In Arizona, the number of state lawyers working on mortgage issues went from one to eight after Clearing House.
Kathleen Day, a spokeswoman for the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit Washington group that works on mortgage issues, said such a cut appears shortsighted and reckless given the damage done by fraudulent mortgages and the potential losses to taxpayers.
Monday sees the opening of the trial of a colorful former Goldman Sachs trader, Fabrice Tourre: a made-for-TV Wall Streeter, a Frenchman with a quick wit who dubbed himself "Fabulous Fab" even as he worked on mortgage deals which, it is alleged, he knew would fail.
An anonymous Justice Department official told David Dayen, for example, that "at least 50" people were working on mortgage fraud.
But she said that her office had been working on mortgage-related investigations since 2007, when consumers began complaining.
"We have one business we need to work on: our mortgage business," Mr. Moynihan said.
The company, though, has faced an unusual amount of criticism from competitors for its work on residential mortgage bonds since the crisis.
But these relatively simple transactions have only a distant family resemblance to the Paulson-Bernanke plan for a huge bailout of countless financial institutions, to say nothing of possible help to households that took on mortgages that would work out only if the home price kept rising.
Eighteen people — investigators, prosecutors and support staff — work full time on mortgage issues in the Nevada office.
Indeed, numerous other colleagues also worked on that mortgage security.
