THE CRA HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS GUY

The wingnuts have decided to blame almost anything besides the banksters for the Great Recession.  These are among their favorite targets: the CRA, ACORN, Fannie & Freddie.  The central meme for many wingers is that the government forced banks to make loans to poor people who simply could not repay them.  I shown before that the CRA had nothing to do with the Housing Bubble and Fannie and Freddie were bit players at worst.

I suspect that the wingnut media won't give much coverage to this MOTU:

Jury convicts exec in $3B mortgage fraud case
Apr 19 06:29 PM US/Eastern
By MATTHEW BARAKAT
AP Business Writer

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A jury on Tuesday convicted the majority owner of what had been one of the nation's largest mortgage companies on all 14 counts in a $3 billion fraud trial that officials have said is one of the most significant prosecutions to arise from the nation's financial crisis.

Prosecutors said Lee Farkas led a fraud scheme of staggering proportions as chairman of Florida-based Taylor Bean & Whitaker. The fraud not only caused the company's 2009 collapse and the loss of jobs for its 2,000 workers, but also contributed to the collapse of Alabama-based Colonial Bank, the sixth-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Colonial and two other major banks—Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas—were cheated out of nearly $3 billion, prosecutors estimated.

...Taylor Bean and a handful of Colonial executives concocted a scheme in which Taylor Bean sold hundreds of millions in worthless mortgages to Colonial—mortgages that had already been sold to other investors. More than $1 billion in such phony mortgages were eventually sold to Colonial, which listed them on its books and on its quarterly reports as legitimate assets, prosecutors alleged.

In a related scheme, Taylor Bean created a subsidiary called Ocala Funding that sold commercial paper—essentially glorified IOUs—to banks including Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas. But prosecutors said the collateral that supposedly backed that commercial paper was worthless, and when Taylor Bean collapsed in 2009, the two banks lost roughly $1.5 billion.

UPDATE: Ken Hoop in comments provides a link to further discussion of how the banksters have been allowed to get away with fraud.