Sanford, North Carolina
Griggs spent nine months building his and Audrey’s new home on Tempting Church Road. Meanwhile, over in Greensboro, the bank packaged Griggs’s loan with hundreds of others and sold the bundle to Chase Manhattan Bank as the First Greensboro Home Equity Loan Trust 1997-1. Three years later, Chase merged with JP Morgan & Co. to become JP Morgan Chase. By then, Griggs’s loan was already far gone, packaged once again with other types of debt—credit card loans, student loans, commercial loans, even car loans—into a bundle called a CDO, or collateralized debt obligation, which Chase sold either to private investors or to the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This chain was called the securitization process, because it gave the banks and the mortgage pushers the security of not having to care whether the loan was ever repaid. They’d already cashed out.
After Griggs made the first four payments, First Greensboro hired a company called IMC mortgage services to manage Griggs’s payments, which was called “servicing the loan.” Griggs grew annoyed because the company was constantly calling him and asking for extra payments or small fees.
“I said, ‘Look, I just sent you the money, what the hell is going on?’ ” he remembers.
Phone harassment by mortgage pushers and servicing companies is fairly common. The Federal Trade Commission reports it receives seventy thousand complaints about debt collectors every year, many of which are mortgage servicing companies.61 In a personal lawsuit against one lending company, a man in New Hampshire said that employees called both his home and cell phone “almost continuously during the day and evening.”62 One woman in Florida sued her mortgage servicing company, Green Tree Servicing LLC, alleging that the constant harassment—up to nine calls a day, sometimes snidely derisive in tone—killed her husband, who had heart problems and an outstanding balance of less than $700.63
Griggs didn’t challenge IMC when it demanded minor additional fees.
“I just told them to take it out of my account—300 102 907—that was my checking account. I still know [the numbers] because that’s how many times this company called,” he said.
One year later, First Greensboro claimed that Griggs had missed his September 1998 payment.64 He told them he hadn’t, and he faxed IMC a copy of the check. Shortly thereafter, he called IMC seeking confirmation that the company had received his proof of September’s payment. As he waited on hold, he heard a man’s voice in the background say, “I think we got us another one.”
Griggs was busy building his first two modular homes on two tracts of land he’d bought across the street, so he didn’t think much of those words. He handed the responsibility of paying the mortgage to his wife, Audrey.
Although Audrey didn’t understand why, IMC began sending back her checks; first October, then November, and then December. The couple would later learn that it takes three months of missed payments before a mortgage holder can initiate a foreclosure, and that servicing companies rarely accept payments after they believe one has been missed. By the spring, First Greensboro told Audrey that she was delinquent on her loan, but that she could catch up through lump-sum payments of $2,500 to $4,000 a month. Over the next few months, she paid over $10,000.
In July, Griggs was in his backyard clearing the lot with a bulldozer when the sheriff came to deliver foreclosure papers. The eviction was scheduled for August.
“That’s how quickly it happened; that’s how it all began,” said Griggs.
Furious with his wife, Griggs tried to untangle what had happened. The man’s whispered words—“we got us another one”—began to haunt him.
“I never forgot,” Griggs said more than a decade later. “That’s why I’m here now. I wouldn’t give up because of what I heard then.”
Did IMC plot Griggs’s foreclosure—using the company’s error in September to push him into default? Did these servicers think they could take advantage of him? Thoughts raced through his head, but time was short. Griggs had less than one month to figure out how to stop the bank from foreclosing on his home. He rushed from lawyer to lawyer without finding anyone who knew how to help. Finally, he saw an ad in the paper for an attorney who claimed he could save Griggs’s home. The man convinced Griggs to declare Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which would stay the foreclosure and allow Griggs time to make the unpaid payments, known as the arrears. Griggs was reluctant. He explained that he wasn’t bankrupt; he was making $80,000 a year. Plus, he was ahead on his mortgage after his wife’s lump-sum payments, not behind. But he was out of time and options. Griggs declared Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
“I used to wake up in a cold sweat, thinking: I’m not supposed to be in Chapter 13,” he said.
His loan servicer switched to another small company called CALMCO, which later renamed itself Greenwich Capital and Olympus Servicing and then quickly disappeared. Within less than a year, Griggs’s servicer changed again, this time to Fairbanks Capital Holding Corp. To his disbelief, Griggs was supposedly behind on his payments, again.
