Mortgage giant Mozilo charged with fraud

Filed in archive mortgage news on June 5, 2009

I'm always amazed that so many people pin the blame for our nation's current housing crisis on homeowners facing foreclosures. Yes, some of these homeowners — but not nearly all of them — were greedy, and tried to buy too much home for their income levels. But if you want to pinpoint the villains who really brought on the housing mess, look at the top levels of the mortgage-lending industry.

That's where you'll find people like Angelo Mozilo, former head of Countrywide Financial and Countrywide Home Loans. You might remember that Countrywide, which was once the nation's top mortgage lender, collapsed quickly once the housing crisis began. Bad mortgage loans, made to homeowners who couldn't make their mortgage payments once their artificially low initial interest rates adjusted to higher levels, brought the company down. It has since been bought out by Bank of America.

Mozilo was charged by securities regulators earlier this week with insider trading and regulatory fraud. You can read all about Mozilo's downfall in this Reuters story.

Mozilo is a cautionary tale. At its height in 2006, Countrywide originated $461 billion worth of mortgage loans. Too many of those loans, though, were bad ones. When the subprime lending crisis hit, Countrywide quickly fell apart.

Mozilo was once the king of the mortgage-lending business. Now he's the face of the industry's massive failure. According to the Reuters story, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Mozilo yesterday. The lawsuit claims that Mozilo made more than $139 million in profits in 2006 and 2007 from exercising 5.1 million stock options and then selling the underlying shares.

Remember people like Mozilo next time you want to blame someone for the housing slump. Yes, everyone from borrowers to real estate agents to appraisers acted badly during the housing boom. But at the heart of it all, are people like Mozilo, people who did everything they could to take advantage of the housing market, good business decisions be damned.