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The Belated Mortgage Fraud/Crisis Investigation

The most interesting news from the SOTU address was the very belated appointment of a mortgage investigation task force, the Office 0f Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses.

You may recall that back in April of 2011, I presented to the National Association of Attorneys General a short keynote speech. It was titled “How Systemic Bank Fraud Contributed to the Financial Crisis.”In particular, you should review pages 14-17, and 22-30.

But meanwhile you may be asking why in 2012 — 4 years after the great financial collapse, 3 years after the recovery began, and in the last year of the President’s term — Mr. Obama finally decided to investigate the role of Fraud in the entire crisis.

The politics are obvious: Both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party were very unhappy with the bailouts, and even more unhappy with the lack of prosecutions. So its obviously good politics.

But the suspicions on the Left have already begun; consider:

• The Schneiderman Gambit: Financial Fraud Unit Appears Designed to Fail, and Grease Skids for Foreclosure Fraud Settlement (Firedoglake)

• Obama To Announce Mortgage Crisis Unit Chaired By New York Attorney General Schneiderman (HuffPo)

• Is Schneiderman Selling Out? Joins Federal Committee That Looks Designed to Undermine AGs Against Mortgage Settlement Deal (naked capitalism)

• California calls $25-billion mortgage settlement ‘inadequate’ (L.A. Times)

That is way too negative — but the suspicions of the Obama administration, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner aka the Banker’s friend — is not unwarranted.

What is the thought process about this? Is this the real deal investigation? Will this commission uncover anything, or is this cover for a white wash?

What say ye?

This post originally appeared at The Big Picture and is posted with permission.

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Edwin G. Dolan is an economist and educator with a Ph.D. from Yale University. Early in his career, he was a member of the economics faculty at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and George Mason University. From 1990 to 2001, he taught in Moscow, Russia, where he and his wife founded the American Institute of Business and Economics (AIBEc), an independent, not-for-profit MBA program. Since 2001, he has taught at several universities in Europe, including Central European University in Budapest, the University of Economics in Prague, and the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, where he has an ongoing annual visiting appointment. During breaks in his teaching career, he worked in Washington, D.C. as an economist for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and as a regulatory analyst for the Interstate Commerce Commission, and later served a stint in Almaty as an adviser to the National Bank of Kazakhstan. When not lecturing abroad, he makes his home in San Juan Islands, Washington.

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