The Foreclosure Issue

Web of Debt author Ellen Brown is now writing about the current foreclosure issue.

She has written a comment on her blog that dramatically summarizes, in my opinion, the specifics on the fraud surrounding mortgages and the financial instruments associated with them:

Ellen Brown, on October 10, 2010 at 9:32 pm Said:

Here’s the reason for freezing foreclosures: Wall Street was engaged in a massive fraud. They were purposely taking bad loans so they could bet against them with their synthetic CDOs. As Neil Garfield points out, sometimes there were 30 of these on one house. A $300,000 house is worth $300,000 if it doesn’t go into default; if it does default, it’s worth $9 million. The banks that set these things up need to be put into receivership, like they should have been in Sept 2008. We have a second chance under the new reform bill.

(Link)

Those synthetic CDOs Ellen refers to are derivatives. My understanding is that derivatives are the major culprit in the worldwide financial meltdown. Hopefully, the present focus on foreclosures will help to educate the public about what has really been going on, and we can turn around and do something about it.

The mortgage fraud that lead to the economic meltdown is virtually the same things as the BP disaster in the Gulf. You had a bunch of companies playing fast and loose with the regulations, exhibiting utter disregard for their actions, motivated entirely by greed and a government that completely failed to provide the oversight that was required and established at the time. The big difference is that in the case of BP, the government forced them to pony-up for the damage they caused. The good people of the Gulf lost thei jobs, livelihoods, businesses, incomes, the value of their property, etc. As imperfect as it has been at least some effort was made to help them. In the case of Wall Street's malfeasance and recklessness there was NO help provided to the victims. Instead, WE were made to make-whole the very organizations that had victimized US. Can you imagine what would have happened had the government told the god people of the Gulf that not only weren't they going to get any help but THEY were going to have to help BP (et al) becasue they were 'too big to fail'.??? It would have been a blood bath.

My business of 8yrs was destroyed by the economic collapse. Our lives were turned upside down and we were financially wiped-out. We came weeks from foreclosure on our home of 11yrs while the bank lied to us about our modification paperwork. We were required to send hundreds of pages of financial records repeatedly because the bank 'never received them'; despite our having a receipt signature on each FedEx package we sent. Our bank accounts have been wiped out, our retirement (as meager as it was) is gone, our credit has been destroyed but I understand the big banks (the ones to whom we gave billions) are doing great. Huge numbers of families have lost their homes and everything they owned. Marriages have been destroyed. Families have been ripped apart. The dreams of completing college have been trashed. And none of that can ever be undone. Where is the accountability?

The REAL cause of the collapse and the REAL culprits behind it have never been taken to task. Why is that? Why has there been no meaningful assistance provided to the victims of this catastrophe? Why, from the outset in late 2008, has all focus been on helping the perpetrators? And why has no one bothered to ask these questions in a public forum?

The thing that pisses me off is that people think that this is the first and the last time this will happen. As long as we give the banks free reign to do what they like in the name of a strong economy. Then this is a delibertae mistake if you'll excuse the contradiction in terms that will happen again and again.

The problem is that theres no avoiding it. As long as you own a business, or have a mortgage or keep your savings with a bank. Your at there mercy and when they decide to send the country in to free fall. Your going with them whether you like it or not.

It's not just a foreclosure issue with the recent focus on documents.It's a general fraud issue. Even if you pay off your mortgage, improper documents could "cloud title" enough to make it much harder to sell. When you or I break black letter law we are held to account. The banks and related organizations have broken black letter law starting with recording transfers of debts and gong through to forgery and perjury on the courts.

NO No Nooo... it's the MERS that is the cause of the foreclosure mess...
there is no actual owner of any individual mortgage contract


Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.
What is MERS ®? MERS ® was created by the ...
Their mission is to register every mortgage loan in the United States on the ...
www.occ.treas.gov/cdd/​MortgageElectronicRegistration...



