What does "collusion" mean?
http://www.msfraud.org/LAW/Lounge/Deutsche Bank National Trust Co_Justice Schack.doc
Posted on 10/11/2010 9:13:41 AM PDT by ex-Texan
If you work in the mortgage industry or for a title insurer, you might not want to make any plans for the next six months. Foreclosuregate is about to explode. It is being alleged that many prominent mortgage lenders have been using materially flawed paperwork to evict homeowners. Apparently officials at quite a few of these firms have been signing thousands upon thousands of foreclosure documents without even looking at them. In addition, it is being alleged that much of the documentation for these mortgages that are being foreclosed upon is either "improper" or is actually "missing". As lawyers start to smell blood in the water, lawsuits challenging these foreclosures have already started springing up from coast to coast. In fact, some are already calling Foreclosuregate the biggest fraud in the history of the capital markets. JPMorgan Chase, Ally Bank's GMAC Mortgage and PNC Financial have all suspended foreclosures in the 23 U.S. states where foreclosures must be approved by a judge. Bank of America has actually suspended foreclosures in all 50 states. Now, law enforcement authorities from coast to coast are calling for investigations into this controversy and it could be years before this thing gets unraveled.
This thing just seems to escalate with each passing day. It is being reported that the attorneys general of up to 40 U.S. states will be working together on a joint investigation into this foreclosure crisis. Lawmakers in both houses of the U.S. Congress, including Nancy Pelosi and Christopher Dodd, have called for an investigation to begin on the national level. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last week that he is looking into the issue. Things are certainly getting very serious out there. Never before has there ever been such a national focus on foreclosure paperwork.
But apparently there are good reasons for such scrutiny....
*One GMAC Mortgage official admitted during a December 2009 deposition that his team of 13 people signed approximately 10,000 foreclosure documents a month without reading them.
*One Bank of America employee confessed during a Massachusetts bankruptcy case that she signed up to 8,000 foreclosure documents a month and typically did not look them over "because of the volume".
But the "robo-signing" aspect of Foreclosuregate is just the tip of the iceberg. Apparently there is a whole lot more going on than just a bunch of bad signatures.
Peter J. Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, was recently quoted by MSNBC as saying the following about Foreclosuregate....
"You've got so many potential avenues of liability. You don't even know the parameters of this yet."
The sad truth is that potentially millions of foreclosures across the United States could potentially be invalid because the securitization process has muddied the chain of ownership. In fact, an increasing number of judges from coast to coast have been ruling that the "owners" of the mortgage have no right to foreclose on a property because they lack clear title.
At the core of this title controversy is MERS - Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. MERS is based in Reston, Virginia and it was created by the mortgage industry to enable that big financial firms to securitize and swap mortgages at high speed. MERS allowed these big financial firms to largely avoid the hassle of filling out more forms and submitting new filing fees every time that a mortgage was traded.
But now MERS is facing some very serious legal challenges. A recent article in Businessweek described the situation this way....
A lawsuit filed on September 28th in federal court in Louisville on behalf of all Kentucky homeowners claims that MERS was part of a conspiracy to create false promissory notes, affidavits, and mortgage assignments to be used in mortgage foreclosures. Similar class actions have been filed on behalf of homeowners in Florida and New York. Karmela Lejarde, a MERS spokeswoman, declined to comment on any pending litigation.
The reality is that as millions of U.S. mortgages have been bunched together and traded around the globe at lightning speed, it has become increasingly unclear who actually has title to them and who actually has the right to foreclose on these properties.
Title insurers have backed the titles of millions of these foreclosed properties and now potentially find themselves in a heap of trouble. Some of the biggest title insurers have already begun circling the wagons in an attempt at damage control. For example, one of the biggest title insurance companies in the United States, Old Republic National Title Insurance, has already declared that it will no longer write new policies for homes that have been foreclosed on by JPMorgan Chase and GMAC Mortgage.
So what happens if nearly all title insurers start avoiding foreclosed properties?
