Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/mortgage-fraud-sweep-nets-hundreds-of-arrests Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript The Justice Department and the FBI announced hundreds of arrests Thursday for mortgage fraud, which is blamed for sparking a national credit crisis and nationwide housing crisis. An NPR correspondent and Columbia Law professor examine the government crackdown. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JUDY WOODRUFF: The government's crackdown on mortgage fraud. Ray Suarez has our story. RAY SUAREZ: It was just about a year ago when the collapse of two large hedge funds first alerted Wall Street and the broader public to a subprime meltdown already under way.The failure of those Bear Stearns funds foreshadowed what was to come: hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed losses around the world; record foreclosures in a number of communities; a bailout of Bear Stearns; and the beginning of a larger credit crisis throughout the financial system.Early this morning, the federal government indicted the two former hedge fund managers. And then, in the afternoon, it announced the separate arrests of hundreds of defendants connected with mortgage fraud.For more on this, we turn to Dina Temple-Raston, who has been covering the indictments for NPR, and John Coffee, a professor of securities law at Columbia Law School.