Fairbanks embodied everything that was sleazy, greedy, and flat-out fraudulent about mortgage servicing companies. By 2002, the company was the biggest servicer of predatory mortgages in the United States, managing more than 500,000 loans worth $50 billion. Predatory mortgage bankers targeted and ensnared people with below-average credit scores, charging higher interest rates and other fees because they were extending loans to “riskier” individuals. In reality, the lenders—not the borrowers—posed the real risks. Because of the securitization process, the lending companies had no incentive to design loans that would actually be paid back, since they would immediately be packaged and sold on Wall Street, as had happened to Griggs’s loan.
Predatory mortgage pushing exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s after decades of lending and banking deregulation. By 2005 and 2006, 20 percent of all loans initiated were predatory. Most relied on ballooning payments (these were called adjustable-rate mortgages), which were legalized after the passage of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. The interest rates on these mortgages would be low for the first few years, and then skyrocket to up to 20 percent of the loan’s value. The most predatory loan Wall Street concocted was called “an interest-only, negative-amortizing, adjustable-rate loan,” an absolutely incomprehensible way of saying that the total amount owed actually increased as time went on.
In the film Inside Job, consumer advocate Robert Gnaizda recounts showing Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan 150 examples of complex, adjustable-rate mortgages.
“If you had a doctorate in math, you wouldn’t be able to understand which of these was good for you, and which wasn’t,” Gnaizda remembers Greenspan telling him.65
Borrowers have been wickedly criticized as being both ignorant and indulgent for signing on to predatory loans that they wouldn’t be able to pay back. But the mortgage pushers not only wrote the loans to be incomprehensible, they often outright lied about the terms of the agreement. According to the Federal Trade Commission, one company sold “15-year balloon loans,” in which, after fifteen years, “the consumer will owe a large lump sum payment that is usually greater than 80 percent of the loan principal.” Since that was not a loan that most people would agree to, the company simply chose to lie at the time of the sale—both in writing and in conversation—by “representing that the loan does not contain a balloon payment.”66 In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Federal Trade Commission sued dozens of mortgage pushing companies for similar cases of deception: lying about the loan’s terms, tacking on charges that the mortgage holder had not agreed to, and even, in one case, foreclosing on people who were current on their payments.67
Griggs’s loan had a high interest rate—nearly 12 percent—but it was a flat-rate loan, and he thought he would be able to afford the payments with his income. His problem was not the predatory mortgage industry but the even more fraud-ridden servicing companies hired by the banks to receive mortgage payments.
“See this little charge right here,” Griggs said, pointing at one of his Fairbanks statements. The bill listed $6.48 owed for something called “interest on advance for the month,” another $10 for “broker price options,” and a handful of other minor charges, including a “history fee.” Within a few years, the Federal Trade Commission would declare all these charges illegal.
“This little charge here, no one would notice it,” he continued. “But $6.50 times 350,000 homeowners”—he pulled out his calculator—“well, that’s $22 million.”
As Griggs was trying to make sense of the fees, the Federal Trade Commission was investigating Fairbanks for defrauding hundreds of thousands of people, Griggs included.
One of Fairbanks’s favorite tricks, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s complaint, was to delay posting a monthly payment, only to turn around and charge a never-ending cycle of late fees. For Griggs, this deception wasn’t just an economic inconvenience; it was destroying his life. In 2002, Fairbanks began hounding him for a missing $680. He sent a check; it wasn’t posted. He drove up to Durham to pay in person, only to be told he was current on his bill. A few weeks later, Fairbanks once again demanded the money, saying his fees had finally been processed. Griggs sent a check, but he’d already been dismissed from Chapter 13 for failure to stay current on his bills.
“It bothered me pretty bad,” Griggs said, his face bunching up with contained emotion. By now, Griggs knew his credit was shot; he worried he’d never be able to buy those one hundred acres of land.
He re-filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, only to learn that his arrears had increased rather than decreased since the first filing. Somehow Griggs owed even more than when he’d first declared bankruptcy, which made no sense to him, since he’d been following the payment plan laid out by the court. Reviewers ordered by the federal government to analyze the banks’ paperwork would later reveal that mortgage-pushing companies frequently levied exorbitant illegal charges against families in Chapter 13, which often landed families in foreclosure the moment bankruptcy ended. One reviewer said that every single bankruptcy case he examined included the banks perpetrating some form of fraud.68 But Griggs couldn’t convince the bankruptcy court that the charges he was accused of didn’t add up. The lawyers, his bankruptcy trustee, and even the judge seemed to be biased toward Fairbanks and Greensboro—even outright complicit in the deception. After one hearing, he watched the judge and all the lawyers, including his own, exit the courtroom laughing.
