Posted on 01/18/2011 9:28:45 PM PST by Kartographer
"You Have to Obey Court Orders"
The first case Judge Schack tossed was Citibank, N.A. v. Murillo, which he dismissed with prejudice on Jan. 7, as the blog StopForeclosureFraud reported. The attorneys for Citibank (C) in that case were from the Steven Baum law firm, a foreclosure mill that has been sanctioned for its involvement in frivolous cases. If the Baum firm couldn't file a timely affirmation in the Murillo case, how many of its other cases will it be able to file affirmations in?
Schack tells me he's thrown out a dozen or so more since Murillo, and he says until the banks and their attorneys start obeying his order to comply with the new affirmation rule, he'll keep tossing cases. A court order is a court order, Schack explains. "They can't just ignore it. In Murillo, they asked for more time, but they didn't give me a reason. It doesn't matter who you are, you have to obey court orders."
By dismissing these cases "with prejudice," Schack is forcing the banks to start the whole process over if they wish to foreclose. Given how long foreclosures take to complete, that alone is a significant penalty. Moreover, if the banks do refile any of these cases, they will be reassigned to him. "We don't have judge-shopping in Brooklyn," Schack explains. So the banks will have to get their papers in order before they refile.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailyfinance.com ...
"One reason that banks might be unable to solve their document problems would be that, Massachusetts-style, they had failed to comply with state law during the securitization process. (In Massachusetts, the problem was doing "assignments in blank.") Another reason would be if the securitizations weren't done in compliance with their own terms, as testimony has suggested.
In either of those scenarios, neither the trusts that issued the allegedly mortgage-backed securities nor the banks that service them would be able to foreclose. If a borrower really is in default, some bank might be able to foreclose -- the bank that had legal title to the note and mortgage before any securitization-related problem occurred. Unfortunately, some of those banks no longer exist, others couldn't afford to suddenly discover they own the loans and still others would have to both produce the mortgage and note belong to them and gather the documentation necessary before they could foreclose. As a CNBC analyst describes, that's not likely to be an easy process.
PING!!!!!
“One reason that banks might be unable to solve their document problems would be that, Massachusetts-style, they had failed to comply with state law during the securitization process. (In Massachusetts, the problem was doing “assignments in blank.”) Another reason would be if the securitizations weren’t done in compliance with their own terms, as testimony has suggested.
The banks are getting what they deserve for FRAUD for an easy buck they thought.They sold these loans and made a fortune but they forgot to keep the original docs.
Like I said on similar threads, if someone owed me $300,000, you can bet I’d have the promissory note.
And I don’t even have a fancy office address and a team of attorneys.
As I predicted, the MERS problems are just getting started.
The larger problem facing the mortgage industry is the speculation that a single mortgage was securitized more than once. “Look Out Below!” if this is the case. Time will tell.
What scares the banks even more is the investors who brought the mortgage backed securities were based on a bank prospectus that stated all these mortgages were owned by the bank (ala hold title, note, etc). The investors can sue the banks for the inaccurate prospectus info. It is so funny that two years after the meltdown, no one in the major banks that melted down ever went to jail. Feds keep claiming that there were no legal grounds to prosecute. Lying on a prospectus is fraud. So is the rating agencies giving these securities AAA ratings when the documentation of these loans were sketchy or nonexistant.
What comes around goes around is very true in this world.
Speculation? I thought recursive securitization was the rule, not the exception. The problem being, that, unlike your typical open-source programming language, they are unable to give an accurate stack trace when a fault is thrown. Judges must insist on an accurate stack trace, even if the lack thereof means deadbeats keep their houses. It's called the rule of law
. Or #pragma ownership-chain strict, as the computer geeks might call it.
It’s called “the rule of law”
Just wondering, did the bank bailouts secretly clear the books on these multiple mortgage back securities?
These bloggers are crackheads. The foreclosing lawyers are going to need to make sure that they have all the proper paperwork necessary to show that their clients own the loans. That should not be hard to do and it is the way that things should be done.
As for the MA decision, the court decision was not easy to read and I think most of these bloggers have it wrong. An assignment in blank that is not signed before notice of sale and foreclosure BY ITSELF is not sufficient — but if the ultimate assignee can show a chain of title from the last recorded mortgagee to the ultimate assignee through PSA and MLPA schedules, the assignment in blank does not have to be in recordable form prior to notice of sale and foreclosure.
Bottom line — there are virtually NO cases where the bank is trying to foreclose and never gave the borrower the money. Everyone knows the borrower got the money. If the borrower received the money and cannot pay, the bank should be able to foreclose.
