As Michael Hiltzik wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Given the government’s failure to bring criminal cases against bankers and other Wall Street figures for collapsing the US economy in 2008, it’s been left to the little guy to strike back.” And the “little guy” did just that, in a case in Sacramento, where a federal jury acquitted four mortgage holders charged with fraud after hearing testimony that bank executives had pulled out all the stops to seduce them into taking out those toxic loans.

William K. Black, a key witness, says: This is the first time that a jury has ever got to hear what actually caused the crisis. And the jury was horrified. Because it was the lenders who deliberately made massive amounts of fraudulent loans and then sold these massive amounts of fraudulent loans through additional frauds to the secondary market and eventually brought down the global financial system.

And the testimony that came out in the case is that the agents, the FBI agents and the IRS agents simply assumed that the banks were the victims and the bankers were the victims and simply assumed that the little people, the mice, were the problem in all of this. So they never even investigated the banks and the bankers.

EMC, the mortgage arm of Bear Sterns issued mortgages to people who had no income and no assets.  Only West Virginia stopped them when they wanted to issue credit cards to these people.  Is the playing field level when a highly trained employee of EMC offers a mortgage to someone who wants a house and never has been able (and still is not able) to buy one?

The question everyone asks is why has no one paid the price for this fraud?