In terms of the size of the housing problem, as Reuters’ Agnes T. Crane and Daniel Indiviglio noted, $26 billion is a “mathematical drop in the bucket,” considering that homeowners are underwater by some $700 billion. As far as being a knock for the banks, Nasdaq.com columnist Daniel Pereira noted that the $26 billion is about half what the four publicly traded banks involved in the settlement made in profits last year:

The $26 billion represents a significant settlement, but it clearly won’t stagger the banks too much. Together, the four banks mentioned above took in a total profit of $47.6 billion in 2011. It’s not as if the banks will be paying the settlements out of pure profits, either; they’ve all set aside a fair amount of capital to pay for their mistakes. Still it’s telling that the banks will be paying just about half of their annual profits to walk away from the foreclosure mess.

Several state attorneys general were hesitant to join the settlement, fearing that the terms were too easy on the banks and that the extent of the banks’ fraudulent activities had not been uncovered. As we noted before, the settlement protects the banks from state and federal lawsuits pertaining to some abuses, such as “robo-signing” foreclosure documents, but doesn’t prevent individuals from moving forward with their own individual actions against the banks.

While it certainly won’t be a panacea for all that ails the housing market, it will certainly help those people who, until this point, had little hope of receiving a principal reduction any other way.

Here are some of the key numbers in the settlement, which is being officially announced at 10 a.m.:

49: States that have reportedly signed onto the settlement. The lone holdout is Oklahoma, as Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R) feels that the terms are too hard on the banks. Attorneys General Eric Schneidermann (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Beau Biden (D-DE) have thrown their support to the agreement, after opposing earlier versions for being too easy on the banks.

5: Banks covered by the settlement: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally Financial.

$26 billion: The amount of the settlement. About $5 billion will be direct cash penalties, $1.5 billion of which will go directly to homeowners foreclosed upon between September 2008 and December 2011.

$17 billion: The amount of settlement money going toward reducing loan principal (the amount homeowners have outstanding on their mortgages) and mortgage modifications. Banks will not get dollar-for-dollar credit for every principal reduction, so HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan believes the deal will ultimately result in $30-$40 billion in real principal reduction.

$1,800 to $2,000: The amount going to homeowners who qualify for direct cash payments.

1 to 2 million: Homeowners expected to be aided by the settlement money, with one million receiving reduced loan balances or loan modifications and 750,000 receiving direct payments.

4 million: Americans who have been foreclosed upon since 2007.

The deal protects banks from state and federal lawsuits pertaining to some foreclosure fraud abuses, including robo-signing. However, Schneidermann’s lawsuit against three big banks for allegedly fraudulent use of a mortgage database will go forward. In addition, “individual homeowners retain private rights of action to sue over foreclosure fraud and other abuses.”

Part of the hesitation on the part of several of the AGs is that a settlement would limit investigations into the extent of the fraud perpetrated by the banks. In the meantime, between shoddy foreclosure and faulty loans, the biggest U.S. banks have already lost $72 billion — with the most losses coming at Bank of America — and are preparing to lose even more:

Costs from faulty mortgages and shoddy foreclosures have topped $72 billion at the biggest U.S. banks as they near a settlement of a 50-state probe into the industry’s practices.

Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Ally Financial Inc., the five largest home lenders during the real estate boom, tallied at least $6.78 billion in new costs tied to mortgages during the second half of 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bank of America, ranked second among U.S. banks by assets, contributes $41.8 billion of the overall total.

“It’s a colossal failure of basic banking,” said credit analyst David Knutson. “It’s surprised everyone in terms of persistence and longevity and I think it will continue to surprise.”

Foreclosure fraud has been going on at the biggest banks since at least 1998. According to a New York Times report over the weekend, government backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae also knew about the shoddy foreclosure practices as far back as 2003, but did nothing. The more facts that come out regarding the extent of foreclosure fraud, the more it seems that further investigations and potential court action is warranted.

