So there was big news yesterday on the foreclosure settlement front. We still have to wait and see what the final deal looks like, but there are reports out that the long-awaited settlement is a far, far better deal for the public than expected. If these reports are true, it looks like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and California AG Kamala Harris have scored an enormous victory in narrowing the scope of the settlement to the point where it really only covers robosigning abuses.

According to reports (like this one in the Huffington Post), the deal will not include:

1. Criminal liability.
2. Tax liability
3. Fair lending, fair housing, or any other civil rights claim.
4. Federal Housing Finance Agency or the GSEs [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac]
5. CFPB claims for the period after they came into existence in July 2011
6. SEC claims
7. National Credit Union Association Claims
8. FDIC claims
9. Federal Reserve Board claims
10. MERS claims

If that is true, and all of those things are out of the deal, and the banks are still exposed to liability not only for all of those things, but also for the broad range of offenses related to securitization, then $25 billion, dare I say it, might not even be a completely sucky number. It's far less than the real liability, but it's a much bigger sum than I ever thought would be negotiated just for robosigning.

I'm interested to see what the market reaction will be if this deal goes through. On the one hand the banks will all obtain some certaintly and relief from robosigning claims. But on the other hand, all the banks are still on the hook in other areas, nost notably putbacks of bad loans.

Score one for Schneiderman/Harris. Coupled with the news that the subpoenas have already started dropping on the securitization front, I'm almost optimistic.

p.s. let me clarify something, for readers who might mistake my meaning here. Robosigning is not a small offense. It's not a "clerical" issue. It's a mass-perjury issue, a tax evasion issue, a contractual fraud issue, and it's a criminal conspiracy issue (the banks' highest executives were engaged in planning it) and it resulted in millions of errors that resulted in untold numbers of premature foreclosures.

Robosigning had a profound and immediate impact on large numbers of actual human beings, and I don't want people to think I'm dismissing it as unimportant. I probably also shouldn't celebrate news like this until I see how the actual deal looks, what wording is used to narrow the deal's purview, how homeowners and other victims will be compensated, what will be done to prevent it in the future, and so on.

But my point was that, while a gross crime and one of the more obvious (and easily provable) parts of the criminal scheme common during the mortgage bubble years, robosigning is really an ancillary part of an even more enormous fraud that went on, and is still going on, in securitization/origination. Many homeowners were victimized by robosigning, but your more common victim of bank fraud during this time was an investor in MBS -- maybe even another WallStreet entity like a hedge fund or a bond insurer, maybe a foreign trade union, maybe a state worker whose pension fund lost 40% of its value because it was sold bad bonds by a too-big-to-fail bank. And the hook that snared those victims was securitization. 

When I first heard about the foreclosure settlement, I thought it might contain a broad waiver for everything, including the tax evasion issues, the fair lending issues, securitization, and all the other things on that list above. If they did that, that would be TARPx10. My only point about this deal is that it appears to have been effectively negotiated down from a bloocurdling outrage to whatever it is now, which is probably something far less than that: it may still be a serious underpay, but it's not the unreal, criminal giveaway it was originally meant to be.

And it still leaves plenty of room for criminal investigation and reform. The people who organized and supervised the robosigning could and should still be targets of criminal prosecution, deal or no deal: this won't change that.

All I'm saying is, good for Schneiderman/Harris for holding out and preventing this settlement from being another AIG -- a secret backroom bailout in which everybody at the table got the government to solve their balance sheet problems in 24-48 hours of frenzied, disorganized discussion. This is still a bailout, but at the very least, someone represented the public this time around.

We still have to see what it looks like in the end, but I'm encouraged.

I talked more on this with the excellent Bill Press on Countdown last night:

VIEW VIDEO

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-big-change-on-the-foreclosure-front-20120128?print=true