Official Secrets of the Financial Crisis : Columbia Journalism Review

Official Secrets of the Financial Crisis : Columbia Journalism Review

Jon Weil’s column the other day was one you really did not want to miss and points to wider ways in which the government’s relationship to the public has changed since, and partly because of, the financial crisis.
Weil points with incredulity to the quiet move by the conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which in 2011 had loudly sued 17 megabanks and other financial institutions for mortgage era predations, to settle with one of the worst of them, Citigroup, for (drumroll) … an undisclosed amount?
The conservator, Federal Housing Finance Agency, had claimed that Citigroup, the subprime and bailout leader and perennial train wreck, had sold the now-bankrupt government-sponsored enterprises $3.5 billion in mortgage-backed securities after providing information that was “materially false.”