A year ago this month, the Justice Department announced the banking giant JPMorgan Chase would avoid criminal charges by agreeing to pay $13 billion to settle claims that it had routinely overstated the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors. When the toxic mortgage securities started turning bad, investors lost faith in the banking system, and a housing crisis turned into the 2008 financial crisis that led to millions of home foreclosures.
Alayne Fleischmann talking:
For a long time, I was expecting it to come out. I’ve been talking to the government for two-and-a-half years now. And first it went through the SEC. Then it went through the Civil Division of the DOJ. And at some stage after watching all of these major banks have deals that actually the facts get wiped away, I started to feel that if I don’t come forward, there’s a real chance of that happening here, too.
In terms of JPMorgan Chase, I started there in March 2006 at sort of the height of the boom. When I started, everything seemed normal. I didn’t really realize some of the things that were happening in the background. And then things started to change in about May, a couple months after I had been there.
I started as what they call a deal manager. Basically, we coordinate between all these different groups when we’re bringing in these loans, that are then going to be sold to investors. I first noticed that there was a problem when they brought in a new person to do our diligence, which is just the review of the loans themselves to make sure they’re of good quality. As soon as he came in, we suddenly—this wall sort of came down between myself and the group that was doing this review, and you couldn’t get information that you would normally get. On top of that, there was immediately a sort of a no-email policy. He wouldn’t send emails, and we weren’t allowed to send him emails. He would actually come out and yell at you if you sent him an email.
normally the reason why you have a compliance and diligence department is to actually have written policies about what you’re doing, to be able to explain to people how you’re making your decisions. So it’s exactly the opposite of what you would normally expect.
It’s really that you’re taking the actual loan files, that was done between the lender and the borrower, and looking at them to make sure everything looks right. Does this person have enough money to pay off their loan? Do they have the sort of history where we think that they’re going to pay this loan? And if we find that they don’t, then we’re actually not supposed to purchase the loans, and certainly shouldn’t be selling them to other investors without at least telling them there’s something wrong with them.
what really started happening—in particular, it became apparent in October—was that sometimes we had deals coming in where even though I wasn’t even the person looking at the loans, you could tell from where I was that something was wrong with them. The GreenPoint deal, which is what Matt talks about in his article, even when the loans came in, they were very, very old, which usually you try to actually pull these loans and sell them within two to three months—these loans were going back to close to the beginning of the year. If you work in the industry, you know immediately what that means, is either they couldn’t sell them, because the buyers were telling them they weren’t any good, or, even worse, they’d been sold and then had missed a bunch of payments, so they had actually been sold back to the originator. Any of those loans you wouldn’t normally sell to investors as regular loans.
Matt Taibbi talking:
Essentially, what the bank was doing was they—you know, there are companies out there, these mortgage lenders, like a company that might be familiar to people is, like, Countrywide—in this case, it was an originator called GreenPoint—they would go out into neighborhoods, and during this boom period, they were giving mortgages to anybody and everybody with a pulse, essentially. They were especially low-income neighborhoods. They were offering these very advantageous loans to people, whether they could afford the houses or not. They were buying huge masses of these loans.
“liar’s loans”. The FBI warned that there was going to be an epidemic of these liar’s loans way back in 2004. The industry ignored these warnings. The government ignored these warnings. And there was this huge influx of these stated income loans, where people could just say that they made an enormous amount of money, and nobody would check.
So the bank buys all these loans, and then what they were doing is essentially throwing them into big pools, making hamburger out of them, and then selling that hamburger to pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, all kinds of investors. Typically ordinary people were the people on the other end buying this stuff. They were investing in these securities, and often they didn’t even know it.
What Alayne was involved with was making sure that these loans were of good quality, so that pension funds, when they bought these securities, weren’t buying something that was going to blow up on them a year later. And what she found was that they were buying loans that were of very dubious quality, that were extremely risky, and that should not have been made into that hamburger.
And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”
Alayne Fleischmann grew up in Terrace, British Columbia, a snowbound valley town just a brisk 18-hour drive north of Vancouver. She excelled at school from a young age, making her way to Cornell Law School and then to Wall Street. Her decision to go into finance surprised those closest to her, as she had always had more idealistic ambitions. “I helped lead a group that wrote briefs to the Human Rights Chamber for those affected by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” she says. “My whole life prior to moving into securities law was human rights work.”
Alayne Fleischmann talking:
what happened was the transaction, at one point, just stopped. It turned out that 40 percent of the loans in this deal had problems with them. When we tried raising this issue with our superiors, what actually happened is they just started yelling at the diligence managers who were clearing the loans, sort of yelling, berating them, making them do reports over and over again. And it became clear that, although they wouldn’t say it, it was going to be like that until they would clear the loans. So what actually happened is these loans started being cleared, but basically just by sort of the brute force of what was going on there.
