I worked in the back office of a bank when I first got out f the USAF in 1982. Even then, we had to report certain cash transactions above I think it was $10K (but that may be low0

I think with Paulson and now Geithner and Holder we are looking at folks being willfully obtuse.

And I find that not at all surprising, unfortunately.

As far as I am concerned this is THE most important question to ask and to find the answer to.

On every level, from micro to macro, the feedback loop was shut down, and over and over again, illegal behavior was ignored. I say ignored, because millions of us were making loud noises and trying desperately to be heard. We were shut out over and over again and this continues today. This behavior is invariant, on every level. The behavior is being ignored, it continues and consequences are avoided. When anything happens with this strong invariance…it means there is a valid force behind it.

I don’t know what it is….but on every level consequences are not being inforced while laws are violated. This has been true in the finance industry since 2000.

Why isn’t Geithner in a federal maximum security correctional facility? Maybe he could even cell up with Lloyd Blankfein…

Sorry. I had a little spell. I’m all better now…

This is a rhetorical question, right?
Unless they’re trying to drive someone like Eliot Spitzer from office,
anyone hoping to use SARs is SOL.

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand the premise of your post.

SARS are supposed to be filed for money laundering issues. How is a fraudlently obtained mortgage a likely money laundering issue? The ID of the mortgagor is known. The transaction is not done in cash. There is a paper trail to show where the money came froma nd where it went–into real estate which is not portable, unlike say, a car.

So, how would a fraudulent mortgage help obscure the ownership of funds?

Are suggesting that money launderers could go around taking cash out of houses (refi’s) and use that as clean cash? But the money they put into the houses would still be tracable and the house can’t be moved around like the pea in a shell game.

There actually IS a way to launder money using real estate, but it would NOT involve using mortgages.

Even on a liar’s loan, there is too much documentation in a mortgage transaction to make mortgage money a good laundering device.

So, I am clearly missing something here.

How does your mortgage fueled money laundering concept work?

And how would liars loans by regular folks trigger a SARS even in that situation?

I’m lost.

If geithner and daschle could cheat on their taxes for $many thousand with no penalty, why would the government go after someone else that is part of the same economic class. obama hired a bunch of crooks and incompetents to run his government and it shows.

Why would Holder or Geithner take any action? That’s like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Remember BCCI? Matters have only escalated since they blew up. The major banks are the primary participants in money-laundering and they make billions doing so. Reporting such activities would be financial suicide.

Citibank is believed to be the biggest player. Do a search for Citibank and Raul Salinas. According to Sen. Carl Levin, between 500 Billion and 1 Trillion dollars are laundered annually; with one-half of that coming into the U. S. According to the Brookings Institute, between 20 and 40 billion in corrupt funds flow from Third World countries into the West.

Raw Story and the NYT have reported on Wachovia (now Wells Fargo) admitting to laundering $ 110 million in drug money, mostly from Mexico.

I agree with the person who posted on another thread that we are back in the days of the Robber Barons.

You’re correct, it is $ 10,000.

I know that you know more about this than I do, so I’ll just ask the question, if the mortgage moneys and paperwork are so traceable, why are the banks and homeowners having so much trouble finding out exactly who has the actual paperwork that will allow anyone to foreclose on a house, and sometimes foreclose on a paid off home?

Oh I know this one they are bought, they want jobs from these companies or friends of these companies to hire them.
They really believe in Chicago and or Rand Paul Austrian Economics despite the realworld evidence of the Bush years.
Someone as Bill Hicks once joked showed them the JFK dallas film and asked them if they had any questions.

Why did FinCEN, a unit of Treasury under then Secretary Henry Paulson, not connect the dots? If fraud was as rampant as the sketchy SARs filings showed, of course fraudulent loans were getting into real estate-backed mortgage securitizations, and into CDOs and synthetic CDOs. How could they not have noticed this level of fraud? Darcy Parmer saw it. Why didn’t someone from FinCEN talk to her or people in positions like hers?

