I probably would but proving that they acted _criminally_ would be hard. You can’t just wave your hands and make up a law they broke.

Meanwhile, that number likely means that the borrowers lied on those same applications. That’s where the fraud actually occurred. And would be easy to prove.

I told you the law: RICO.

> The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering and allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing, closing a perceived loophole. For example, before RICO, a person who instructed someone else to murder could be exempt from prosecution because they did not personally commit the crime.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...

You’d need to prove that a “Wall Street CEO” told someone to commit mortgage fraud. That almost certainly didn’t happen.

Quite the opposite you’ll find all manner of examples of the CEO’s enabling things like anti-fraud and risk management teams.

The issue was the implicit organizational pressures between those parts of the companies and the lending/revenue arms.

Making a new class of law that makes those implicit conflicts a criminal responsibility of company CEOs seems extremely fraught, but more importantly those laws didn’t exist at the time.

> You’d need to prove that a “Wall Street CEO” told someone to commit mortgage fraud.

For it to be RICO, no you do not need to prove that. You need to prove more. You'd need to prove that the "Wall Street CEO" told someone to commit mortgage fraud, and then used the proceeds of that mortgage fraud to take control of an enterprise (which would presumably have to exclude the company of which he is CEO).

(https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962, for reference)

RICO requires as predicate acts other laws to be broken before it can even kick in. So if there's no fraud in the first place, then there can be no RICO.

More importantly, there's a specific sequence of connections between the original predicate acts of racketeering and the control of the enterprise that has to be established for it to happen. 18 USC §1962 has the gory details, but I just don't see how the CEO can possibly be guilty of RICO.

As Ken White says, it's never RICO: https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

It's hardly a coincidence that we're missing laws that would be useful in this case. The bankers and politicians are too similar for this to be probable.

The corruption may be rampant but those aren't "Wall Street" jobs. Countrywide was based out of Calabasas, California.

There's no way half the loans in a portfolio are fraudulent, and that doesn't get noticed. That includes by the Wall Street firms that are repackaging and securitizing them as CDOs and CDSs. At some point, in a functioning system, that does attract the attention of the CEO.