MERS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MERS System|Mortgage...|ServicerID|The MERS...Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) is a privately held company that operates an electronic registry designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans in the United States.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_​Electronic_Registration




because the mortgage issurers got greedy, and sliced diced
then mixed together 1,000s of mortgages into several fee driven pieces of debt paper...
resulted in there being no single, defined entity that has 100% ownership
of any of the millions of Mortgages out there ---which were sold by the banks
like BoA, Wachovia and others


see: www.321gold.com for an daily index of articles that cover the MERS mess

i'm no good at explaining the contorted mess

Originally posted by St Udio


NO No Nooo...

I don't think this is accurate. There is more than one issue.

MERS, is definitely a major component in this mess. I also have problems explaining exactly what they do, but they are entwined in the while document mess. The fact that there are obvious forgeries and recreations being presented to courts throughout the country, should concern anyone who is expecting to eventually hold clear title to their home. If the banks and MERS fubarred the documents here, do you really think they've done any better job on those notes that are current and someone one day expects to have a clear title? And if they were this sloppy in the states that they have to go to court to foreclose, how badly have they screwed the counties, states, and citizens in the nonjudicial states?

An honest and honorable person might continue to pay their mortgage even if underwater on it, but who in their right mind would pay on an underwater mortgage that even if they paid it off they wouldn't have a clear insurable title.

This a big issue. I know that there are people on the msm saying this is not a big issue. Remember these are the same people who said "home prices only go up" and "the issues in subprime are contained".

In her article "HOMEOWNERS' REBELLION: COULD 62 MILLION HOMES BE FORECLOSURE-PROOF?" Ellen Brown says this about MERS:

Mortgages bundled into securities were a favorite investment of speculators at the height of the financial bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. The securities changed hands frequently, and the companies profiting from mortgage payments were often not the same parties that negotiated the loans. At the heart of this disconnect was the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a company that serves as the mortgagee of record for lenders, allowing properties to change hands without the necessity of recording each transfer.

MERS was convenient for the mortgage industry, but courts are now questioning the impact of all of this financial juggling when it comes to mortgage ownership. To foreclose on real property, the plaintiff must be able to establish the chain of title entitling it to relief. But MERS has acknowledged, and recent cases have held, that MERS is a mere “nominee”—an entity appointed by the true owner simply for the purpose of holding property in order to facilitate transactions. Recent court opinions stress that this defect is not just a procedural but is a substantive failure, one that is fatal to the plaintiff’s legal ability to foreclose.

That means hordes of victims of predatory lending could end up owning their homes free and clear—while the financial industry could end up skewered on its own sword.

reply to post by jtma508


Word for word my thoughts, and experience with this whole scam.

There is two sides to this.

No one forced many of these foreclosed people to sign paperwork. In many cases, it was fraud on the borrower claiming income they did not have nor ever able to make. Then, people are too stupid not to have an attorney look over a contact, but it is still the bank's fault the borrower doesn't understand the terms. So then, we pass a law to rewrite some loans, and 60% of them still go through foreclosure a second time.

Yeah, it's the damn bankers fault for the poor people buying houses. Congress wrote the lending laws, the banks were required to follow, requiring loans for anyone and everyone to be made.

There is no "right" to succeed nor a "right" to a free house from action of others or lack of action by yourself. I'm tired of hearing people whine about how they were screwed. Everyone went into these loans with their eyes wide open.

Bottom line, there is a reason for bankruptcy laws. No one, regardless of what our elected officials say, is too big to fail.

American is the land of dreams and nightmares. Easy to get them confused.

reply to post by hinky


Seriously? Still? After everything that has come to light there are still people rabidly clinging to Rick Sanchez' ridiculous assertion that the whole economic collapse was brought on by 'red necks biuyng homes they knew they couldn't afford'??? That is the most indefensible, ignorant steaming pile of crap I've heard. That argument was skewered years ago. It was a flacid attempt to divert repsonsibility from the guilty. Millions of people have lost their homes. Many have lived in their homes for decades --- responsibly paying their mortgages until their jobs and livelihoods were extinguished --- no fault of their own. And who exactly do you think created the whole concept of 'sub-prime' mortgages and for what purpose?

Your argument is utterly bogus.

Originally posted by hinky
I'm tired of hearing people whine about how they were screwed. Everyone went into these loans with their eyes wide open.

