Free Republic

Remember, the allegations made by various legal folks in the practice (and apparently validated by the case law thus far) is that not one note has been able to be produced that contains all of the required conveyances and endorsements. What's going to happen when (or if) these folks gain access to the files and find that they're missing - that is, that the custodian doesn't have them? Well now that would be interesting, no? "Mortgage-backed securities" that in fact have no mortgages in them? Why that would be a wee problem, no?

The total cost to rescue and then overhaul mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could reach $685 billion, according to estimates published Thursday by Standard & Poor's. Fannie and Freddie have already cost taxpayers nearly $134 billion, but S&P analysts said Thursday that the government could ultimately be forced to inject $280 billion into the firms because of a slowdown in the housing market. Any entities that might replace Fannie and Freddie would need new start-up funding that would go beyond the money already committed. A consensus of academics, industry officials and investors has coalesced around the idea of...

NEW YORK (AP) -- In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in "foreclosure expert" jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says. In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word "affidavit." Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when...

Florida foreclosure law firms were using the same "robo-signer"-type practices to repossess homes that tripped up the nation's major lenders, a signal, defense attorneys argue, that should lead to a larger foreclosure moratorium. Banks that have not pulled back on foreclosure sales and evictions, such as lender CitiMortgage, gave firms power of attorney to sign documents on their behalf. In turn, some firms created assembly-line signing systems to keep up with bank deadlines on foreclosure cases.