(thoughtful music)
- In the savings and loan crisis,
criminal referrals changed everything
because we made public
how many criminal referrals we had made.
And of course it was public
how many prosecutions had been started.
And so the news media
by about 1986, 1987 was filled
with "Wait a minute, there
are 2,000 criminal referrals,
and they are only 20 cases.
what's going on?"
Right, and then it was by 1988,
"Hey, there are 7,000 criminal referrals
and only 50 cases," type of thing.
And so the Justice Department
and the FBI were getting
hammered every month
with news stories that said,
"Why isn't the Department
of Justice prosecuting
when you have all these
criminal referrals?"
So we always understood as regulators
that our criminal referrals
were absolutely critical.
President Obama comes in after
this catastrophic disaster,
absolute failure of regulation,
absolute failure of prosecution.
And everybody knew that the
criminal referral process
had been destroyed under President Bush.
And again, it would've
been great politics.
Hypothetical President
Obama national address:
I have been informed to my horror
that the criminal referral process
and the criminal
coordinators were eliminated
under my predecessor and
that this is responsible
for the complete inability to investigate
and prosecute the frauds.
I have ordered the
following people forthwith
to reestablish this process,
and we're bringing in the following people
who made it such a
success story in the past.
Not only didn't happen,
has not happened even as we speak, right?
Instead, I'm the one who
actually got generated finally
through investigative reporter the story
about the death of the
criminal referral process.
And the investigative reporter
from "Huffington Post"
that I talked to called up the
Office of Thrift Supervision
and got the answer.
How many criminal referrals
have you done? Zero.
Remember, we made over
30,000 criminal referrals,
the same agency,
in a crisis that was
less than 1/100 the size,
in which the fraud epidemics were less
than 1/1,000 this size,
and now they make zero criminal referrals.
