Up until this week, and not counting the Bear Stearns hedge-fund indictments, we’ve had more talk than action from the AGs offices around the country on the credit crisis. Now, the lawsuits are starting to fly.
Today, the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth charged units of financial services giant UBS with fraud and dishonest conduct in [...]

If AG Michael Mukasey wants to leave mortgage-related prosecutions to local law enforcers (click here), he can rest assured that a veritable alphabet soup of federal law enforcers is on the case. The WSJ’s Amir Efrati and Liam Plevin are reporting that the SEC is investigating whether insurer AIG, which settled an accounting scandal for [...]

For lawyers digging deep in the chilled auction-rate securities market — and other credit-crunch followers — here are a few Tuesday tidbits. Auction-Rate Securities: Legally Elusive? Earlier this month, Law Blog colleague Amir Efrati wrote a post suggesting that the auction-rate securities mess could prove legally nettlesome for Wall Street. Today, Bloomberg news has a [...]

A few days ago NYT ran this story discussing the difficulties of winning shareholder suits stemming from the subprime crisis, which made sense to us given the spate of court rulings that have raised the bar for plaintiffs and what we’ve heard from lawyers who’ve thought these suits didn’t have juice.
But perhaps we legal [...]

For the litigators busy suing over subprime, or corporate types waiting – praying — for that market to come back, a few news tidbits.
Securitization Spotted: The Journal’s Serena Ng reports today that the business of securitization – in which banks create securities out of big pools of loans – could be staging a modest comeback. [...]

During a hearing back in December, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Jeff Bohm chastised Countrywide and its lawyers after the mortgage lender admitted to making numerous errors in a case. “How many times do I have to listen to that before I conclude, ‘You know, there’s got to be some kind of reckoning’ when I keep hearing [...]

Will Andrew Cuomo’s “appraisal code of conduct” — the set of guidelines for mortgage lenders to follow to avoid inflated home appraisals — ever see the light of day? If it does, reports the WSJ’s James Hagerty today, it may well see a whole lot of litigation first.
Here’s the backstory: Earlier this year, Cuomo campaigned [...]