“Most people would have given up, quit,” he said. “I’ve even cried. These people . . . the judge laughed at me. They were working for the banks to take my money and steal our homes.” He paused. “It really bothered me. You’re going to make me. . . .” He trailed off, then resumed. “I had a home modular dealership, and they caught me up in all this stuff.”
Griggs’s health worsened. His knees were aching from the years of construction work, and the stress of being in Chapter 13 had elevated his blood pressure. He was on various medications to control it, but he still experienced moments of dizziness and lightheadedness, especially when driving back and forth from the bankruptcy hearings. But the worst part was the emotional effects: Griggs felt increasing angry and alone. The continuing foreclosure process hadn’t only threatened his house; it was eating away at his dreams.
In 2003, Fairbanks settled with the Federal Trade Commission on allegations of fraud, and the company shelled out $40 million in consumer refunds.
The government celebrated.
“Today’s settlement makes clear that HUD and the FTC are serious about protecting consumers from those who would try to steal their American Dream,” declared Mel Martinez, the Secretary for Housing and Urban Development (HUD).69
But instead of a reimbursement, Griggs received another foreclosure notice. By March 2004, Griggs found himself back in housing court. He arrived armed with information from the settlement, forcing Fairbanks’s lawyer to drop the foreclosure. But the ordeal wasn’t over. The company changed its name to Select Portfolio Services and remained Griggs’s servicer. Like the majority of mortgage-pushing and -servicing companies that have settled with the Federal Trade Commission since 1998, it was allowed to remain in business both during and after the investigation.
As Griggs began to research the companies with which he was dealing, the inside of his home began overflowing with evidence of the mortgage company’s wrongdoings. File cabinets and cardboard boxes sprouted in his office, basement, and bedroom, which he quickly stuffed with court transcripts, FTC complaints, SEC reports, news articles, legal manuals, and a seemingly endless stack of foreclosure filings against him. As the years went on, his stacks upon stacks of papers grew into a paper trail of what he called “a ten-year crime spree.” Taken together, it was a testimony—a museum exhibit, almost—to the unraveling of his dreams and those of millions of others.
“I’ve got piles—thousands of papers. I can show you some cheating,” he said, picking through the dozens of filing boxes and loose stacks of court documents, news articles, bank statements, attorney payments, and letters to the Attorney General and President Obama. In his office were stacks of reports like the hundred-page Federal Reserve document “Understanding the Securitization of Subprime Mortgage Credit.” In the basement were piles of books, such as Represent Yourself in Court, and a whole shelf of binders with neat, handwritten labels: “Fairbanks Lawsuit,” “Foreclosure Filings,” “FBI.” He hired assistants to come in and help him organize the evidence, but he was so particular and protective of the paper trail that he always ended up asking them to leave.
In July 2006, GMAC mortgage claimed that it was now servicing Griggs’s loan. He was off in Chapter 13, but his problems were far from over. Like Fairbanks, GMAC was secretly engaging in a host of illegal activities that would soon place the company at the center of a massive scandal in the mortgage industry and keep Griggs’s home perpetually in foreclosure.
Within the first few months of assuming the loan, GMAC signed a foreclosure affidavit for Griggs’s house, even though he had paid the company consistently.
“Here I am, I’m sending you my money, and they say, ‘Welcome to GMAC. We’re putting your house in foreclosure,’ ” Griggs said.
It felt as if GMAC hadn’t even read his loan history before authorizing the foreclosure, which was probably true. Four years later, a GMAC mortgage employee testified in a disposition that he and his team had signed “a round number of ten thousand” foreclosure affidavits every week without actually reading the documents or verifying the information.70 This admission kicked off an investigation into the practice, which later became known as robo-signing.
“All the banks are the same, GMAC is the only one who’s gotten caught,” a Florida-based lawyer told Bloomberg News as the controversy unfolded in the fall of 2010. “This could be huge.”71
Within one year, investigations revealed that Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citi Bank, HSBC, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Deutsche Bank, Litton Loan Servicing (a mortgage servicer owned by Goldman Sachs), and others were all engaging in similar practices: authorizing hundreds of thousands of foreclosure filings every month without ever checking if the people—like Griggs—were actually current. One robo-signer named Chris Pindley signed not his own name but the name “Linda Green” because it was shorter, and he was pressured to sign four thousand foreclosure affidavits every day.72 Other employees notarized the documents, testifying that the signatories were who they said they were and had done what they said they’d done, even though they knew otherwise.
