In “The Untouchables,” which re-airs tonight on FRONTLINE, correspondent Martin Smith examines why not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for fraud tied to the sale of bad mortgages.
Prosecutors should consider the “collateral consequences” of bringing criminal indictments against financial institutions, SEC nominee Mary Jo White told lawmakers at her confirmation hearing.
The attorney general’s comments underscored previous concerns that the Justice Department hasn’t been sufficiently aggressive in prosecuting major banks for the fiscal crisis.
Two U.S. senators have criticized the Department of Justice for offering an “aggressively evasive” response to their questions about why major banks have avoided prosecution for the financial crisis.
The unanimous decision largely ensures no new civil fraud charges will come out of the crisis, now that five-year statute of limitations for such cases has nearly expired.
The Justice Department alleges Standard & Poor’s, the nation’s largest credit ratings agency, knowingly understated the risk behind many of the financial products that caused the subprime mortgage meltdown.
Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) want to know whether the DOJ avoided prosecuting banks in order to protect financial markets.
The appetite is growing for cases that address systemic fraud during the financial crisis, says the co-chair of the Obama administration’s Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group.
Lanny Breuer is leaving his position as head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. As assistant attorney … Continue reading →
Join us for a live chat on “The Untouchables” with producer Martin Smith and New York Times DealBook reporter Peter Eavis at 2pm ET on Wednesday, January 23rd. You can leave a question now.
Well before the 2008 financial meltdown, mortgage industry insiders discovered a ticking time-bomb that they say went up to the very top of Wall Street. What did they find? Who did they warn? And what happened to their warnings?
In nearly every major legal case to emerge from the crisis, government prosecutors have won multi-million dollar settlements, but companies and officials have not been required to admit wrongdoing.
The current system of enforcement in the financial services industry has done little to deter pervasive fraud, says the former chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Prosecutors are holding Wall Street to account for the financial crisis, but success should not be measured solely by the number of convictions to date, says the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
The lack of high-level prosecutions from the financial crisis can be traced to the Obama administration’s ambivalence to upset the banks, the former U.S. senator told FRONTLINE.
For more than four years, regulators have struggled to successfully prosecute a Wall Street bank or its executives for alleged misconduct during the financial crisis. Now, time may be running out.