Main Street

The White House Needs to Hear You: No Settlement Without An Investigation

A draft settlement between five big financial institutions and the U.S. states was distributed earlier this morning. It calls for the banks – Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Ally Financial – to settle with homeowners to the tune of $25 billion dollars.

The Associated Press estimates this will translate into 750,000 Americans getting checks for $1,800. That’s about half the number of Americans eligible for assistance under the deal.

$25 billion sounds like a lot of money. It is, don’t get us wrong. It’s the biggest settlement with a single industry since the 1998 multistate tobacco deal. But when there’s $700 billion worth of money owed on underwater mortgages, and when these Big Banks are handing out enormous sums in bonuses to their executives, you realize how much of a slap on the wrist this really is for them.

Not only is that a tiny amount in the eyes of a Bank of America or a Wells Fargo – settling also potentially avoids a full-scale investigation into the nastiness they’ve been pulling on the American homeowner for decades.

We know about robo-signing, which we’ve written about. We’ve also received letters from our members describing absolutely despicable treatment at the hands of these banks. It’s common knowledge that these five banks make it their mission to extract money from American workers, not get them into homes. It would be an incredible travesty of justice for them to get immunity from further investigation while paying a mere pittance to the homeowners whose lives they ruined.

This is not change we can believe in. The White House needs to know we’re watching.

Use our tool to call the White House now – tell them they can’t rush into a settlement. An investigation of the deceptive mortgage practices that caused millions of Americans to lose their homes needs to be part of any agreement with the banks.

Tags: Corporate Accountability, foreclosures, Housing