Won't that make it much more difficult for the banks to sell the massive backlog of foreclosed properties that they have accumulated?
In addition, Americans that have purchased foreclosed homes may now be facing some serious problems themselves. Millions of Americans may now "own" homes that they do not have clear title for. When it comes times to sell those homes, many Americans may find themselves unable to do so.
Needless to say, this is a complete and total mess.
Already, U.S. banks have a record number of foreclosed properties that they need to clear out, and now all of this scrutiny on foreclosure paperwork and all of these lawsuits are going to grind the process of getting these homes sold off to a standstill.
In fact, the true legacy of Foreclosuregate may be the massive amount of bank failures that it causes.
It would be difficult to understate how much of a nightmare Foreclosuregate is going to be for U.S. mortgage lenders. Having to go back through the paperwork of millions of old mortgages is going to be a complete and total disaster. If banks end up being unable to foreclose on a large number of bad mortgages, it could potentially be enough to put many banks out of commission for good. Not only that, but the legal fees that many of these banks will accumulate defending lawsuits related to Foreclosuregate will be astronomical.
The U.S. mortgage industry was already on the verge of death, and Foreclosuregate may just be the straw that broke the camel's back.
The reality is that U.S. banks are drowning in foreclosures and this current crisis is just going to make things a lot worse. Back in 2005, there were approximately 100,000 home repossessions in the United States. In 2009, there were approximately 1 million home repossessions in the U.S. and RealtyTrac is now projecting that there will be an all-time record of 1.2 million home repossessions in the United States this year.
For the U.S. mortgage industry, Foreclosuregate must feel like someone has dropped a bomb on them after they have already been beaten up and doused with gasoline.
Attorney Richard Kessler, who recently conducted a study that found serious errors in approximately three-fourths of court filings related to home repossessions, says that foreclosuregate could haunt the U.S. mortgage industry for the next ten years....
"Defective documentation has created millions of blighted titles that will plague the nation for the next decade."
While it may be easy to beat up U.S. mortgage lenders and say that they deserve all this, let us not forget that this is going to impact a whole lot of other people too.
It is going to become much harder to get a mortgage. It is going to become much harder to buy a home. It is going to become much harder to sell a home. The U.S. housing industry is likely to suffer a significant downturn due to all of this. There is even a good chance that the entire U.S. economy could be dragged down for an extended period of time.
So no, Foreclosuregate is not good news for anyone.
Well, except maybe for lawyers.
But for virtually everyone else this is really bad news. Any hope that the U.S. housing industry would experience a quick recovery is completely and totally gone.
Good God, get a grip man. I already admitted to misusing terms.
Honestly, I couldn’t give a crap what the reason is behind a deadbeat payer’s failure to pay. You can put lipstick on the pig by calling it “coming under financial hard times” if you want.
Ultimately, the deadbeat payer - especially one who tries to use a loophole to absolve themselves of their responsibility to pay - is a scumbag. Here’s a thought experiment for you:
Let’s say you owned a rental properties. Everything is going well until your tenant falls on “hard times” and stops paying you. He now owes you money AND is living in your property so you can’t lease it to someone else. He finds a loophole in your rental agreement and hires a lawyer. Whatever.
This is a ridiculous example. The point is that he owes you money and is using legal means to screw you. Sadly this happens every day in America. If it was happening to YOU PERSONALLY, you would be pissed.
For some reason, though, we don’t seem to care when people screw big eeeeeevil corporations. The banks may have done something wrong, but that doesn’t mean the borrower should be absolved of their debt. Sadly, the entitlement attitude in this country is ALWAYS looking for that loophole - that legal “out” - that quick way to get whatever they want without actually paying for it or earning it.
So, “hard times” my ass. Everyone can have “hard times” but that doesn’t help the person to whom you owe money. In my rental example above, as the landlord, you would want the right to evict the tenant. It’s only good business.
And I told you. If the hard copy of the note was not in the hands of the bank, they were allowed to produce affidavits attesting to the electronic records of the purchase of note.
