Black vs. B of A

William K. Black and L. Randall Wray are calling Bank of America out:

Bank of America Should be Placed in Receivership NOW


We argued that the FDIC should place Bank of America in receivership and the federal banking agencies should impose a moratorium on foreclosures until the mortgage servicers correct their systems, which currently often rely on massive fraud and perjury. There can be no assurance that foreclosures are lawful until the banks actually find the mortgage "wet ink" notes signed by debtors to prove they are the true beneficial owner of the mortgage debts, which is required to seize property.

Quite the shot over the bow, that.

They follow up with:

...Bank of America's data indicate another form of deceit that is a typical consequence of accounting control fraud. Bank of America has delayed foreclosing, sometimes for years, on large numbers of loans that have no realistic chance of being brought current, even with the loan modifications it offered. This behavior would be irrational for an honest lender, for it would increase ultimate losses, but is a typical strategy for a lender controlled by fraudulent senior officers because it greatly delays loss recognition and allows them to extend their looting of the bank for years through bonuses paid on the basis of fictional reported "profits" after the bank has (in economic substance) failed. Bank of America's response to us admit that, of their 1.3 million customers who are more than 60-days delinquent, 195,000 have not made a payment in two years. Of those loans which have not received a payment in two years, 56,000 are already vacant.

That would be B of A putting off the day of reckoning with its shareholders - while increasing the damage to their investments when the reckoning eventually comes.

This bit is nice, too (not that the FASB rule change is news - but it's good to see it in context):

The bank's response primarily criticizes its borrowers as deadbeats, yet the data it provides support points we have made in our prior posts, including Bill Black's posts about the banks working with the Chamber of Commerce and Chairman Bernanke to extort the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in order to destroy the integrity of the accounting rules requiring banks to recognize losses on their bad loans. We have explained why the fraudulent officers controlling many lenders followed a strategy of making bad loans at premium yields in order to maximize (fictional) accounting income and their bonuses. This dynamic drove the current crisis. These frauds hyper-inflated the housing bubble and caused trillions of dollars of losses.


The extortion of FASB was successful; Bank of America was one of the leaders of that extortion. It changed the accounting rules so that banks could often avoid recognizing losses on these fraudulent loans, until they actually sold the home taken back through foreclosure. This dishonorable accounting fiction creates perverse incentives for banks to do exactly what Bank of America has done -- let bad assets waste away and make already severe losses catastrophic.

Good stuff. Part II is just as good.