One obvious area of follow-up from the Final Report is to look closely at FinCEN. If it couldn’t figure out a giant disaster like mortgage fraud, why do we think it can find terrorists or drug cartels?

Most important, there are no excuses for failure to file SARs as appropriate, including what the Final Report says is the consensus view, that markets are self-regulating. It looks like there are grounds to investigate and prosecute the individuals at the banks who failed to file SARs. Who knows what turning over those rocks will produce?

This issue surely appears to be part of the soft, vulnerable belly of The Beast.

Also, anyone reading last week’s FDL Book Salon selection, “The Monsters” by Michael Hudson, will read about Ameriquest lunch rooms supplied with ‘The Art Department’: scissors, paste, glue, and documents. Need to falsify a mortgage doc? Cut out someone’s legal signature, glue in over the correct spot on your target document, photocopy, and presto! Insta-fraud! Wheee!

So at the same time that Ameriquest had ‘Art Departments’ in their offices around the US, the FinCEN couldn’t figure out that the volume of mortgages was suspicious?

This is truly an Inside Job.
And it’s gutting out the legitimacy of a federal government that is not investigating it, and prosecute it.
But the perps were all white collar, as near as I can tell: realtors, bank employees, the kinds of people who you probably pass in the veggie aisle at the grocery.

The paper loan was split into pieces and then sold to several people and each piece resold many times I don’t know if stock transactions are monitored like homes are suppose to be.

Yves Smith at NakedCapitalism has done a phenomenal job of showing how the sequence of ownership has been perverted by MERS. In addition, we have no information about how often, and how, MERS was hacked. MERS held a lot of property records that were used in CDOs.

I can imagine a scenario where the same piece of property could have been insured 50 times, by putting the same piece of property into a different CDO on each of 50 consecutive hours, then CDSs purchased to gamble on every one of the CDOs. I’m not saying this happened; I’m saying that running that scenario through your mind might make it easier to see how money laundering could be part of this system.

Also, rapidly escalating house prices are a good way to bring money into a system in order to ‘cover’ those bogusly inflated mortgages. This then breeds a kind of churning effect; it’s like a dynamo that builds up and attracts more money on promises of quick, high returns.

The faster the dynamo spins, the more money sucks into that system until a tipping point when it collapses.

But anyone laundering money, profiting from laundering money, or profiting from gambling against RMBS’s will want to defang FinCEN. Obviously, someone did.

Considering the banks are thanks to Geithner and Holder cheating us the statue of limitations on financial fraud ticker it can be reasonably argued can’t begin until attempts to sustain the fraud stop and honest attempts to address the fraud begin.
Think of it this way just because the President says murder and torture are ok does not make it legal the same applies to financial fraud. Given the continued failure to fix our economy, the failure of government spending cuts in Greece and Spain to restart their economies and the protests in Egypt over jobs do the banks and Obama really want to keep playing chicken with us?
The Left was right about everything during the Bush years the Wars, the economy, no WMD etc does Obama really want to be laughed at by us and history?

I can relate to making loud noises. In the early 90s I was a Reg. Mgr. for a major residential wholesale lender. I routinely audited a sampling of loan files before closing. I caught blatant fraud on an FHA loan and after thorough investigation called in the FBI. My Area Mgr. reamed me a new one and came close to firing me. I think the only reason I kept my job was because my region was adding handsomely to his wealth.

The fraud was quite sloppy. The first thing to catch my attention was a W-2 form with an employer ID (TIN) # beginning with 00. Next was a home phone # I recognized as a mobile exchange. From there it just snowballed. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. You’d think if someone was committing fraud they would at least try to do it right.

BTW, the FBI decided to take no action.

Obama is now in full business suckup re-election mode. Absolutely nothing will happen that makes business cringe. I am sure they already have all the assurances they have requested and more will be passed along.

