In the waning days of the Obama administration, Deutsche Bank made a series of unusually frank admissions in a U.S. court filing.
The German bank acknowledged that during the housing boom it made intentionally false representations to buyers of its mortgage-backed securities, concealing the actual risks from purchasers of the bonds. It lied, for example, about borrowers’ credit scores. It also lied about the amount of equity that borrowers held in their homes.
Banks typically do not fess up to deliberate wrongdoing, and when they do, their language is usually more equivocal than it was here. So the Department of Justice, which extracted the confession, took credit.