Recently released emails are part of a trove of internal communications and documents, mostly from 2006 and 2007, that paint a troubling picture of how Credit Suisse, a major player in the American mortgage market, operated as the housing bubble inflated, the New York Times DealBook blog reported today. The documents, filed in Massachusetts state court as part of an investor lawsuit, suggest that top officials at the bank routinely pressed subordinates to override due diligence standards and accept questionable loans that were subsequently bundled into mortgage investments. The documents are noteworthy because Credit Suisse, unlike many other major banks, has refused to settle large lawsuits stemming from the mortgage crisis. The bank has long maintained that its operations were held to a high standard and that the mortgage investments it sold lost value largely because of the broad housing collapse, rather than its practices.
