Matt Levine, Columnist

Mortgage Bonds and Stock Blockchains

Also sin stocks, quiet lives, amici curiae, legal realism and big startups.

September 12, 2017 at 1:24 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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A mortgage case.

Well here's a blast from the past: The U.S. Department of Justice brought a civil case against Paul Mangione, the former head of subprime mortgage trading at Deutsche Bank AG, for an alleged "fraudulent scheme to misrepresent the characteristics of loans backing two residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) that Deutsche Bank sold to investors that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses." In April and June 2007. Surely we are very near the end of financial-crisis enforcement cases: The longest statute of limitations you can get for this sort of thing is 10 years, and all the big crisis mortgage securitizations are now more than 10 years old. I don't quite know how they snuck in this case, really, but there can't be many more.