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Obama Falls Flat on Mortgage Fraud

“Task force” aimed at prosecuting mortgage fraud hardly exists.

The Obama administration has talked a good game about prosecuting mortgage fraud, but has done little to demand actual change on Wall Street. David Dayen from Salon reports that a “task force” set up to examine problems in the packaging of residential-mortgage-backed securities during the bubble years isn’t the independent organization it claims to be. “There are no offices, no phones, and no staff dedicated to the non–task force,” Dayen writes. Instead, the “Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force” is essentially a “press release” factory that secretly piggybacks on existing litigation efforts. The president failed to so much as mention the task force in his State of the Union. A telling fact: he has many things on his plate—this doesn’t seem to be one of them.