Morgan Stanley has agreed to pay $95 million (59 million pounds) to resolve a lawsuit accusing the Wall Street bank of misleading investors in mortgage-backed securities in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis.

The settlement, disclosed in court papers filed Monday in New York federal court, follows years of litigation by investors over allegedly false and misleading statements over the soured securities.

The deal stemmed from a lawsuit pursued by the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi (MissPERS) and the West Virginia Investment Management Board.

The plaintiffs accused Morgan Stanley of violating U.S. securities law in packaging and selling mortgage backed securities in 13 offerings in 2006 and 16 offerings in 2007.

Read on.

In response to the insightful article by Daniel Wise, “Panel Shifts Toward Remedy in ‘Sarmiento,'” (Aug. 29), I would raise one small point. Wise lamented that “The 2009 New York law (mandating settlement conferences in foreclosure cases) specifically instructed the Judiciary to issue rules to ‘ensure’ that judges have ‘the necessary authority and power’ to see that ‘conferences not be unduly delayed or subject to willful dilatory tactics,'” but that “the Judiciary has taken no action on the Legislature’s command.”

What the Legislature actually stated was “The chief administrator of the courts shall … promulgate such additional rules as may be necessary to ensure the just and expeditious processing of all settlement conferences authorized hereunder.”¹

Although banks and mortgage servicers have argued in a number of cases that the failure of the chief administrator to have issued rules specifying what sanctions might be imposed for failing to…

The Tea Party regards Barack Obama as a kind of devil figure, but when it comes to hunting down the fraudsters responsible for the economic disaster of the last six years, his administration has stuck pretty close to the Tea Party script. The initial conservative reaction to the disaster, you will recall, was to blame the crisis on the people at the bottom,

on minorities and proletarians lost in an orgy of financial misbehavior. Sure enough, when taking on ordinary people who got loans during the real-estate bubble, the president’s Department of Justice has shown admirable devotion to duty, filing hundreds of mortgage-fraud cases against small-timers.

But high-ranking financiers? Obama’s Department of Justice has thus far shown virtually no interest in holding leading bankers criminally accountable for what went on in the last decade. That is ruled out not only by the Too Big to Jail doctrine that top-ranking…