It is incumbent upon the lender not to engage in predatory lending practices. They're the experts.

reply to post by hinky


I might have a moral, and somewhat legal obligation to pay my mortgage, but don't the lenders, mers, whoever.....
have an obligation to keep the title's integrity in tack???
My mortgage is paid, we went into this with our eyes open, but I'll tell ya one thing, if I could pay the thing off tommorrow, I wouldn't! Not without some solid guarentees and assurances that that title would come to me as clean as it was the day I signed the papers for the house!!!

Can they do that???

Originally posted by hinky

So then, we pass a law to rewrite some loans, and 60% of them still go through foreclosure a second time.

Maybe I missed that whole part of this.
There was a law passed to rewrite loans?

If you could point out to me what law was passed, and when, I'd be mighty grateful.

View Max Keiser's passionate remarks about what is going on with foreclosures right now and the overall picture of bankster financial terrorists and the destruction of the U.S. dollar in the global marketplace:

Originally posted by Mary Rose

Ellen Brown, on October 10, 2010 at 9:32 pm Said:

. . . Wall Street was engaged in a massive fraud. They were purposely taking bad loans so they could bet against them . . .

(Link)

"Purposely taking bad loans." These are the key words that we all need to understand thoroughly in my opinion.

The foreclosure mess is not from sloppiness or irresponsible borrowers it's from fraud motivated by profits to be gained by selling derivatives.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
The foreclosure mess is not from sloppiness or irresponsible borrowers it's from fraud motivated by profits to be gained by selling derivatives.

BINGO! When you lend money with the full knowledge that the borrower can't pay it back and you make money off the interest and the sale of the derivative and then pass off the bad debt to an unsuspecting sucker and then bet against him. And then allow them a streamline process to fill in the blanks on the foreclosure process. It's nothing but a fraud scheme by criminals. The whole monetary scheme is a fraud. These people should be in prison and instead they get bailouts, bonuses and a get out of jail free card. And our government protects these b@stards. I'm angry and rightly so. There isn't enough whoop-@$$ in my can to make me feel better in the end.

What I'm actually trying to say is:

Bankers lending to people who can not repay their loans becomes an actual interest bearing investment which leads to a profitable sell off in the end. It's like a football game that's been rigged by bribing the opposing quarterback to throw interceptions instead of touchdowns.

The document issue is only the latest crises in the whole mortgage meltdown. They almost slipped the fix through before anyone really knew about it. Passed the house without a recorded vote back in april, passed the senate recently likewise without a recorded vote. Only the visibillity of the foreclosure crises and active actions by secretaries of state and state attornies general prevented the president from signing it.

Be wary of those running the "no one should, get a free house" meme in the msm and even here. It's a distraction. I doubt there will be many free houses out of it even when unwound. There are victims of this fraud already. What about the person who rented and saved during the bubble, and then bought a foreclosure recently that was improperly or even fraudulently done? If the title paperwork is as screwed as some are claiming what about someone who paid off their mortgage during this timeframe and it is found that the same person who signed their release of mortgage was participating in document fraud in hundreds if not thousands of cases of forged signatures?
This is a line of attack that will turn up other frauds as well I think. Given the pervasiveness of fraud at all levels I believe that you will find, asmore of these mbs are unwound, that several different mbs hold the same mortgage at the same time meaning that they were cheated. The largest holders of mbs include the fed, your pension fund, mutual funds, and money market funds.
Don't let this story die there is way more to it than "some bastard may get a free house".

An article entitled "Here Is Your Chance To Check If You Are the Victim of Mortgage Fraud" is appearing on zerohedge.com.

Wondering if you are one of those suckers paying a mortgage in limbo, with all the payments due to some non-existent mortgage noteholder getting retained at the servicer banks? Well, if you can spare 3 minutes then "Where's the Note" is for you. The website, which is on the verge of a viral break out, has a simple message: "Whether you are facing foreclosure, have an underwater mortgage, or are just a concerned homeowner, it’s important that you contact your bank and demand to see the original note on your mortgage. It only takes a few minutes using our free online tool." Quick, simple and easy. And in a few days your mortgage bank will have no choice but to tell you if they do in fact have your original mortgage note. . . .

reply to post by Mary Rose


hi rose
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