But at the same time, as Change.org has noted, the bank is on the verge of foreclosing on a 78 year-old former civil rights activist:

Helen Bailey is a 78-year-old grandmother who participated in the civil rights movement, worked as a childcare provider for autistic children, and was a community volunteer. She has paid her mortgage since 1999, but now she can’t keep up the payments. All she wants is to stay in her home until she dies, in the neighborhood where she feels safe and has lived for nearly quarter of a century. She could have refinanced with a company willing to let her live in the house for free until her death, but Chase Bank would not reduce her principal by $9,000. She’s been paying 7% interest, well above most rates, so Chase could have decided they had made enough. Instead, they have started foreclosure…While Chase tries to tie itself to the incredible legacy of Martin Luther King, who really did believe in communities, Chase tries to throw a grandmother who marched for civil rights out onto the street.

“JP Morgan Chase must practice what it preaches,” said Gary Flowers, Executive Director and CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, Inc. “On one hand, the bank cannot earnestly invoke the values of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., while devaluing the very principles for which he lived and died.”

This is not the only mortgage-related issue JP Morgan has brought upon itself recently. Last year, JP Morgan found itself in hot water for overcharging members of the military on their mortgages, eventually agreeing to a $56 million settlement. The bank even sold off the home of a military member on the very day that he returned from Iraq.

One former JP Morgan banker told Reuters, “I don’t say this lightly, but the consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose of the banking organization.” And evidently that exploitation extends to touting the bank’s commitment to civil rights with one hand while foreclosing on a former civil rights activist with the other.

Increased financialization is of dubious societal use; as former Federal Reserve Chairman and big bank critic Paul Volcker has said, “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence.” (Volcker has opined that the last useful bit of financial innovation was the ATM.) At the same time, the industry is one of the highest paid. In a new piece in New York magazine, a former Lehman Bros trader explained that, in his view, “there’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little“:

Many [on Wall Street] acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said.

The Great Recession destroyed nearly $20 trillion in wealth, and total family wealth is still down $15.1 trillion (in 2011 dollars) from its last peak. And there’s very little that the financial industry can point to that could possibly be worth that cost. To the contrary, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, the era of “boring” commercial banking — when strict regulations kept investment banking and commercial banking separate — “was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.” (HT: Jillian Berman)

However, new estimates from Javelin Strategy and Research, a research and consulting firm, show that the original numbers were closer to the truth. Javelin found that 5.6 million people have moved their bank accounts in the last 90 days, with 610,000 citing Bank Transfer Day as their reason:

Bank Transfer Day and the Occupy Movement have received tremendous attention, and for the first time we have market research data to measure the impact on the financial services industry. Javelin’s research estimates that 5.6 million U.S. adults with a banking relationship changed providers in the past 90 days. Of those switchers, 610,000 US adults (or 11% of the 5.6 million) cited Bank Transfer Day as their reason and actually moved their accounts from a large to a small institution.

Javelin noted that this pace of account closing is three times the normal rate. While 11 percent of people moving their accounts cited Bank Transfer Day, one quarter said they moved their money because their old institution charged too many fees. Account closures at Bank of America, the nation’s second largest bank, actually jumped 20 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, potentially driven by the bank’s ill-fated decision to implement a $5 monthly fee for its debt cards.

According to the consulting firm cg42, the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose as much as $185 billion in deposits this year due to customer defections. Of those banks, “Bank of America is the most vulnerable and could lose up to 10% of its customers and $42 billion in consumer deposits.” (HT: Business Insider)

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL)

According to his latest disclosure, more than $173,000 of Bachus’ total haul came from the financial sector. Over the past quarter Bachus received at least:

– $144,805 from employees of and PACs for banks, financial services firms, and venture capitalists. This includes $7,500 from Wells Fargo’s corporate PAC, $5,000 from U.S. Bancorp’s PAC, $5,000 from UBS Americas’ PAC, and $5,000 from payday lender Advance America’s PAC.
– $15,810 from insurance industry political action committees and from insurance agents for State Farm Insurance Co.
– $12,500 from real estate PACs and individual real estate agents and realty investors.