Why Aren’t Geithner And Holder Acting On Failure To File Suspicious Activity Reports On Mortgage Fraud?

Answer: campaign contributions and future employment prospects, dummy.

Book Salon up with Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi’s The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future hosted by Kelly Niknejad

SARs are not just for money-launderinng. You have to report any violation directed at the financial institution. That includes mortgage fraud. The Final Report gives figures for filing of SARs related to mortgage fraud: the number of SARs for mortgage fraud rose from 23,998 in 2005 to 37,547 to 65,004 to 67,507 in subsequent years. The only people prosecuted for these SARs were mortgage brokers. No one connected the dots to the banks which were providing the warehouse lines of credit to the fraudulent mortgage brokers, and no one asked if any of those fraudulent loans were getting into RMBS.

For further reference, the applicable statute is 31 USC § 5318(g), and the applicable regulation is 12 CFR § 22.11. Here’s part of the latter:

(3) Violations aggregating $25,000 or more regardless of potential suspects. Whenever the national bank detects any known or suspected Federal criminal violation, or pattern of criminal violations, committed or attempted against the bank or involving a transaction or transactions conducted through the bank and involving or aggregating $25,000 or more in funds or other assets where the bank believes that it was either an actual or potential victim of a criminal violation, or series of criminal violations, or that the bank was used to facilitate a criminal transaction, even though there is no substantial basis for identifying a possible suspect or group of suspects.

I wholeheartedly agree Geithner and Holder are doing as they are instructed and that all this is being done by design. Where we disagree is on who is instructing them. IMHO, it sure as hell is not Obama. I doubt he could accurately analyze a simple financial statement.

I keep reading/hearing about how smart, intellectual, even how brilliant Obama is. I just haven’t seen any demonstration of that. He does an amazing job of reading what has been written for him by others. And, those others probably are smart, intellectual and even brilliant.

There may be other alternatives. Neither of those is right.

Obama and Holder obviously have decided that there won’t be any criminal prosecutions of the banksters for the massive financial frauds they have committed and continue to commit. They have exempted the rich from the Rule of Law. Whistleblowers are the only people who will be prosecuted.

I’ll ask this question, if the scary repugs are elected to control the government, how will they be different than the dims in giving the rich and connected all they want?

Two reasons, one it is a RICO conspiracy, and two, they put some transactions to related or corrupt counterparties at 0 dollars transacted,
perhaps to avoid the very statute reporting requirements.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/02/so-how-did-major-law-firms-lose-deal-documents-on-the-way-to-the-massachusetts-supreme-judicial-court.html

“On December 15, 2008, Appellant U.S. Bank sold the property to Blue Spruce Entities LLC for $0.00; in a simultaneous transaction, Blue Spruce Entities LLC sold the property to HomeSolutions Properties LLC for $5,500.00.

These facts raise serious questions about why Appellant U.S. Bank would pay $94,350.00 at auction for the Ibanez property and sell it for $0.00.”
One comment …
“Out of curiosity I searched ‘HomeSolutions’ and ‘Blue Spruce’ and found that these entities have been buying foreclosures all over the country, typically for under $10,000 each, and many of them from Fannie & Freddie. Sometimes they sell the homes onward without even registering the title in their own names. Is this a fencing operation? It would be interesting to learn what connections these entities may have to major banks.”

Rip Van Holder was installed by the Mansion Family to snooooze for justice for 8 years. And he is doing a fine job of it, so don’t wake him up.

Folks this is Eric Holder…remember he was the one who researched & recommended the pardon for Marc Reich(sp),the arms financier to BClinton.

It’s not surprising,Holder always folds on the side of the monied interest.And think about the hundred of thousands of poor folks who sent campaign checks to Obama,remember how Obama & his inner circle boasted about those $25.00 donations coming from folks who were living paycheck to paycheck.

