Penalties for his economy if he does not change course. and so you would go ahead. you should consider providing lethal military equipment to the ukrainians, anti-tank, anti-aircraft and air to ground missiles to the ukrainians so they could more quickly defeat these russian led, russian supplied rebels. ambassador herbs to the former ambassador to the ukraine, some very strong thoughts there, sir. thanks very much. you, too. sub prime loan market nearly collapsed the u.s. open. now word the loans are back again. where they are and how much damage they can cause to us overall and new technology that may revolutionize the auto industry and save you some time and money. we ll explain next.
Been enough punishment until you re sure the crimes have been committed and many times the reason both sides settle, the government and the regulated entity is because neither one actually wants to push it. the government might lose the lawsuit or the entity might be taken down in a serious way. that s why they settled. we don t know in a lot of these cases. we can t tell from the fact that a bank failed that someone needs to be punished. just to ground it here. in the case of wells fargo, okay, we know that there was a compensation structure that pushed people into subprime loans and on a racial basis and these were people who were coming in that were black and latino, but the compensation structure, this is the doj wells fargo complaint. provided a strong incentive for wholesale mortgage brokers to originate a room as subprime even if they could qualify for a more prime loan.
For low interest loans were given loans solely based on their race. that was the problem. we heard over and over again from the industry and also those who apologized. they said wait a minute, it s not our fault. we didn t make someone sign on the dotted line and make someone come to us and say we need the loan. the government was mandated. we find out because of the aggressive action and my hats off to eric holder and by the way, other state attorney generals have weighed in on this saying no, b of a and country wide at the time and many other lending institutions, you were guilty and steered people like african-americans and hispanics to sell prime loan when is you knew they were competent, qualify and could qualify and were eligible for regular loans. if that s not discrimination with a vengeance, i don t know
Holdings were not significant. the company had $141 million of exposure. they demonstrated the fraud, tiny sliver represent the sub prime loan disclose and the rest of the pie shows how much actual exposure there was. that is 40 to 70 times greater than he told investors. today s action only involves charges for misleading investors. one analyst says it helped trigger the housing crisis from which the nation still suffers. i think if there had been full disclose sure required by the securities laws, we would not have had a financial crisis, because many people would have bailed from the market before it grew to be so large. because the information was withheld, the market was unaware of how many risky loans had been made and overextented the housing market was.