350 for my "team" to go fetch coffee and take a poop sometime during the day.

Whats interesting about the whistleblower is that even if Deutche bank gets her how, they dont have a clear title.

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Szymoniak said she’s unsure what she’ll do with the $18 million award. Deutsche Bank is proceeding with its foreclosure action against her home, she said.

“Even if I pay off the mortgage, I would own a house with no clear title, so I still couldn’t sell it,” she said.

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So why haven't there been more of these whistleblowers come forward? Or maybe there are, but we aren't aware of them yet.

It's a very tough business. Remember, the False Claims Act is only about the recoveries of fraud and tax evasion against the US Federal government. It does not cover fraud against states or against private individuals. Only the very early smart whistleblowers will be the ones that get all of the money, and it's going to be big. You have to prove the false claim, show that your contribution is indispensable to the case (and the government will always say they knew about it all along!) and also be among the first, if not the first to claim to get the prize. You also have to overcome law and tax enforcement authorities who are either too lazy, corrupt, ordered to stop you by politicians (in my case IMHO the GOP)or just jealous that you have proved them inept and will get rich off them. IMHO the worse are the Brits (Inland Revenue Large Accounts Office)and the SEC. They do take years, and most people don't want to take the risk of having to change jobs into another line of business plus take the personal safety risk until the case is resolved. I'm involved in one that covers three countries that started in 1999, and is still on-going.

The best thing that could happen here is a lot of interest, some filings, some get rich (and get immunity from prosecution as whistleblowers) and then a lot of people begin to get to keep their homes as they find the maze of corrupted titles and the banks can't get the properties back.

IMHO, speaking as an uninformed and dumb J6P investor, I think that the banks are starting to foreclose because they are betting that in some areas, in a year or two housing will be scarce and they can make a killing off the foreclosed properties, even at cents on the 2005 dollar. That also clears up their past misdeeds by forcing all past MBS investors out of the deal as well.

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What's interesting about the whistleblower is that even if Deutche bank gets her now, they don't have a clear title.

That's why the next criminal enterprise from the banksters who brought us "robosigning" will be "Title Laundering" by buying and selling a property several times to cleanse the dirty, encumbered titles. I'll surmise corrupt state legislators are already working on laws that will say that after X property transfers (or years) with no complaints any dirt or anomalies on a property title is to be considered legally intangible and financially irreversible without payment of damages. I believe, even though I'm just a dumb engineer and not a lawyer, that this will be a new raison d'etre for the MERS crew as they try to merge their transaction data back into old registrar systems. As usual, the alleged banksters and confidence men in the business reveled in their new found illicit revenue streams but forgot to finish the job of cleaning up after the titles were encumbered, but they'll get corrupt Republicans AND Democrats after the election to get this obstacle eliminated via new laws in exchange for political contributions.