Saint Mozilo demands to be worshiped
With Bank of America shelling out $17 billion in the historic settlement with the federal government to make up for their wrongdoing in the housing crash, it is no secret that they did their best to shake off the sink of Countrywide Financial, which they acquired in 2008, filling their coffers with endlessly bloated and undocumented bad mortgages, and over $40 billion in litigation and settlement costs. Ouch.
Two years ago, before a judge, Countrywide CEO, Angelo Mozilo, said that homeowners are to blame for the mortgage crisis.
Now that the glut of toxic loans are coming to a close and Bank of America is left holding the bag, Mozilo tells Bloomberg that not only is Countrywide not at fault, he says he has no regrets.
With an off-putting use of the third person, Mozilo said of the mortgage crisis, “No, no, no, we didn’t do anything wrong. Countrywide or Mozilo didn’t cause any of that…”
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rolandestrada
September 2, 2014 at 5:16 pm
I am definitely no fan of banks and lending institutions with regard to how they handled the aftermath of the housing crisis. However, banks were and the are the conduit for the entity truly at fault, and that is the federal government.
Nothing in banking happens in a vacuum. Banks did what they were allowed to by legislation passed by congress. If you want to point the finger at the true genesis of the housing crisis, congress should be your target. They passed the laws and they were in charge of oversight. Not surprisingly, congress “acted” shocked and stunned when they found out that there “is gambling going on in here”. That’s a Casablanca reference for the younger set.
I’m not saying that Mozilo was an innocent bystander. Corruption many times stems from the top. And in this case the top was and is congress.