The Other Foreclosure Menace

Her mortgage paid off, a woman loses her home over a small water bill. Amid the economic downturn, it's happening in Baltimore and other cities where big banks, brokerage houses, and other investors buy the right to collect paltry municipal debts from citizens.  By Fred Schulte, Lagan Sebert & Ben Protess

Fred Schulte18 May 2010

VIDEO: 'The Perfect Crime'

There is growing evidence that fraud was at the heart of the current financial crisis. But so far, no high-level bank executives have been hauled off to jail. One of the reasons may be that key bank regulators, who are counted on to root out fraud from the companies they regulate, have largely left it to the banks to report suspicious activity themselves. In this story one veteran bank regulator and a fed-up Senator try to answer the question many have pondered since the beginning of the crisis:  Why haven't more bank bosses been held responsible for this mess?

» Related Story: Too Big to Jail?

Lagan Sebert3 May 2010

Yielding to Wall Street, Raters 'Drink the Kool-Aid'

In the lead up to the financial meltdown, Wall Street firms routinely exerted influence on the nation’s largest credit rating companies— which judge the quality and safety of bonds—and the companies often surrendered to the pressure, a Senate panel has found.

The rating companies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, regularly awarded generous grades to thousands of mortgage-related investments that later collapsed and precipitated the financial crisis. Investors rely on the raters’ assessments in deciding what to buy and sell.

Ben Protess22 April 2010

WaMu Bank Executives Aware of Rampant Fraud

One of the central unanswered questions of the financial crisis is whether bank executives knew fraud was rampant within their mortgage lending. In the case of Washington Mutual Bank, the largest bank failure in history, executives knew  - and in some cases failed to take much corrective action.

David Heath12 April 2010