A HUD investigation later revealed that robo-signing of affidavits often led to foreclosures based on incomplete or inaccurate information. In one study, HUD reviewed thirty-six foreclosures at JP Morgan Chase—the bank that owned Griggs’s mortgage—and revealed that in only one of the thirty-six cases did the bank have documentation proving even the most basic information: what the family supposedly owed on the mortgage.73
Throughout 2006, Griggs trudged back and forth from one foreclosure hearing to the next. GMAC’s robo-signing practices had not yet been revealed, and he was constantly at risk of losing his house. In one month—July 2006—he succeeded in getting one foreclosure dismissed, only to receive a new foreclosure filing two days later. Griggs believed that much of the confusion in his paperwork was caused by his previous servicer, Select Portfolio Services (SPS). Between 2003 and 2006, SPS had continued to plague Griggs with even more of the illegal fees and penalties that it had inflicted upon him under the name Fairbanks.
Griggs wrote to the North Carolina Office of the Commissioner of Banks, an agency that was supposed to oversee banking and lending regulation and investigate cases of fraud, to inform the office about SPS’s abuse. At the time, the commissioner was a lawyer named Joseph A. Smith, who, before his appointment in 2002, had worked as the senior vice president and general counsel to RBC Centura, which later became PNC Bank. Griggs waited years for a reply. Finally, in 2009, Smith’s office wrote to Griggs saying that there had been no problems whatsoever with his loan—neither with its origination nor with its servicing. Suspicious, Griggs began to investigate Smith himself, learning that when he had served as vice president at RBC Centura, the bank owned 49 percent of First Greensboro Home Equity, the very company responsible for originating Griggs’s loan. No wonder, then, that Smith had outright dismissed any allegations of fraud that had to do with his own business record.
“I wrote the Governor telling her who she had hired, what he had been doing before working for the state,” said Griggs. To him, the revolving door between the banking industry and the very agencies charged with regulating that industry looked a whole lot like government collusion.
The Wall-Street-to-Washington pipeline is nothing new. The very first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was created after the Great Depression as “the main overseer and regulator of the U.S. securities market,” was himself the former president of the Columbia Trust Bank.74 Yet the revolving door has been spinning ever more quickly in the last two decades. The CEO of Goldman Sachs, for example, seems to have a guaranteed position as the future Secretary of the Treasury, a cabinet position that was filled by Goldman leaders under Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. One of JP Morgan’s managing directors became a senior official in Clinton’s Treasury Department; the chief Goldman Sachs lobbyist became the chief of staff in the Treasury Department under Obama.
The Federal Reserve has also been filled with former Goldman men, including the company’s chief economist (later the president of the New York Federal Reserve) and its chairman (who kept his same title at the Fed). Another senior official at Goldman became the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The list goes on and on.75
With the government’s regulatory agencies crawling with former and future bankers, whistleblowers like Griggs find these men more often ignoring widespread fraud than actually fulfilling their jobs. But Griggs wasn’t going to accept what he saw as a criminal collusion between the North Carolina Office of the Commission of the Banks and his original mortgage company, First Greensboro. He wrote furious, certified-mail letters to the governor, the Federal Trade Commission, and the President, asking for help and warning them about what was going on. In these letters, he explained that he’d uncovered filing cabinets’ worth of deception. In addition to Smith’s conflict of interest, First Greensboro seemed to be at the center of shady activity, which included tampering with court transcripts and deleting the online records of bankruptcy cases of people who had First Greensboro Home Equity loans.
But Griggs was worried about more than just First Greensboro or even North Carolina. By the beginning of 2006, at the height of the housing bubble, Griggs was worried about the entire United States economy. The more he learned, the more he thought that the frenzied increase in speculative trading—betting on what would happen in the future—was dangerous and absurd.
“If you got a pair of boots,” he said, gesturing toward his feet as he began to explain speculative trading, also called derivatives, “I can put options on the shoestrings that they’ll stay tied up, and then I can bet that if you go through the briars, they’ll come unloose. And then we can have a bet on whether the briars will pull the shoes loose or whether they will not. Anything you can think of you can bet on Wall Street. That’s what it’s all about.”