So most of ‘em work to put people in office who have total disdain for ‘em.
well,I voted for the creep,& can’t stand to hear him or see him on TV,wonder how those who donated to his campaign & went knocking on doors enduring insults to get this creep elected ,really,really feel ?

It’s always useful to examine Tim Geithner’s full resume/wrap-sheet. Highlights include:

Geithner was a Director, at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. That’s Peterson as in Peter G Peterson. The same financial sector player who’s been running the Wall Street crusade to loot social security.

Geithner worked in Clinton’s Treasury Department where he was one of two negotiator’s for the WTO’s FSA(Financial Service Agreement) which committed us to eliminating Glass Steagle and opened the doors for the international derivatives market.

And regarding bailouts, Geithner’s affair with bank bailouts began long before the TARP. Mark Calabria makes the case that “If there’s a common thread to almost every bank bailout over the last 15 years, it’s that Timothy Geithner was always somewhere in the room”

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/geithner_lifelong_love_of_bailouts_rweqUPQK9EIongrU8AMtfK
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Timothy_Geithner

There’s plenty of evidence that Geithner is Wall Street’s guy. He’ll avoid any course of action which might slow down their profit “innovations”.

If it couldn’t figure out a giant disaster like mortgage fraud, why do we think it can find terrorists or drug cartels?

After seeing the 1998 Reuters picture of the NYSE Chairman shaking hands with FARC leaders, it’s difficult to believe that the drug cartels are hard to find.

While it may be labeled as an Anti-Money-Laundering Act, I suspect it’s true purpose is merely to maintain a monopoly on money laundering.

Those are apples and oranges. Money laundering is when you take money from an illegal (or embrassing source) and you do a series of transcations to obscure where the moey came from, so you can spend it.

This is unrelated to the misfiling, non-filing of the mortgage documents. Even is there is a crappy chain of title on the mortgage docs transfers, there are still (thanks to the wonderful world of image scanning) TONS of copies of the loan origination documents–which should where the money came from in the first place.

I can go througu (and have) a Pooling and Servicing Agreement and find out when and between whom money changed hands to create the RMBS, so I can follow the money (up to the point where the RMBS is sold, because many were private placements), what I cannot trace is the loan documents because differetn states have different rules for validly transferring that kind of instrument and the rules do not appear to have been followed.

But none of this is money laundering, and that’s where I get lost about the premise of this post.

I can imagine a scenario where the same piece of property could have been insured 50 times, by putting the same piece of property into a different CDO on each of 50 consecutive hours, then CDSs purchased to gamble on every one of the CDOs. I’m not saying this happened; I’m saying that running that scenario through your mind might make it easier to see how money laundering could be part of this system

But your insurance scenario would not trigger a SARS.

I am very narrowly focused on how SARS figures into this, b/c I am familair with how the SARS system works, and I don’t see the connection.

I am missing something here.

You have to report any violation directed at the financial institution. That includes mortgage fraud.

The phrase “directed against the bank” in the statute is part of why I don’t get your premise. If the system is working the way the bank wants it to, the bank would not percieve it as “directed AGAINST the bank”.

Which is also why the reports that are filed are against mortgage brokers. If the mortgage broker is deviatinf from the bank’s standards, ie ripping off the bank, that would be an attack directed at the bank. If the bank is getting what it thinks it wants (regardless of how stupid its desires might be) then there is no attack directed agaisnt the bank.

If you look at the instruction manuals and guidelines that banks send out to their branches about when to fill out a SAR, you can see that most of what you are talking about would not trigger awareness in the mind of the employee.

I don’t think the SARs tool was ever intended to pick up this kind of thing. It’s like trying to use a moneky wrench to drive a nail, can you pound the nail in with th emoneky wrench? Sure, I’ve done it myself. Is that what the moneky wrench is meant to do? no. Does it do it well? no Can you fault someone for not realizing that a moneky wrench can be used in this way? I doubt it.