Inside the Foreclosure Reviews

Yves Smith has a pair of damning posts about the OCC foreclosure reviews (part I and part II). Yves is compiling an extensive documentary record about the way the foreclosure reviews were structured to guarantee a whitewash that would provide little assistance even to borrowers who were seriously harmed. There's plenty of material here for any investigative journalist or Congressional committee to run with, and I really hope that this story gets picked up elsewhere.  

That said, I suspect that the complexity of the review process combined with the general ennui about foreclosure shennanigans will mean that the story doesn't go much further. After five years of regulatory tolerance of outrageous behavior involving loan modifications and foreclosures, it's hard for anyone to get excited about the problems with the review process.  I'm afraid it's become a dog bites man story. This isn't to say that it isn't all awful, but just to express my sense that media--and political--interest in the issue is waning. The only interesting and ironic twist with the last reconfiguration of the settlement was that it turned out that the accounting/consulting firms doing the reviews ended up squeezing the banks for a lot more money than they anticipated.