Tag Archives: underwriting

Doing Justice with the $13B JPMorgan Settlement

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I have posted a couple of items on this massive settlement (here and here).  This should be my last one. Perhaps I am ungrateful, but the Statement of Facts agreed upon by the Department of Justice and JPMorgan Chase left me with an empty feeling. Recovering $13 billion for homeowners, investors and the government is certainly a key aspect of the justice done in this case. But the law can and should have an expressive function — it should make a statement about the difference between right and wrong behavior. Unfortunately, the Statement of Facts almost completely fails as an expressive document.

It only makes it clear at one point that JPMorgan, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual did something very wrong:

employees of JPMorgan, Bear Stearns, and WaMu received information that, in certain instances, loans that did not comply with underwriting guidelines were included in the RMBS sold and marketed to investors; however, JPMorgan, Bear Stearns, and WaMu did not disclose this to securitization investors. (1)

The Statement of Facts provided a couple of facts that made clear what JPMorgan did wrong (see page 2), but I could not even parse the sections of Bear Stearns and WaMu to tell you what they did wrong. This is about as strong as it gets:

in 2008, internal WaMu reviews indicated specific instances of weaknesses in WaMu’s loan origination and underwriting practices, including, at times, non-compliance with underwriting standards; the reviews also revealed instances of borrower fraud and misrepresentations by others involved in the loan origination process with respect to the information provided for loan qualification purposes. (10)

You can’t tell from such language whether WaMu was acting intentionally, recklessly or negligently.  You can’t really tell whether this behavior was endemic, frequent, occasional or rare. You can’t tell whether it was the fault of some low-level employees or of upper management. Just about the only thing you can tell from the WaMu section (and the Bear Stearns section, for that matter) is that it was not JPMorgan’s fault:

The actions and omissions described above with respect to WaMu occurred prior to OTS’s closure of WaMu and JPMorgan’s acquisition of the identified WaMu assets and liabilities. (11)

No doubt, JPMorgan tried to control the PR and legal liability to third parties that this Statement of Facts could engender. But Justice could have held the line on the expressive aspect of the settlement just as it did with the monetary aspect. In the long run, that could turn out to be just as important.

Misrepresentation and Wholesale Misrepresentation

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Federal Judge Lungstrum (D. Kan.) issued a Memorandum and Order in National Credit Union Administrative Board v. RBS Securities, Inc. et al., No. 11-2340 (Sept. 12, 2013).  The Board, as conservator and liquidating agent of the U.S. Central Federal Credit Union, alleged that the defendants made “untrue statements or omissions of material facts relating to” a number of RMBS. The main allegation is that  “the originators for the loans underlying the [RMBS] certificates systematically abandoned underwriting guidelines, and that the certificates’ offering documents failed to disclose that fact or misrepresented that guidelines were followed.” (3) The court found that

plaintiff’s forensic analysis, based on the particular loans underlying the six dismissed offerings, support a plausible claim of misrepresentations involving the LTV and owner-occupancy ratios. Not only are those alleged misrepresentations independently actionable, they provide a connection to the particular certificates at issue and thus support a plausible claim based on the abandonment of underwriting guidelines.  That is true for claims based on these six offerings, even without originator-specific allegations.  Accordingly, the Court denies the motion by RBS and Wachovia to dismiss certain claims on this basis. (7)

Courts have been increasingly willing to draw a distinction between run of the mill misrepresentation and systemic misrepresentation (see here and here for instance).  This will have a big impact on how reps and warranties are drafted going forward as well as, obviously, the scope of theories of liability for breach of contract in the context of securities offerings.