It's Thursday August 7th. Welcome to Mark Fuller. I'm Chris Hill joining me in studio today from

Fool.com David Hanson. Thanks for being here, man. Of course, how are you?

I am well. This was yet another day. From time to time someone will ask well how do you

prepare for market fooling how do you like how do you decide who's going to be on and in

this case it was easy because of Bank of America and the headlines over the last I would say 18 hours or so had me thinking

even though I didn't let you know until this morning last night I was thinking oh yeah

I'm gonna spring this on David Hanson in the morning because Bank of America, as you may have heard, is reportedly close to the largest settlement ever with the U.S. Department of Justice.

This is of course regarding the bad mortgages sold in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008.

And the numbers that are being thrown out there somewhere in the

neighborhood of 16 to 17 billion dollars nine of that billion would be fines to federal and state governments to rest going to consumer relief.

First, you saw these headlines.

What went through your mind when you saw the numbers that were being thrown out there?

Probably the same thing that went through everyone's mind is just trying to figure out now which one is this related to?

I mean I follow Bank of America very closely. I used to work at Bank of America and I was sitting there and you're having trouble keeping up with all this.

The news came across and we were like, no, all right, how does this fit into this bucket and this one?

So the big numbers kind of make it hard to figure it all out

because they're all so big and it's kind of just like,

oh, what's another 16 billion?

But this is, this would be be and it's not confirmed yet

The biggest of all the settlements that Bank of America has had to deal with and this one's relating to mostly just mortgage abuses

It's very general and the government basically just saying hey you guys did some bad things

the companies you acquired did some bad things and instead of finding a lawsuit against you how about you just give us some money and we'll put this thing to rest?

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