Federal regulators simply aren’t that interested in investigating foreclosure fraud and laying down the appropriate punishments. Tom Miller is too busy deflecting criticism about massive campaign contributions from the banking sector to run a proper state-based investigation. So it’s actually come down to the registers of deeds – the unassuming public servants working in county recorder’s offices across the country and carefully recording the transfers of land titles – to step up and deliver some measure of accountability on the banks for violations of law.

It’s unquestionably true that there have been virtually no major prosecutions stemming from the financial crisis. But yesterday we found the exception that proves the rule.

This is a reminder that the victims of Wall Street’s misconduct during the housing bubble actually include millions of responsible Americans who had zero involvement in the bubble, but are simply unfortunate enough to live in a community where the banks refuse to take care of their property.

I get the feeling that we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb, and we’ll replay this all over again soon.

Even if the banks get slapped with the “large” $30 billion penalty, that is only a net loss of 50% more than was saved by cutting corners. More likely, though, the settlement will cost the banks less than $30 billion. If I know the maximum punishment for robbing a bank was only being required to pay back what I stole plus at most another 50%, my life of crime would start tomorrow.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is pushing the state attorneys general to quickly as possible “bring to bed” their investigations of the wide-scale systematic violations of law by the nation’s largest financial institutions–it is a great reminder that, in America, there is a very important theft-to-punishment inflection point for the super rich and powerful.

Forced-place insurance is this: when a homeowner doesn’t pay for homeowner’s insurance for their mortgage, the loan servicer must step in to buy an insurance policy for the homeowner. This policy is supposed to be of comparable worth, but in this scheme, the servicer will purchase insurance for the homeowner that costs ten times as much or more, get a kickback from the insurance company for buying such an expensive policy, and then charge the investors or even the homeowner for the insurance. And the servicer usually reinsures the insurance, which means this expensive policy will never face a claim.

File this under “Who could have predicted?” President Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, William Daley, told the nation he didn’t think it was appropriate for a President to recommend criminal prosecutions for the banksters whose reckless behavior and massive fraud brought down the entire financial system, looted their own companies, defrauded thousands of investors and who are still engaging in fraudulent manipulation of the mortgage/foreclosure system.

For the low, low price of $20 billion, the Administration proposes, banks could be excused for the abundant mortgage fraud they’ve committed. But $20 billion won’t even begin to compensate those victims of fraudulent appraisals for the fraud committed on them.

The mortgage traders at Bear, who now are spread out across the financial sector, sold purposefully bad securities to investors – emails revealed show that they told superiors they were selling “a sack of shit.” They got data on their pools of mortgages bundled up in securities deals that came back with high percentages of bad underwriting or even loans already slipping into default. They falsified that data for the rating agencies to get AAA ratings, never told the investors about the bad loans in the pools, and sold the shit as gold. But it gets worse.

They got paid by the investors for selling the mortgage-backed security, AND they got paid by the originator for taking back the bad loan. So Bear traders made money on the same mortgage twice. Only the investors could force a put-back on an originator after the security was sold – Bear Stearns didn’t have a legal claim on the loan after they sold it. They did so anyway.