In 2010, Bachus candidly admitted that he believes Washington’s role is “to serve the banks.” As chairman, he has sought to cut foreclosure prevention programs and to repeal many of the the key reforms in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

Bachus, now in his tenth term in Congress, has also been in hot water for his financial investments. In November, CBS News’ 60 Minutes reported that one day after receiving a private briefing from the nation’s chief economic officials on the extent of the financial crisis in 2008, Bachus bet that the stock market would tank, “buying option funds that would go up in value if the market went down” and netting about $28,000. After the report broke, Bachus attempted to seize the high ground by moving a bill to ban the sort of insider trading he was accused of, but Republican leaders blocked his effort. One colleague reportedly said at the time that House Republicans were “not going to cover Spencer’s ass by passing a half-baked bill.”

Bachus is term limited as chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and has said that he won’t seek a waiver to keep the seat in the next Congress.

The 42nd World Economic Forum Annual Meeting closed today, with business leaders urging resolute action to promote growth and employment, particularly among young people. “Jobs should be our number one priority,” declared Annual Meeting Co-Chair Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citi, in a session on the global agenda for 2012. “Ultimately it is about growth. Nothing creates jobs better than growth.”

But this proclamation comes just seven weeks after Citigroup announced 4,500 job cuts, and some analysts think those job cuts are just the “tip of the iceberg.” Overall, the financial industry cut 200,000 jobs in 2011. Bank of America has announced 30,000 job cuts that will take place over the next several years.

“Everybody knows, in any case, that profits are Pandit’s number one priority; to be honest I’d be surprised if jobs are on his priority list at all,” Salmon noted. “The markets like it when big banks cut jobs, and hate it when they add jobs. And Pandit’s job is to do what the market wants. Which is, fire people.”

To explain how to boost growth, Pandit broke out the favorite right-wing canard about “uncertainty” holding back job creation. But as economist Bruce Bartlett has pointed out, “regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out.”

According to BusinessWeek, Bank of America is fighting back by giving loan modifications to borrowers who have made complaints. The catch is that, in return for the modification, the borrower must agree to stay silent and expunge any previous criticisms of the bank from his or her public record:

Bank of America Corp. is impeding an investigation of its loan modification practices by negotiating settlements with borrowers who must agree to keep them secret and not criticize the bank in exchange for cash payments and loan relief, Arizona officials say. [...]

One 2011 accord involving a borrower facing foreclosure who defaulted on a $253,142 mortgage included a $5,000 payment, plus $7,500 for legal fees, and the defaulted payments were waived and the loan was modified to a 40-year term with a 2 percent interest rate, court documents show. The terms of the original loan and the borrower’s complaint about the lender weren’t described in the documents.

The borrower “will remove and delete any online statements regarding this dispute, including, without limitation, postings on Facebook, Twitter and similar websites,” and not make any statements “that defame, disparage or in any way criticize” the bank’s reputation, practices or conduct, according to documents filed in state court in Phoenix.

This isn’t the first time that Bank of America has been accused of obstructing an investigation into its mortgage practices. Back in June of 2011, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general claimed that the bank was blocking access to employees and data in order to slow down an investigation into its alleged misdeeds. “Our review was significantly hindered by Bank of America’s reluctance to allow us to interview employees or provide data and information in a timely manner,” said HUD’s William Nixon.

Now, if the Arizona officials’ claims are true, Bank of America has gone from obstruction to explicit payoffs in order to keep its mortgage mess under wraps. (HT: Naked Capitalism)

In fact, as McClatchy News noted, Romney has received more in donations from employees of the nation’s five biggest banks than all of the other presidential candidates combined:

Employees at the five largest U.S. banks by assets, including Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., had given Romney about $600,000 through the first three quarters of 2011, according to the most recent filings available from the Federal Election Commission.

The second-largest recipient of bank employee contributions, President Barack Obama, had far less, about $200,000, the analysis showed. The Republican presidential hopeful with the second-highest total, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, dropped out of the race in mid-August.

Romney received more from employees of those top five banks than all the other candidates combined.

So far, the financial industry has made 69 percent of its donations in the presidential race to Republicans, a trend that, if it continues, “would mark the most skewed to one party the spending has been in more than two decades.”

