Goldman Sachs reaches $5 billion settlement for mortgage

Goldman Sachs announced Thursday it had reached a $5 billion settlement with federal and state regulators over its packaging, marketing, and sale of toxic mortgage-backed securities that helped fuel the financial crisis in 2008. The regulatory penalty is the largest in the bank’s history, but is much smaller than other banks: Bank of America paid $16.6 billion and JPMorgan Chase paid about $13 billion in 2013 in similar settlements to investigations into whether they deliberately misled customers about the quality of the individual loans in the mortgage-backed securities.

Here’s more from Goldman on the terms of the settlement:

Under the terms of the agreement in principle, the firm will pay a $2.385 billion civil monetary penalty, make $875 million in cash payments and provide $1.8 billion in consumer relief. The consumer relief will be in the form of principal forgiveness for underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers; financing for construction, rehabilitation and preservation of affordable housing; and support for debt restructuring, foreclosure prevention and housing quality improvement programs, as well as land banks.

“Goldman said litigation legal expenses stemming from the accord would trim its fourth-quarter earnings by about $1.5 billion, after taxes,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “Crisis-related settlements by banks, mortgage firms, brokerages and others total at least $181.1 billion, according to an analysis done this month by Jeff Nielsen, a managing director at Navigant, a litigation consulting firm.”

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