Somewhere in early 2008, it began to dawn on folks that the bubble was, in fact, a bubble. The system crashed. In September, John McCain suspended his campaign (military metaphor, tsk tsk) to come to the rescue, at which point he lost the election.
Now comes the blame game. Time to analyze the dumps and identify the wrongdoers. Lots of entities lost their shirts investing in those securitized mortgages. If they can show they were sold a bill of goods, then they are entitled to recover. That is, if there is anything to recover! That is their reward for marshaling their talents in the service of public policy. God damn them all!
What if the so called chain of title is blank too (actually of lien, if it’s like the way I bought my own house with a mortgage and X% down)? This leads to the current debacle. The banks may all trust MERS to “say the right thing” but will the courts do likewise? This is not only a “deadbeat” problem as you imply, but also a clouded title problem for people who have always faithfully paid on a mortgage and now want to sell outright.
Then why can't they do it? Why are they fighting discovery at every turn?
Bottom line — there are virtually NO cases where the bank is trying to foreclose and never gave the borrower the money. Everyone knows the borrower got the money. If the borrower received the money and cannot pay, the bank should be able to foreclose.
The banks in virtually all of the cases forwarded OTHER PEOPLES MONEY , not theirs ,, those investors that created the pools for table funding , if they have the note properly assigned to them , can foreclose ... BUT NOT THE BANK that was nothing but a straw man to the transaction and now wants a FREE HOUSE to resell.
These are the same guys that can lard on 30-40 charges on peasants like me and you if we drop a gum wrapper on the sidewalk.
The Feds are criminals, too.
An assignment in blank is a bearer instrument, and many states regulate bearer instruments heavily. You've got to jump through a lot of hoops to issue them, and the mortgage companies didn't do that, and in many cases are FORBIDDEN to do that.
quote:
1. In some states you CAN'T endorse a mortgage in blank. An attempt to do so is void as if the endorsement never happened. This is a monumental cluster**** as if the originator is then paid in full he has no standing EITHER, and what you've managed to do is create a naked promissory note with no deed of trust associated with it. For obvious reasons this is a very big problem and MAY be unrecoverable. MERS cannot override state legal requirements regarding endorsement of deeds in these instances.
2. In the case where MERS has a blank endorsement they specifically state they have a bearer instrument. But a bearer instrument to which coupon is associated requires the payment of an excise tax post the early 1980s, which is why they're not issued in the general case any more. If there's a private letter ruling on this from the IRS (possible) it has not been disclosed, but if not, this is a potential nuclear bombshell since the excise tax is 1% per year due at creation on the instrument. For a 30 year mortgage this is an effective tax of 30% of the face value, due UP FRONT. Aieeee! Not paying your taxes is of course a serious matter. Being an excise tax liability would presumably attach to the creator, in this case, the originating lender who endorsed in blank.
“I think what happened was, the government (Barney Frank and Chris Dodd) created a safety umbrella over the mortgage industry, in the form of Fannie and Freddie. Those quasi-governmental corporations stood ready to back up mortgage paper, as long as certain increasingly loose guidelines were meant.”
I think you are on to something here just look at the BOA put backs at Fannie/Freddie that were settled for ONE CENT on the dollar after obama left the GSA’s open ended for the Banks to pile these on to the taxpayers. Seems a lot of people were duped at the time of the financial crisis the reality is those TBTF bankers had the democrats in their pockets. It was a two fer they got to eliminate a lot of their competition (our own smaller conservative bankers) and we got stuck with the bill to boot.
Unlimited credit for GSEs seen as backdoor bailout
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6044YU20100105
Is Fannie bailing out the banks?
“But how sharp is Freddie if all it can do is squeeze a $1.28 billion payment out of a giant customer in exchange for relinquishing fraud claims on $117 billion worth of outstanding loans? The very best its million-dollar executives can do is claw back a penny on each bubbly subprime dollar?”
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/03/is-fannie-bailing-out-the-banks/
I get irritated with people who think this is only some kind of so called dead beat issue. People certainly have the right to expect a clear title on a home. The Banks greed in trying to save filing fee’s with MERS and inventing these faulty products in the first place is often overlooked and I don’t hear people referring to them as Dead Beats even though their losses were socialized unto the taxpayers or when they walk away leaving the taxpayers again to eat the losses!
More banks walking away from homes, adding to housing crisis
Those who had these MBS’s as investments whether it be through a Pension Fund/401K in a bond that had these and were lied to by the banks who sold them as AAA were greatly harmed by these TBTF bankers as well.
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