The financial industry’s support for Romney is unsurprising, as he has made attacking the Dodd-Frank financial reform law a centerpiece of his campaign. He has even likened financial regulators to “gargoyles.” While he has paid lip service to needing some sort of financial reform, he has yet to propose any plan of his own.

But, as a new National People’s Action report shows, one borrower’s poverty is a payday lender’s profit. The report finds that lenders “take at the very least $3.4 billion” from low-income communities every year in fees alone. Titled “Profiting Off Poverty,” the report describes how payday lending companies open in areas isolated from traditional banking options to ensure they are the only available line of credit. Faith and Public Life reports:

While payday lenders prey on the most vulnerable and drive the poor into never ending cycles of indebtedness, the lending institutions reap huge profits by borrowing from big banks like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, US Bank and Bank of America at extremely low interest rates, “which they in turn lend out as payday loans charging between 260% and 570% APR”.

As the “Profiting off Poverty” report details, these companies continue to make record-breaking profits by setting up in neighborhoods isolated from traditional banking options. With more payday lending locations than McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S., these companies gladly admit that they are often the only available line of credit for people in poverty.

Major banks like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo finance about 42 percent of the entire payday loan industry in the U.S. Those loans strip $3.1 billion in wealth from low-income, working poor who are literally trying to pay bills from paycheck to paycheck. This kind of scheme exemplifies the need for an agency like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and indeed is the subject of the bureau’s first public hearing today in Alabama.

Newly-appointed bureau head Richard Cordray intends to research the industry and its enforcement actions that pose “immediate risk to consumers and are clearly illegal.” Endeavoring to answer whether regulation of the industry is necessary or whether the practice should be “explicitly restricted,” Cordray said that the goal will be “to develop a more vibrant, competitive market for small consumer loans.”

Robo-signing people into foreclosure is bad enough. But as it turns out, the practice may not have been limited to residential mortgages. American Banker, in fact, notes that JP Morgan Chase may also have been robo-signing credit card deals:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has quietly ceased filing lawsuits to collect consumer debts around the nation, dismissing in-house attorneys and virtually shutting down a collections machine that as recently as nine months ago was racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly judgments…It is unclear whether Chase has stopped pursuing collection on many claims nationwide, or if intends to pursue the debts in some other fashion. The bank has not explained its apparent moratorium and declined comment.

Chase’s halt does, however, follow scattered defeats in state courts and a whistle-blower’s allegation that it falsely overstated the balances of thousands of delinquent accounts it sold to a third party. Former Chase employees and debt collection experts insist that the bank would not have abruptly retreated from its collections efforts in the absence of trouble. [...]

Robo-signing, or the high-volume production of signed legal documents, has been a key element of the governmental and media foreclosure reviews. Chase’s current pullback raises at least the possibility that at least some banks may have documentation problems in other business lines…”If sloppy record keeping and problems with false affidavits is a problem with mortgages, it’s 100 times bigger in credit card accounts,” says Michelle Weinberg of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.

As one finance blogger put it, “When a bank leaves money on the table for no obvious reason, you know that something’s not quite right.” It seems that JP Morgan, and who knows how many other banks, were attempting to collect on debts without being certain that the amount they were asking for was accurate. One whistle blower looked at $200 million in JP Morgan customer accounts and claims to have found that “half the accounts lacked adequate documentation of judgment and one-sixth listed the wrong amounts owed.”

Banks have been robo-signing documents since as least 1998, as an Associated Press investigation found, and its not all that surprising that a practice that worked so well for so long (at least in the eyes of the banks) would have migrated to other areas.

In a Fox News op-ed, Huntsman explicitly said that he would like to “break up the big banks” by imposing a fee on banks whose size hits a certain percentage of GDP:

As president, I will break up the big banks, end future taxpayer bailouts, and restore capitalist principles – competition and creative destruction – to our financial sector.

We will accomplish this by imposing a fee on banks whose size exceeds a certain percentage of GDP, proving them an incentive to slim down and localize.