In other words, Santelli’s rant that started the whole tea party movement was based on a false premise. Hard-working Americans weren’t just bailing out lazy one. It was the hard-working Americans that had been swindled out of their homes and their life savings by the Big Banks.
So how come hard-working Americans are being encouraged by the GOP to continue to continue to blame other hard-working Americans, instead of the swindlers?
It seems like the super-wealthy who stole all this money should be the ones we blame.
That forgery machine is shocking.
= = =
Off Topic, sorry, [hurrying to leave for work] Dr. Mercola’s extensive article on GMOs can be found at this link
“I think this may be prove to be the biggest fraud in human history.”
Until the proof comes out that BO is not eligble to hold office.
But that’s the rub as the ‘hard’ copy is what is required in most cases that’s exactly why they were forced to and got caught forging those documents.
Why did they stop the foreclosures? Because a handful of activist judges have begun buying the argument.
Foreclosure is almost always a losing proposition for the bank, unless there is huge equity in the house — which almost never happens, especially these days. If they have to get into a big legal battle, with high attorney fees, only to have a judge say, “You produce the hard copies, or I am dismissing this,” then the process results in an even bigger loss.
I don’t know what they are going to do about it. I saw a news article last week stating that, without debate, Congress had passed a bill allowing these foreclosures to proceed — probably with some alternate provision for demonstrating ownership of the note. But Obama is vetoing it. Even most Democrats, apparently, acknowledge this is bogus. But Obama wants to bring the country to its knees. To him, this is just another way to redistribute wealth.
How do you know such a thing? What constitutes a “deadbeat borrower” in your eyes? There are millions of people out of work and looking for jobs in this economy. The jobs that they DO find pay a small fraction of the good-paying jobs they lost in this economic debacle. And don’t kid yourself that it’s all Obama’s fault - this collapse *started* when the Lehmann bit the dust and the Banksters held a gun to the country’s head and demanded a bailout.
Now it’s two years later, the banks are flush with cash and making record profits. But they refuse to loan to small businesses or to anyone with less than perfect credit. The swindling of the real estate market has caused a collapse in vales - one out of three homeowners is now underwater because of this. You can’t get any sort of equity loan for any reason, not even for repairs.
If you are trying to make us feel sorry for the *banks,* you are singing the wrong song. It will take a hell of a lot of screwing the banks before it even comes *closes to the tens of billions they screwed out of Americans. Between the housing values and the pension clean-outs, they stole the single largest source of wealth in the world - the sum total of the savings of the American middle class.
They were not “forging” documents. They were just signing attestations on “personal knowledge” without actually taking the time to read each loan file.
But for some reason some people don’t care about the honest homeowner who is make his payment and has a good chance of ending up with a dee not worth the paper it’s writen on. or relizing if they allow the short cuts to be used against ‘dead beats’ whats to stop them from using them against honest home owners?
The banks didn’t cause housing values to go down. The banks have paid for those houses at the inflated prices. They will almost always take a bigger loss than the “homeowner” in the foreclosure.
“But for some reason some people don’t care about the honest homeowner who is make his payment and has a good chance of ending up with a dee not worth the paper it’s writen on.”
You keep saying this, but this is not what’s happening, and there’s no scenario where this foreclosure issue would make that happen.
Try again:
http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/housing_market/more-banks-freezing-home-foreclosures-10112010
Yeah, uh, different conversation, different indicators.
This has to do with a specific analysis tool, and the timeframe it indicated.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=equity+loans&form=OSDSRC
Yes, you can get equity loans.
I get offers for them all the time. Every month with my mortgage statement and with my Navy Federal Credit Union bill.
If any person has cable, cellphones or throws birthday parties at Chuck E Cheese instead of paying their mortgage, they are deadbeats. Period.
If all that has been gone before they skipped a payment, my heart goes out to them. I wish we could chose “hand up” instead of “hand out”.
We dumped Directv two years ago because we thought the hubby’s job might go. Other moms I talk to “are behind” but still hitting Starbucks every morning while yakking on their blackberries. I have no sympathy for them.
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