The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

Now, someone at WaMu sold this preposterous loan into a pool of mortgages that was bought by investors all around the world. Among the buyers of such loans was Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, a Dutch state pension fund, which ultimately sued JPMorgan Chase, which by then had acquired WaMu in a state-aided shotgun wedding. The Dutch plaintiffs described the Simpson loan in their suit. That same year the fund was forced to cut pensions for some three million workers by 0.5 percent. Selling that loan into a securitized pool that would be marketed everywhere wasn’t just fraud, it was as bad as grinding horsemeat into hot dogs and sending them by the truckload to supermarkets around the world. There were tens of thousands of cases just as insidious as the Simpson case, and each one of them was a truly despicable criminal fraud. But no individuals were ever prosecuted for this kind of crime.