This is akin to the “bank tax” that lived a short life during the financial reform debate. While it wouldn’t be as clean a break as reimposing the strict divide between investment banking and traditional commercial banking, if it were large enough, a fee like the one Huntsman proposed would provide an incentive for banks to shrink — or if not, could be used to build up a pot of money that could be tapped to dismantle a big bank that is going under, instead of resorting to ad hoc, taxpayer funded bailouts.

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon put it, Huntsman “goes where Obama dares not tread.” Indeed, Obama has never called for breaking up the biggest banks — or “right sizing” them, as Huntsman puts it — preferring instead to craft a regulatory framework in which big banks can exist without having one of their failures doom the wider economy.

But that fact is that the biggest banks are still big enough to pull down the financial system, and while Dodd-Frank went a long way to make it possible to dismantle those banks without taxpayer funds, it didn’t do much to reduce the dangerous co-mingling of investment and commercial banking (which even 90s deregulator Newt Gingrich now admits it was “a mistake” to permit in the first place).

When Tom Mudie was approved for a mortgage modification program, he thought his foreclosure troubles were over.

Bank of America lowered his monthly payment by nearly $200. All he had to do was make the new payments — on time for three months — and the new amount would be made permanent.

But a simple error — hitting a “0″ on his telephone keypad instead of an “8″ — threatened not only to cancel the savings but also to cost him his home…Mudie paid his second trial mortgage payment by phone. The keypad mistake meant that instead of paying $615.82, he paid $615.02. He was three quarters and a nickel short.

Mudie paid the 80 cents in a separate check. The bank not only sent that check back to him, but sent his subsequent payment back as well and continued with foreclosure proceedings. Mudie was eventually able to convince the bank that he, in fact, had not intentionally underpaid his mortgage by less than a dollar. BofA claims the whole mess is due to a “computer glitch.”

Bank of America has had a significant amount of trouble processing loan modifications. It even foreclosed on one New Jersey homeowner two days after approving his modification, a mistake it did not correct until it was contacted by New Jersey’s largest newspaper. Outside of the modification sphere, one couple resorted to cutting a music video in order to embarrass the bank to close on their loan.

Haruni cites the work of Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove and shows how banks have seen their value and stocks plunge by double-digits while executive compensation remains high:

According to data from Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove, the heads of major banking groups including JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Bank of America (BAC) are out-earning their employees and shareholders even as shares of bank stocks as a group lost about 26% this year.

Bove found that while the 23 financial institutions he follows saw their stock prices and market cap drop by more than 30% and 11%, respectively, bank CEO compensation averaged $7.74 million. That means the banking heads brought in 50 to 100 times the average worker. Take BofA’s CEO Brian Moynihan who will earn $2.26 million this year while his bank’s market value dropped 60% – the worst in Rochdale’s study.

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon will earn $41.9 this year — the most among the bank CEOs in Bove’s coverage list — for a bank that saw its stock lose roughly 23% this year. There’s also Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein whose compensation was nearly $22 million, while the investment bank he runs – Wall Street’s most powerful — lost more than 46% of its market cap.

Haruni notes that press “reports have suggested that compensation pools at seven of the biggest U.S. banks will total about $156 billion (including salaries, benefits and bonuses) in 2011, which would be 3.7% higher than last year’s record breaking number.”

At least one major mortgage lender is taking the Occupy Our Homes movement quite seriously. In an email obtained and posted by the financial website Zero Hedge, Bank of America’s field services operation warned about Occupy activities, saying “we need to be prepared” and advising bank representatives against interacting with protesters:

On Tuesday December 6th there is a potential nationwide protest planned that could impact our industry. We believe protests will likely take place tomorrow at auction sites, homes that are being foreclosed, homes in the eviction stage and vacant homes. We need to be prepared.

1. Your safety is our primary concern, so do not engage with the protesters.

2. While in neighborhoods, please take notice of vacant BAC Field Services managed homes and ensure they are secured.

See the email here. ThinkProgress contacted Bank of America, and a spokesperson confirmed that the email came from the bank. “This is standard operating procedure,” said BofA spokesperson Jumana Bauwens. “The safety of our associates and third party contractors is our first priority. It is the bank’s policy to protect and secure our properties for the investors who own them. Bank of America is committed to helping our customers with home retention solutions and other foreclosure avoidance programs. Foreclosure is always our last resort.”

