The news this week for Bank of American keeps getting worse. Today the Justice Department announced it was filing a lawsuit against the bank. The suit alleges that Countrywide Financial, formerly the country’s largest private mortgage lender, generated thousands of fraudulent mortgage loans and then sold them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government institutions that underwrites mortgages for millions of American homeowners. The suit further alleges that the practice of streamlining and generating those fake and risky mortgages continued even after Bank of America purchased Countrywide in 2008.
“The fraudulent conduct alleged in today’s complaint was spectacularly brazen in scope,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan.
Those transactions became the tipping point of the “subprime” mortgage disaster that led to the Great Recession and the bankruptcy of some of the nation’s largest financial institutions including Countrywide and Lehman Brothers. The Justice Department is seeking $1 billion in damages for the actions of the bank for selling these knowingly “toxic” assets to the Fannie and Freddie, which then became insolvent and required taxpayers bailouts under the TARP program. The financial problems of these two housing lenders also led to thousands of foreclosures on the homes of American families.
The Countrywide case is a new addition to several other lawsuits being pursued by the government against Wall Street firm and financial institutions. For example, last year the Federal Housing Finance Agency sued 17 banks over losses sustained by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and is relentlessly calling on firms like Bank of America to repurchase billions of dollars in the bad loans they fraudulently sold to the government-controlled housing lenders.
Bank of American did not have an immediate comment. The news will be disappointing to its shareholders as it comes in the same week the bank announced that its profits had declined by 95 percent in the third quarter. The new the lawsuit represents yet another obstacle to the financial solvency and longevity of the country’s second largest bank.