Bill Black takes down claims of a “victory for the
government in its aggressive effort to hold banks accountable for their role in
the housing crisis.”  (HT: naked
capitalism.)  The full piece is available here, and
I highly recommend you go read the whole thing. 
What follows is a brief excerpt:

The author of the most brilliantly comedic statement ever
written about the crisis is Landon Thomas, Jr…. 
Everything worth reading is in the first sentence, and it should trigger
belly laughs nationwide. “Bank of America, one of the nation’s largest banks,
was found liable on Wednesday of having sold defective mortgages, a jury
decision that will be seen as a victory for the government in its aggressive
effort to hold banks accountable for their role in the housing crisis.” … Yes,
we have not seen such an aggressive effort since Captain Renault told Rick in
the movie Casablanca that he was “shocked” to discover that there was gambling
going on (just before being handed his gambling “winnings” which were really a
bribe)…. The jurors found that BoA (through its officers) committed an orgy of
fraud in order to enrich those officers…. The journalist’s riff is so funny
because he portrays DOJ’s refusal to prosecute frauds led by elite BoA officers
as “aggressive.”  Show the NYT article to
friends you have who are Brits and who claim that Americans are incapable of
irony…. I’m not sure whether the DOJ consciously deciding not to investigate,
bring civil suits, or prosecute the most destructive frauds in history
represents “aggressive” or “accountable” to the DOJ.  We do know, however, the fantasy that caused
DOJ to give these control frauds a free pass. Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney
who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points
out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. “It doesn’t
make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,”
Wagner said. “They” refers to the CEO. 
“Themselves” refers to the bank. 
“They” are not “defrauding themselves.” …  The game being played out in all the corporate
settlements, like the JPMorgan deal, is that the controlling officers, even
when they grew wealthy by looting the shareholders, use corporate funds to cut
deals that protect them from being prosecuted or having to return their
fraudulent proceeds.  We all know who
pays for this – the shareholders.  Only a
comic genius would have the mastery of irony necessary to call the ability of
elite bankers to become wealthy through fraud with immunity “accountability.” …
The self-congratulations that DOJ press flacks regularly issue to attempt to
con journalists and the public into believing that DOJ is aggressively holding
elite bankers accountable for their frauds make “Baghdad Bob” seem credible by
comparison.