love the photo!

Mozilo better pack up his tennis whites and his backgammon board, sounds like someone is headed to a white collar prison as the official mortgage meltdown posterboy....

We need one more headline with Three [Something]! italicized in it.

As far as the article.... oops.

Harper's May 2006 Cover read: "The new road to serfdom:
An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse"

It was, and still is, a great read. The writing has been on the wall for a long, long time. Oh, and if you can see the article, the pictures are awful pretty.

[www.harpers.org] (You may need to be a subscriber.)

So the monstrous looking guy turns out to be a scapegoat. Where is Dr. Frankenstein?

I worked for this company in Plano, Texas once. I am not at all shocked at any corruption going on within this company. The people at the Plano office (and a recruiting company from Richardson that had a shady side-deal with them) were some of the most awful people I've ever met, and not just professionally. It was such a terrible experience I'd compare it to working in some third-world country.

I hope they lock up a lot of these bastards for a long time. They treated their employees even worse than anything they did to their "customers".

This guy should work for cheetoh's.

Bad Wolf

Interesting quote...
"They made investors their last priority."

Should investors really be any higher of a priority? Shouldn't the order of importance for your company be?
1. Employees
2. Customers
3. Investors

I'd have to disagree with that quote because I think that Countrywide customers were their last priority. If they really did care about these customers that received these terrible loans, these customers wouldn't have been offered or approved for these loans in the first place.
Either way though, the fact that investors were their last priority isn't a bad thing at all. I think more companies need to act that way so to take care of who really matters - employees. Because without employees there is no company, and without a company there are no customers or potential customers. And without a customers, there sure won't be any investors.

@snazz: "I'm addicted to you... don't you know that you're toxic..." What great duality between debt and addiction! Britney Spears might be smarter than I thought!!

This hits a pet peeve of mine. "Mislead" is the present tense, pronounced to rhyme with "deed." If you want the past tense, it's "misled," pronounced to rhyme with "dead." So the issue is whether Countrywide conspired to mislead investors, or in other words, whether the investors were misled.

It's one of those fine points of language that is slowly eroding under the sandblasting onslaught of txt and IM.

"Robert Khuzami, a former federal prosecutor brought in by SEC Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro in February to toughen the agency's enforcement division"
So that would be which administration toughening SEC enforcement efforts created by which other previous administration?
You'd think we'd all have saved quite a bit of effort (and treasure) had the first one, well, done its job.

@dialing_wand: The problem, is that no one wants to believe a problem will occur if it means money now. No one wants to take preventative measures on anything now because they don't see the problem occuring now.

No one is generalizing it but the gist is there. Why wear a seatbelt when right now it's just annoying to some. Why wear a helmet or knee pads or a proper jacket while on a motorcycle because you haven't been in an accident and surely it won't happen to you.

A vicious cycle that will never end because the stupid ruin it for everyone.

@wooster11: Without investors, there would be no companies.

For a publicly trated company (as CFC was) they have a fiduciary duty to put the equity owners first.

@dwasifar:
OK, please explain to me, if/when he is criminally charged, will he have plead (as in "fed" not "read") or pleaded guilty? I always see pleaded guilty today but was taught plead, or is it pled, as past tense? How about hung vs. hanged? I see hanged now too. GD english language!

@wooster11: LOL. I love it when people take a turn of phrase and decide to over analyze it. The quote is an extremely simplistic sound bite meant to convey the fact that the company intentionally screwed its investors in the interest of making more money. That's what the SEC investigates, investor fraud. Of course the irony is that all companies put profit above investors (and employees and customers), and the entire job of the corporate management is to twist every fact about their company to make it look positive or simply hide it so that investors will keep investing. The trick of course is that you are not supposed to say any of that out loud. It's supposed to remain unspoken so you can assert plausible deniability.

@YouInTheBack: Yes, but investors want a lean, effecient company that has a good profit margin to allow for growth. Mistreated employees do not equal productive eomployees.

It looks like there's no way to get these birds for mortgage fraud or similar charges so they'll use what's available and charge them with securities fraud. As I understand the article, the SEC alleges that Countrywide knew there was trouble ahead but failed to disclose the problems while the insiders continued to sell their stock. If proven, that's a pretty good case.

FWIW, Al Capone didn't go to jail for murder; he went for tax evasion. Marvin Mandel didn't go for corruption; he went for mail fraud.

@wvFrugan: The past tense of "plead" is either "pleaded" or "pled" (but not "plead").

Re: hung/hanged:

"Paintings are hung, people are hanged."

"Hanged" is used only as the past tense for the method of execution -- everything else is "hung".

For all such disasters, we look in hindsight and say we should have done something, or listened to someone, or read between the lines, and then vow to do just that int he future. But we don't. There are probably such indicators right now of a future crisis, but if someone raises an alarm, they are called an extremist, and are run out of town. WHen will we learn?

@Newman!!!!: Oh, trust me: Britney didn't write that song. (It was actually written by Cathy Dennis.)

I figure by the time this "toxic" information is going in e-mails or memoes it probably has been discussed for a while before hand. Most execs let alone people know that if you don't want anyone to know about you don't put it on the internet .

The fact that they were noting the toxicness in documentation tells me they were either quite comfortable or familiar with that information .

@dwasifar:

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Eek for to winne love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.

(Chaucer, 1385. Loosely, "Language changes, but men still get chicks with it.")

The Mozilla foundation should sue the guy for defamation due to his similar name.

@bluewyvern:
A sincere thanks. I owe you my remaining sanity. Sorry though, it's not much!

But I thought Sen Chris Dodd was a "friend of Angelo"?

On a totally semi-unrelated note..what is up with his nick name. Well not so much with the actual name but the trend with the Orange look.

I know a girl, who radiates orange..it's not a brown or tan look...it's very much ORANGE! Some people should not tan or be out in the sun too long.

Tan beds are toxic if you frequent the sessions. I guess its just another obsessive compulsive behavior for some. But your ORANGE! & I wanna squeeze you UP!

@sarahq: And it was subsequently performed MUCH better by Yael Naim. Pretty much the only thing BS did was butcher it.

@Zanorfes: a little black face paint and he could totally be Chester Cheetah at corporate events.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Would it be fair to say that Chaucer got mad play?

@m4ximusprim3:

He's certainly already got the orange part down...