The Inaugural Financial Fraud Lemons of the Week Award Goes to DOJ

The Bank Whistleblowers United announce the inaugural Financial Fraud Lemons of the Week award. There can be no more fitting recipient than the ironically named Department of Justice (DOJ). The ‘lemon’ is used in the economics and criminology literature to refer to a car of surpassingly terrible quality. The quality is so bad that the car can only be sold through fraud. We will award it each week to an example of dishonesty or cowardice about financial fraud that is worthy of public ridicule. We want to leave room in our scale for truly spectacular examples, so this first award will only receive Four Lemons. The first award is for what has become a routine example of dishonesty and cowardice by DOJ. Its conduct should be a scandal of national proportions, but by now everyone expects DOJ to embarrass our Nation when it deals with elite bankers.
DOJ wins the inaugural award for picturing its humiliating settlement with Morgan Stanley as a triumph. This first column in a series we will do on DOJ’s refusal to prosecute the scores of senior bankers that led Morgan Stanley’s criminal enterprise will focus on DOJ’s press release. In the course of the series we will see that state and federal investigators, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and Clayton’s (not very) ‘due diligence’ reviews have repeatedly documented that Morgan Stanley was one of the largest criminal enterprises in the world and committed tens of thousands of acts of fraud that cost the American people billions of dollars in losses.
But you would never guess that from the DOJ settlement with Morgan Stanley, which at least partially explains why readers were presented by article titles that are themselves worthy of our weekly lemons awards. TheNew York Times entitled its story ‘Morgan Stanley to Pay $3.2 Billion Over Flawed Mortgage Bonds.’ Headline writers are normally hired to craft bold titles that will grab the reader’s attention, but this was one written to be a snorer. The Wall Street Journal’s title was even more somnolent: ‘Morgan Stanley to Pay $3.2 Billion to End Government Mortgage Probes.’ The mortgages weren’t even worthy of the euphemistic ‘flawed.’ The WSJ title portrayed it as if it were a settlement of an extortionate nuisance suit.

This post was published at Wall Street Examiner on February 12, 2016.