Sense on Cents

The Department of Justice is soon expected to announce a $17 billion settlement with Bank of America. Is this justice?

I will defer in writing my own commentary this morning because the words and details on this topic provided by Dean Starkman qualify as a Sense on Cents Instant Classic:

There’s a much deeper problem here, however, and one that has received far less attention: Not only has the Department of Jus­tice (DOJ) failed to build any criminal cases for financial-crisis misdeeds, but it’s also now settling with these banks without even filing civil complaints.

A complaint is the cornerstone of civil litigation, the foundation for even routine lawsuits. One of its primary benefits—and of adversarial legal proceedings generally—is that a complaint can bring huge amounts of previously undisclosed information into the public record. In these mortgage securities cases, the Justice Department had not only an obligation but an opportunity: to show the country what it found, to deter future misconduct, to complete the story of the financial crisis in humanizing, clarifying, searing detail. (more…)