U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey addressed questions from reporters this week about the need to tackle mortgage fraud and the subprime crisis through a national investigation, spearheaded by a government entity like the Justice Department.

Mukasey told reporters that while he sees the need to probe for mortgage fraud and to not turn a blind eye towards practices that led to the subprime crisis, he does not believe a national “Enron-type” task force is needed to handle the investigations and spawn changes.

"I have a sense that it is a problem that arises in particular markets, many of them. A lot of them in the same way but that there is no Enron-type task force that is a proper response,” Mukasey said. “I think what’s a proper response is information sharing. Is getting familiar with the way in which it arises starting from over evaluation of properties to turning a blind eye to the over evaluation, to putting together securitization packages that are then marketed to not letting people know what the true terms of their mortgages are, to rating those security packages in a way that overstates their value by disregarding the risk and that has happened over and over again. Somebody who I met with characterized it as white collar street crime.” Kerri Panchuk | 06.06.08