Paul Ryan Begs Congress to Bail Out Bank of America

Paul Ryan is supposed to the symbol of fiscal responsibility in the Republican Party. Here's a blast from the past in which Congressman Ryan begs his colleagues to bail out Bank of America and the other irresponsible banks who made poor decisions when it came to lending money and put the American economy in real jeopardy. Ryan claims to be fiscally conservative, but here is his gambling with trillions of dollars to help the irresponsible banks who produced a failed business model.



That's right, Mr. Ryan supported TARP, the bank bailouts. He also supported the auto bailouts that followed. Has General Motors paid those loans back Mr. Ryan, or are the American people still out billions that is now predicted General Motors will never pay back as they move more factories overseas. We all know the latter is the case.

The shorthand version of the scam is by now familiar: Banks and mortgage lenders conspired to create a gigantic volume of very risky home loans, delivering outsize mortgages to dubious borrowers like immigrants without identification, the unemployed and people with poor credit histories. Then the banks took those dicey home loans and sprinkled them with bogus math, using inscrutable financial gizmos like collateralized mortgage obligations to rechristen the risky home loans as high-grade, AAA-rated securities that could be sold off to unions, pensioners, foreign banks, retirement funds and any other suckers the banks could find. In essence, America's financial institutions grew vast fields of cheap oregano, and then went around the world marketing their product as high-grade weed.

The holy trinity of Bank of America, Countrywide and Merrill Lynch represented the worst conceivable team of financial powers to get hold of this scam. It was a little like the Wall Street version of Michael Bay's nonclassic Con Air, in which the world's creepiest serial killer, most demented terrorist and most depraved redneck are all thrown together on the same plane. In this case, it was the most careless mortgage lender (the spray-tanned huckster Angelo Mozilo from Countrywide, who was named the second-worst CEO of all time by Portfolio magazine), the most dangerous mortgage gambler (Merrill, whose CEO was the self-worshipping jerkwad John Thain, the ex-Goldman banker who bought himself an $87,000 area rug as his company was cratering in 2008) and the most relentless packager of mortgage pools (Bank of America), all put together under one roof and let loose on the world. These guys were so corrupt, they even shocked one another: According to a federal lawsuit, top executives at Countrywide complained privately that Bank of America's "appetite for risky products was greater than that of Countrywide."

The three lenders also pioneered ways to sell their toxic pools of mortgages to suckers. Bank of America's typical marketing pitch to a union or a state pension fund involved a double or even triple guarantee. First, it promised, in writing, that all its loans had passed due diligence tests and met its high internal standards. Next, it promised that if any of the loans in the mortgage pool turned out to be defective or in default, it would buy them back. And finally, it assured customers that if all else failed, the pools of mortgages were all insured, or "wrapped," by bond insurers like AMBAC and MBIA.

It sounded like a can't-lose deal. Not only did the bank offer a written guarantee of the high quality of the loans it was selling, it also promised to buy back any bad loans, which were often insured to boot. What could go wrong?

As it turned out, everything. From tits to toes, the mortgage pools created, packaged and sold by Countrywide, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America were a complete sham: worthless and often falling apart virtually from the day they were delivered.

First of all, despite the fact that the banks had promised that all the loans in their pools met their internal lending standards, that turned out to be completely untrue. An SEC­ investigation later found out, for instance, that Countrywide essentially had no standards for whom to lend to. As a federal judge put it, "Countrywide routinely ignored its official underwriting guidelines to such an extent that Countrywide would underwrite any loan it could sell." Translation: Countrywide gave home loans to anything with a pulse, provided they had a sucker lined up to buy the loan.

How did they make these loans in the first place? By committing every kind of lending fraud imaginable – particularly by entering fake data on home loan applications, magically turning minimum-wage janitors into creditworthy wage earners. In 2006, according to a report by Credit Suisse, a whopping 49 percent of the nation's subprime loans were "liar's loans," meaning that lenders could state the incomes of borrowers without requiring any proof of employment. And no one lied more than Countrywide and Bank of America. In an internal e-mail distributed in June 2006, Countrywide's executives worried that 40 percent of the firm's "reduced documentation loans" potentially had "income overstated by more than 10 percent... and a significant percent of those loans would have income overstated by 50 percent or more."

"What large numbers of Countrywide employees did every day was commit fraud by knowingly making and approving loans they knew borrowers couldn't repay," says William Black, a former federal banking regulator. "To do so, it was essential that the loans be made to appear to be relatively less risky. This required pervasive documentation fraud."

So what happened when institutional investors realized that the loans they had bought from Countrywide were nothing but shams? Instead of buying back the bad loans as promised, and as required by its own contracts, the bank simply refused to answer its phone. A typical transaction involved U.S. Bancorp, which in 2005 served as a trustee for a group of investors that bought 4,484 Countrywide mortgages for $1.75 billion – only to discover their shiny new investment vehicle started throwing rods before they could even drive it off the lot. "Soon after being sold to the Trust," U.S. Bancorp later observed in a lawsuit, "Countrywide's loans began to become delinquent and default at a startling rate." The trustees hired a consultant to examine 786 loans in the pool, and found that an astonishing two-thirds of them were defective in some way. Yet, confronted with the fraud, Countrywide failed to repurchase a single loan, offering "no basis for its refusal."

Mr. Ryan's name is all over this fiasco now as you can see begging for Congress to bail these clowns out.out.