I raised it first with a managing director and an executive director, and couldn’t get any response. After that, I decided the best possibility would be to write a letter to another managing director that actually laid out everything I was seeing. I used the GreenPoint deal as an example, which is why the letter specifically says exactly who was doing what all over this deal. But it also lays out general problems in our diligence that the salespeople were being involved, which isn’t normal, and that there seemed to be a lot of pressure on diligence managers to clear loans that shouldn’t have been purchased or sold.
what it used to be is that the way that you could stop these things from happening was, if you write a memo that lays out what’s happening, the management won’t go forward, because they realize that if they do, there’s going to be this evidence of what happened.
The big worry with these settlements and the way they’re being done—and I’m not the only whistleblower in these cases—is that you have these emails and these memos, but nothing happens. A fine gets paid, and then all of the facts and who did what gets washed away. So, as a whistleblower, you’re thinking, “I did all of this, and the DOJ has all of this, but for some reason they’re not going forward on it.”
one issue I had is that although I warned not to securitize the loans, there was no way—I was blocked off, especially after I had raised complaints, from being able to see any of the data or the diligence process, which right there shows that something was wrong. So, after I left JPMorgan, I actually had no idea, for a full four years, that the loans had been securitized. On one hand, I was worried they would, but I really thought no one would ever actually securitize those loans.
Matt Taibbi talking:
This is an important distinction because Alayne had no idea that a crime had been committed until she had concrete knowledge that the loans had actually been resold to somebody else. They’re certainly allowed to buy as many bad loans and as many risky mortgages as they want. It’s not until they go to some investor and represent to them that these are, you know, AAA-rated securities or whatever, or highly rated securities, that they’re actually committing fraud. And so, she had no way of knowing that. Even after she was laid off from the company, she had no knowledge of what actually happened. So she couldn’t actually report the crime yet, because she only saw one half of the deal.
[she was were laid off in—at the beginning of 2008. actually before the crash. Already there was turmoil in the home loan market, but there was not—the crash had not happened. so that the bank, when Jamie Dimon and other leaders later said that they had no realization that the market was tanking as fast as it could]
what’s funny is they actually said two completely opposite things. There was an article in Fortune magazine later in 2008 in which they report that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the company, knew as early as October of 2006 that the industry was rife with underwriting problems, all the things that Alayne is talking about. The company was aware of this, and there are quotes in which the CEO is telling his subordinates, “We’ve got to get out of these investments, because this whole thing can go up in smoke.” And then, meanwhile, so Chase is selling its own investments in these kinds of mortgages, but they’re taking these same mortgages and selling them to investors and not telling them that they have these concerns. Later, when they testify in front of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010, Dimon said exactly the opposite. He said, essentially, “Well, we had no idea that these things were happening. We got caught up in the fact that housing prices were just going continually upward.”
so, the settlement happened in—I guess, a year ago about this month. And what’s interesting about it is, Alayne, by that point, had already talked to civil investigators in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, and she talked to some very talented lawyers there who seemed very anxious to press this case. And they were about to release a very detailed civil complaint against Chase in September of last year, and just hours before that press conference, when they were going to announce that, reportedly, Jamie Dimon, again, the CEO of Chase, called up the assistant attorney general, asked to renegotiate, and they canceled the press conference, and they went back into negotiations. And a few months later, they had a settlement in which they paid a lot of money, but none of the facts came out in that.
I could call up—yeah, I could call up the mayor or the president and have a court case go away. I mean, that’s exactly what happened in this case, is they basically put in a phone call to the very top of the criminal justice system.
Alayne Fleischmann talking:
my first contact, it was actually after four years. I was working in Calgary, and I got a call from the SEC. He introduced himself as an investigator from the Enforcement Division. And as I sort of paused for a minute, jokingly, he then said, “You weren’t expecting to hear from me, were you?” And after that, they set up my first interview with the SEC, which was very short. It was only maybe an hour, hour and a half. They were only interested in one deal. And even though I kept bringing up GreenPoint and they had the letter that I had written, they weren’t actually interested in that. And the SEC settlement was based on that other deal.
And then, it wasn’t until later, about December 2012, that I first met with the DOJ investigators. And it was very clear that this was going to be very different. As soon as they walked in, you could tell they knew these securities up and down, and they were really anxious to go forward with it and felt very comfortable going forward with the case. So, in that meeting, it was a very detailed meeting, sort of hours of going through how the process works and what happened. And then I had an actual deposition in about May of 2013, where they nailed down a lot more of that.
And you could see at that stage—first, I got to find out for the first time ever how many of these loans had actually gone into—had been sold to investors in sort of one pool, and it was hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of them, with nothing actually disclosed about the problems with the loan. And then, second, I got to really see what their case was, and they clearly realized they had an incredible case there.