But if any major mortgage lender deserves to be protested when it comes to foreclosures, it’s Bank of America. Not only has the bank dragged its feet when it comes to getting borrowers into sustainable loan modifications, but it has engaged in some truly absurd foreclosures, including foreclosing on a man whose home was destroyed by a hurricane and breaking into another borrower’s home to incorrectly repossess her pet parrot. Perhaps the banks’ failure on the foreclosure front has something to do with its CEO’s belief that foreclosures are a good thing.

In fact, the Center for Responsible Lending has found 76 percent of payday loan volume (and $3.5 billion in annual fees) is due to “churning,” which is repeat borrowing by customers who paid off their loan, but because of the interest, require another loan before their next paycheck. And according to Credit Slips’ Nathalie Martin, a professor at the University of New Mexico, the nation’s biggest banks are, in a big way, financing this predatory lending:

– Major banks provide over $1.5 Billion in credit available to fund major payday lending companies.

– The major banks funding payday lending include Wells Fargo, Bank of America, US Bank, JP Morgan Bank, and National City (PNC Financial Services Group).

– All together, the major banks directly finance the loans and operations of (at minimum) 38% of the entire payday lending industry, based on store locations.

– The major banks indirectly fund approximately 450,000 payday loans per year totaling $16.4 Billion in short-term payday loans.

– Wells Fargo is a major financier of payday lending and is involved with financing companies that operate one third (32%) of the entire payday lending industry, based on store locations.

– All of these above mentioned banks received TARP bailout funds in 2008-09 and have benefited from accessing capital at exceptionally low interest rates from the Federal Reserve.

About 120 million payday loans are made annually in the U.S., with an average interest rate of 455 percent. One of the tasks of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be to get a handle on this sort of lending, once the Bureau gets past Republican obstruction, and it seems like chasing down payday lenders is going to lead the CFPB right to the front doors of some of the nation’s financial behemoths.

The show probed the abuses at Countrywide Financial, which engaged in widespread lending fraud, persecuting whisteblowers and enriching its own executives at the expense of homeowners (and the taxpayers who were called upon to save the industry). One senior vice president even said the fraud at the company was systemic. Yet despite these practices, there were no major prosecutions at Countrywide or most other major financial institutions.

So 60 Minutes decided to confront Larry Brewer, who is head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), and ask him why there have not been more high-profile prosecutions utilizing, for example, the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Brewer responded that he thinks nobody “lacks confidence” in the department’s ability to prosecute financial crime:

60 MINUTES: We spoke to a woman at Countrywide who was a senior vice president for investigating fraud and she said that the fraud inside countrywide was systemic. That it was basically a way of doing business.

BREWER: Well, it’s hard for me to talk about a particular case. Of course in the Countrywide case, terrific office, US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, investigated that. Interviewed many, many people. Hundreds of people, perhaps. Reviewed millions of documents.

60 MINUTES: Do you lack confidence in bringing cases under Sarbanes-Oxley?

BREWER: Steve, no one is really has accused this Department of Justice, or this division, or me of lacking confidence. If you look at the prosecutors all over the country, they are bringing record cases with respect to all kinds of criminal laws. Sarbanes-Oxley is a tool, but it’s only one tool. We’re confident. We follow the facts and the law wherever they take us. And we’re bringing every case that we believe can be made.

Watch it:

As 60 Minutes goes on to note, a lot of people actually lack confidence in the DOJ’s ability to take on financial crime. In fact, prosecution for financial crime has actually hit a 20-year-low:

As former financial regulator and University of Missouri professor Bill Black says, not only should Americans as a whole and federal officials be seeking prosecutions of financial fraud, but so should “honest bankers.” After all, allowing criminals to help cause a global recession that plunged 60 million people into extreme poverty and then proliferate in an industry will only sully its reputation.