By 2000, derivatives constituted an unregulated $50 trillion market. Between speculative trading and the increase in predatory mortgages, the price of houses grew higher and higher, doubling between 1996 and 2006. This overinflation of house values was called a bubble—and many considered it the biggest in United States history.
The fact that everyone (besides the families in the homes) could take out insurance on these loans fueled the dizzying increase in predatory mortgages. Through the securitization process, the mortgage-pushing companies and Wall Street banks quickly profited from the loans and then sold them off to investors through collateralized debt obligations. These investors, meanwhile, bought insurance on the CDOs so that they were protected from any losses in case the financial products failed. AIG, the world’s largest insurance company at the time, issued $500 billion worth of insurance on loans during the housing bubble. Other speculators who had no relationship with the CDOs could still bet against them (and turn a profit if they failed) by buying credit default swaps (CDSs) from AIG as well.
In other words, the banks and investors could engineer their bets so that they got paid whether the briars pulled out those shoestrings or not.
Griggs wrote a sixteen-page letter to Lynne Weaver, the assistant attorney general of North Carolina, warning her of an impending wave of foreclosures nearly one year before the housing market collapsed.
“All of these servicing companies including First Greensboro [are] owned by JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan bank. These loans are put into packages and sold on Wall Street. The servicing companies are robbing and stealing homes for profit. No one is seeing what is happening in the background. . . . I am, I feel, a rather intelligent individual and have had no help in getting my case in court,” he added.
But Griggs was the type of whistleblower who never got his day of glory. Weaver didn’t even reply until two years later, well after Bear Stearns failed, then Lehman Brothers, then AIG, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By the time she replied in 2009, the national unemployment rate was 10 percent, and the banks had already evicted families from nearly two million repossessed homes.
Griggs’s physical and mental health further deteriorated. Still bitter from those few months where Audrey assumed responsibility for the loan, he thought about leaving his wife. His knees were shot; he needed surgery. But worst of all, his anger and sense of alienation threatened to consume him. With a fierceness in keeping with his stormy personality, Griggs returned to God after years of absence from the Tempting Congregation.
Bolstered by his faith, Griggs filed a lawsuit in North Carolina District Court against Select Portfolio Services for violating the 2003 Federal Trade Commission injunction. Fed up with lawyers, Griggs wrote both the original and the amended complaint himself, which the judge later criticized as being “disorganized, rambling, and at times incoherent.” But the quality of the complaint didn’t matter. In July 2009, the judge dismissed the case because the “FTC Act does not create a private right of action for enforcement of the FTC Act.”76 In other words, everyday people don’t have the right to sue companies that have broken the rules established by the Federal Trade Commission’s settlement.
That same year, Griggs watched as President Obama gave $9.9 billion to six mortgage-pushing companies to “help struggling homeowners,” one of the companies being Select Services Portfolio. In 2012, Griggs again watched, indignant, as Smith resigned from his post as commissioner so that he could take on a bigger and better responsibility: overseeing the allocation of the $26 billion settlement the government had reached with the banks over robo-signing and other criminal acts of fraud. Part of that settlement required the banks to hire consultants to review the paperwork of nearly four million completed foreclosures to better understand the industry’s crimes. Instead, in January 2013, the banks once again settled with government—this time for $8.5 billion—in order to hastily stop the foreclosure reviews and, as one New York Times columnist wrote, “push those misdeeds under a $8.5 billion rug.”77
Over the course of a decade, Griggs received an estimated forty foreclosure filings since the first one in 1999, all of which he fought relentlessly in court. Finally, the assistant clerk of court for Lee County promised Griggs that he wouldn’t have to worry about eviction any longer. In North Carolina, the county clerk’s office must sign the writ to initiate eviction before the sheriff’s office will take action.
But keeping the house was a small consolation to Griggs. The fraudulent foreclosures had destroyed his plans to build one hundred acres of homes. He felt as if he’d lost not only his career and his credit but also his whole life—and no one even understood.
“Imagine seeing this here happen, witnessing it, and thinking you’re all alone,” said Griggs. “It’s like someone stealing your identity,” he said.
He no longer thought that he’d been the victim of a mistake or a single instance of fraud. Instead, he saw the last ten years of his life as an illuminating and devastating picture of how the U.S. economic system actually worked when in its normal state. What had first appeared to be an isolated incident of crime and deception now seemed to have enveloped the entire country. It wasn’t just that he had been a victim of corruption; it was that he was living in a corrupt society.
