Richard Bowen blowing the whistle on billions of dollars in toxic assets

by Juan Carlos Salcedo, Internationalist “Pocho”

We talked with former banker Mr. Richard Bowen, whose role in CitiGroup was to supervise a mortgage portfolio of 90 billion dollars annually, he observed irregularities in the process and denounced them internally and publicly.

CitiGroup ultimately received $350 billion in bank bailout from the U.S. government. In total, US citizens ended up paying $23 trillion so that the banking system would not go under.

The entire world suffered the impact of that giant financial crisis, but not a single high-level executive of the involved financial entities was prosecuted. Richard Bowen, at the epicenter of that thorny historical period, reflects on the matter, and talks about the lessons learned and not learned.