Matt Taibbi talking:
it’s a crazy thing when the leading law enforcement official (Attorney General Eric Holder) in the nation comes out and says, “Well, some companies are just so big that we can’t prosecute them no matter what they do.” In that case, he was speaking—he was testifying in the wake of a settlement the government had entered into with HSBC, which is the biggest bank in Europe and the biggest bank in Great Britain, which had admitted to laundering over $800 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels. And if you can’t send someone to jail for laundering $800 million of drug money, you know, because the company is too big, clearly something is very seriously wrong. But yet, this became sort of the unofficial official policy of the Justice Department. And this greatly affected the way they dealt with companies like JPMorgan Chase, like Citigroup, like Bank of America. They tried to find a way to effect some kind of resolution that didn’t involve criminal charges, didn’t involve penalties to individuals, and also didn’t put the facts of any of what they had actually done out into the public.
[it’s the old Monopoly board game all over again, get out of jail free. Instead of paying $200 to get out of jail, you pay $2 billion to get out of jail. But the amounts of money that these governments are getting as a result of this—I mean, I just checked with the New York state comptroller. New York state alone, this year, is getting out of its bank settlements with Wall Street a windfall of $5 billion. That’s just New York state. Other states are getting their share, and of course the federal government is getting huge infusions. And so, they suddenly have all this cash. And then they also had this other stuff that you’ve talked about, which is consumer relief apportions. So, the governments actually get cash settlements, but then they supposedly negotiate additional money for the citizens, a consumer relief.]
these settlements, they always come up with a big number, but the number is always actually—when you actually look at the accounting, it turns out to be smaller than they announce. In the case of the Chase settlement, the number they announced was $13 billion. But there’s a couple of really important factors here. One is that $7 billion of that—it’s $7 billion, right?—was tax-deductible, which means that all of us, American citizens, anybody who pays taxes, actually picked up the check for about $2.4 billion worth of the settlement. So we paid part of that settlement, which is crazy. I mean, the ordinary person, if we get a speeding ticket, we can’t deduct that when we go to pay our taxes. But these people cratered the world economy, and they get to write a tax deduction for it.
Four billion dollars of the settlement was what they call consumer relief. And what this really boils down to, I mean, there’s some loan forgiveness, where they’re allowing people to pay less principal towards their home loans, but mostly it comes down to letting people have a little extra time to pay off their payments. And it’s not always the bank that is actually doing that; it’s often the investors in those loans who are actually giving the relief. So, it’s not really the bank paying $4 billion. It’s just a number.
they brought a bunch of settlements and they collected a bunch of money, but there isn’t a single individual, in this entire tableau, who is actually individually paying any kind of penalty for any of these misdeeds. All of that money came out of the pockets of shareholders. No executives had to pay a fine. No executives had to do a single day in jail. There were not even charges filed against any individuals.
I can’t stand here and tell you that Jamie Dimon committed a crime. But certainly there are people in these companies, and in cases like Alayne’s case, who would be targets of criminal fraud prosecutions, and probably at a lower level than Jamie Dimon. I think it would be hard to prove, although who knows? Because they didn’t try. In a normal drug case, what you would do is you would take everybody who was guilty, and you would try to roll them up the chain and see how far you could go. And that’s exactly what they did not do in this case. They didn’t aggressively go after everybody. They didn’t follow every lead. Instead, they just sort of went into a back room, decided on a number and made the whole thing go away. And yes, that is a kind of justice, it’s a kind of resolution, but I think it’s insufficient.
after the settlement agreement with JPMorgan Chase, the stock of the company went up dramatically, the stock price of the company went up dramatically, and Jamie Dimon ended up getting a huge raise from his board of directors.
in the first weeks after the settlement was announced, the market capitalization of JPMorgan Chase went up 6 percent, which translated into about $12 billion worth of value. So that’s most of your settlement right there. Actually, it’s more than almost—more than the entire settlement, if you look at it as a $9 billion settlement. And yes, Jamie Dimon, just a few weeks after being dinged for the largest regulatory fine in the history of capitalism, got a 74 percent raise by the board of—by the Chase board.
Alayne Fleischmann talking:
There’s actually an excellent website called JPMadoff.com with some lawyers who were involved in the Madoff case, where they’ve been tracking, actually, all of JPMorgan’s fines for fraud and illegal activity. And they’re actually at $29 billion now in the last four years alone. So, the question that needs to be asked is: How is it that you can be a CEO, over $29 billion worth of fines, and get a raise? It also clearly shows that there’s no deterrent to all of these fines. It’s just happening over and over again. And if there aren’t any individuals held accountable, there’s no reason for any of them to actually stop doing these very serious crimes.
there’s very little difference between civil securities fraud and criminal securities fraud, or even how you can do this as a wire fraud case. Once you have that strong of a civil fraud case, the only real difference is that you need a little more intent level—they had to have really intentionally been doing the fraud—and you have to prove it to a higher standard. You know, you have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that this is what they were doing. But when you look at these cases, these are some of the easiest white-collar crime cases that you’re ever going to see.