Griggs became depressed, angry, and even apocalyptic about the country’s future.
“The world is going to blow up; it’s going to catch on fire. I’ve seen nothing but cheating,” he said.
Gone was the entrepreneurial and hopeful Griggs Wimbley who so believed in the American Dream that he aspired to build houses. That identity had been stolen from him, and in its place there emerged a man who believed there was a deep sickness within the nation. Little did he know as he sat in his foreclosed home in rural North Carolina how many other people felt the same way.
61. Herb Weisbaum, “Debt Collectors Getting More Aggressive,” MSNBC, August 14, 2008. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26178152/ns/business-consumer_news/t/debt-collectors-getting-more-aggressive/
62. Dillon v. Select Portfolio Servicing, Case No. 09-1469. (C.A. 1, Jan. 13, 2011). http://judicialview.com/Court-Cases/Civil-Procedure/Dillon-v-Select-Portfolio-Servicing/10/21599
63. Rich Phillips, “Woman Sues Debt Collector over Husband’s Death,” CNN, December 10, 2009. http://articles.cnn.com/2009-12-10/living/debt.collector.lawsuit_1_debt-collectors-green-tree-servicing-credit-and-collection-professionals?_s=PM:LIVING
64. IMC Mortgage Company dissolved in 2001. There is no longer any contact information for the company and there exists no record that Griggs did not pay his September 1998 payment.
65. Inside Job, written by Charles Ferguson (Sony Pictures, 2010). Transcript: http://moviecultists.com/wp-content/uploads/screenplays/inside-job.pdf
66. See the 2002 FTC Complaint and Settlement with Mercantile Mortgage Company. http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0023321.shtm
67. See http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2002/07/subprimelendingcases.shtm for a list of subprime lending fraud settlements. The last example, the company that the FTC accused of foreclosing on families who had not defaulted on their payments, was Capital City Mortgage Corporation.
68. Yves Smith, “Bank of America foreclosure reviews: whistleblowers reveal extensive borrower harm and orchestrated coverup (part II)” Naked Capitalism, January 22, 2013. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/37705.html
69. “Fairbanks Capital Settles FTC and HUD Charges,” FTC Press Release, November 12, 2003. http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/11/fairbanks.shtm
70. Dakin Campbell and Lorraine Woellert, “Ally Says GMAC Mortgage Mishandled Affidavits on Foreclosures,” Bloomberg News, September 21, 2010. http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/11/fairbanks.shtm http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-21/ally-financial-says-gmac-mortgage-mishandled-affidavits-on-foreclosures.html
71. Campbell and Woellert, “Ally Says GMAC Mortgage Mishandled Affidavits on Foreclosures, Bloomberg News, September 21, 2010. Ibid.
72. Zach Carter “Deutsche Bank Sues Foreclosure Fraud Expert’s Son with No Financial Interest in Her Case” Huffington Post, May 13, 2007. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/13/deutsche-bank-lynn-szymoniak_n_861900.html. See embedded video of 60 Minutes interview.
73. Nelson D. Schwartz and J.B. Silver-Greenberg, “Bank Officials Cited in Churn of Foreclosures,” New York Times, March 12, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/business/federal-report-cites-bank-officials-in-foreclosure-surge.html?pagewanted=all
As a result of the robo-signing scandal, the five largest banks settled with the federal government, paying $25 billion that was supposed to go directly to mortgage-holding families. Some of the money, instead, has gone to paying off state deficits, budget shortfalls that were caused by the banks themselves.
74. For more on the SEC: http://www.sec.gov/about/whatwedo.shtml
75. Some cycled back and forth between Wall Street and K Street as fast as their private planes could take them. Roger Altman, for example, started as a partner at the later-to-collapse Lehman Brothers, served a stint as assistant secretary of the treasury, turned to Wall Street to work in investment banking at Lehman and as the head of mergers and acquisitions at Blackstone, served as deputy treasury secretary under Clinton, returned to Blackstone, and finally became an advisor for both Kerry in 2004 and Clinton in 2008.
76. Wimbley v. Select Portfolio Servicing. In the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, July 9, 2009. http://nc.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.20090709_0000120.MNC.htm/qx
77. Joe Nocera, “The Foreclosure Fiasco,” New York Times, January 14, 2013.