The Mortgage Business Is No Fun Anymore

Mortgages.

A few years ago I tried to add up all the fines that Bank of America Corp. had paid for doing bad mortgage stuff. There were a lot of them, enough that, as the internet decays, the chart that I put together appears to no longer be readable. The headline number -- $68 billion of fines, settlements, etc. at the time -- was big, but more interesting to me was the repetitiveness of the fines. Countrywide Financial Corp. sold bad mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 2004 and 2008, and Bank of America bought Countrywide in 2008, and everyone sued, and Bank of America reached settlements with Freddie (in 2011) and Fannie (in 2013) over those mortgages. And then it reached a settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency over those mortgages in 2014. And then it lost a trial and was ordered to pay more money to the Justice Department over some of those loans, though that was later overturned. And then later in 2014 it reached a $16.7 billion settlement with the Justice Department and other agencies covering, among other things, those same loans. Bank of America basically spent the first half of this decade revisiting its mortgage misdeeds, over and over again, and paying for them each time.