And one of the things that I think has been sold to the public is, well, these are really complex and difficult, or we don’t really know who did what. First, in my case, and what I’ve seen in these other cases, there are all sorts of documents that show exactly who was making the decisions and who knew what. The idea that they’re too complex, you know, these securities themselves that are sold to investors are complex, but the fact that the investors were lied to about the quality of the loans, that’s actually really easy. And the fact that obviously if you have people who can’t afford their loans, there’s going to be no money coming out of these loans, is also something that’s not a difficult thing to understand.
I, for a long time, believed that this come out, that the government would do their investigation and come forward with it. It’s actually taken a really long time for me, because for me it’s a little bit of an incredible thing to believe. But after watching all of these cases over and over again, at some stage I’m in the position where if I keep silent and the statute of limitation runs, or they do one of these agreements where they whitewash everything, then it’s too late, which is what’s happened over and over again so far. So, I’m trying to change the pattern and come out first, so that they have to either follow these properly, the way they would for any other criminal defendant, or explain why they’re not doing it.
Matt Taibbi talking:
I think it’s hard not to make a connection between the total lack of enthusiasm that we saw for the Democratic Party this past week and, for instance, their behavior in pushing investigations of the financial services community. And we saw it with the Occupy protests. I talk to people on Wall Street all the time. I mean, all my sources come from Wall Street. And they all say the same thing, that Barack Obama had an incredible opportunity in late 2008, just after he took office. With his communication skills, he could have gone to the American people and explained to them exactly what happened and said, “This is why the economy is bad. This is why you’re losing your job. There was massive criminal activity. It’s not just an accident.” And then he could have gone and put a few people in jail and really put some teeth behind those words. Instead, they swept it all under the rug. And people, even if they don’t completely understand what happened, they sense that nothing was done. And I think it’s important to understand that.
Alayne Fleischmann talking:
there are different arguments about whether I am or am not violating it, because of the criminal nature of what I’m bringing forward. For me, at some stage, it’s just sometimes you’re involved in something that’s bigger than you personally. Even right now, there are still all sorts of suits out there by private investors, retirement funds, pension plans, trying to get their money back. And they don’t—in a lot of cases, they don’t know that I have information. So I actually now have, in my email, contacts coming in, asking for help from me, so that they can get this money that was really stolen from their investors, these retirees, back to those people. So, for me, that’s more important than anything that’s going to happen to me.
At some stage, I think I decided that this was more important. And at the end of the day, I’ll be OK. You know, I’ll figure something out, and I’ll get through this. But I think we’re at a stage where unless a lot of people start coming forward and say, “We care about this. We now know what’s happening, and we want someone to do something about it,” that this is all just going to pass into history.
The concern I have is that what we’ve seen is that even when they’re really strong cases—you look at the JPMorgan-Madoff case, HSBC—they still, no matter how strong it is, they just get hushed away. So, yeah.
Matt Taibbi talking:
And this is an important distinction, too, is that it’s often not the line investigators who are the problem. The people who actually work these cases, the career prosecutors who are doing this digging, oftentimes they’re very talented and aggressive lawyers who really know what they’re doing. The problem is, the political wing of the Justice Department can take those cases and do whatever they want with them. And we saw, in Alayne’s case and in many other cases, that they take these excellent investigations, and then they just turn them into these slap-on-the-wrist settlements. And that’s what she’s worried about, I think.
For years now, I’ve been covering a lot of this stuff. And I’ve spoken to a lot of people in law enforcement. And there are really two types of people that I talk to who are prosecutors. One is the kind of old-school law enforcement type that want to get the bad guy at all costs, and they’re really career civil servants who just want to do their jobs and want to see justice happen. And then there’s this new kind of person who’s appearing in government now, who comes out of the corporate defense sector. These are people who grew up as corporate lawyers defending companies like Chase and Bank of America. And that’s who Eric Holder is, very pointedly. He spent a long time at a company called Covington & Burling. And this type of lawyer, this type of law enforcement official, is much more interested in coming up with a settlement that everybody feels good about when they walk out of the room, as opposed to the old-school kind of justice where the bad guy gets his or her comeuppance in the end. And I think his tenure was very representative of a big sea change in the way we do white-collar crime in this country.
— source democracynow.org
Alayne Fleischmann, JPMorgan Chase whistleblower. She was a deal manager at the bank, where she says she witnessed “massive criminal securities fraud” in its mortgage operations during the period leading up to the financial crisis.
Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. His latest article is headlined “The $9 Billion Witness.” He is author of the book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.