As the US hurtles towards mid-term elections in which Supreme Court blessed campaign financing has tripled relative to the 2006 midterms, the People discover once again that their Bankers have fcuked Fiduciary Trust, Rule of Law and the People once again by Fcuking Foreclosures with gross negligence and legal fraud.
Paul Krugman at the NYTimes catches the immensity of the fraud noting:
American officials used to lecture other countries about their economic failings and tell them that they needed to emulate the U.S. model. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, in particular, led to a lot of self-satisfied moralizing. Thus, in 2000, Lawrence Summers, then the Treasury secretary, declared that the keys to avoiding financial crisis were “well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective corporate governance and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of contract enforcement.” By implication, these were things the Asians lacked but we had.We didn’t.
The accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.
The story so far: An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on mortgage payments. So servicers — the companies that collect payments on behalf of mortgage owners — have been foreclosing on many mortgages, seizing many homes.
But do they actually have the right to seize these homes? These horror stories have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits asserting that the papers are in order. And these affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.
Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist. In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible. These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.
This is very, very bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of borrowers are being defrauded — charged fees they don’t actually owe, declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they aren’t.
If you are in doubtthat this is just a leftist rant, fair and balanced Fox News confirms the core of Krugman’s report here:
“At the core of this problem was a widespread, massive interconnected fraud,” says Janet Tavakoli of Tavakoli Structured Finance. “The fraud didn’t begin at foreclosure, the fraud began when these loans were first made.”
Finally, there is coverage at Money Morning which spells out the consequences of this mortgage mess. Money Morning sees deep throat implications since the banks have been totally remiss in many of their foreclosure dealings. Here is the details:
The whole mess begins at Square One. And “Square One” is a circle of fraud and deceit so large that if civil and criminal charges and fines were eventually levied against the perpetrators, there isn’t a big bank in this country that would be solvent.
In order to easily buy and sell mortgages between themselves so that these loans might be repackaged, securitized and then sold to investors as mortgage-backed securities, banks and other lenders needed a quick way to “trade” individual mortgages. They created a company called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS). This group includes Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), GMAC LLC (NYSE: GMA), Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC), Washington Mutual (now owned by JPMorgan Chase), the United Guaranty Corp. unit of American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG), Fannie Mae (OTC: FNMA), Freddie Mac (OTC: FMCC), mortgage-servicing companies and other similarly interested members.
You may not realize it, but at your home-purchase “closing,” you sign a document that appoints MERS as the “nominee” for the lender that granted you a mortgage. That gives the nominee the right to flip your mortgage to any other bank or lender it chooses. That’s how banks move mortgages around to package them into different securities.
But that brings us to the crux of the controversy: Every time there’s change on the title (a change occurs when the nominee switches the lender on your title out for another), local governments require that a new title be recorded. Of course, those governments – the county or municipality that you live in – also charge a “recording fee.” MERS also charges a fee, but it’s a lot less than government recording fees.
Here’s the problem. In creating MERS, these institutions actually changed the land-title system that this country – for much of its history – has relied upon to determine legal ownership status of land titleholders.
Not only did the lenders sidestep (read that to mean avoid) paying billions of dollars in fees to local governments, they paid themselves from the fees that MERS collected.
MERS is facing class-action lawsuits and civil racketeering suits around the country and their members are being individually named in all these suits. One suit alleges that MERS owes California a potential $60 billion to $120 billion in unpaid land-recording fees.
If suits against MERS and all its members are successful, unpaid recording fees and fines (that can be as much as $10,000 per incident) would make every one of them insolvent.
And you wonder what the Federal Reserve meant when it warned of “potential negative shocks?”
My question is will the GOP slated to win over the Democrats in the upcoming elections want or be able to do anything against the Banksters? It appears the Banksters own both political parties with their massive and now unlimited funds for lobbying and campaign financing . The Obama financial administrators under Tim Geithner and Larry Summers declined to prosecute any of the Money Mischief perpetrated by the Banksters with the lone exception of Goldman Sachs assault on Fiduciary Trust. Is there any hope that the Financial Foreclosure Frauds will be punished either ? Take a stiff 5th for the sake of the oppressed “populi in medias” – US middle class suckers.