Borrower Beware: Don’t Payoff Without Tender of REAL Original Note

The Perils of Payoff

On the road again: I met a fellow on the Red Coach from Tallahassee to Fort Lauderdale who is pursuing a case that proves the central point of this blog: Whether you are selling, refinancing, Short-Selling, or otherwise paying off your supposed loan balance, the institution that receives the payoff (a) has no right to the money and (b) has no authority to execute a satisfaction of the note and mortgage even upon receipt of the money. And the reason is that in most cases they don’t have the note, which means it is still in circulation somewhere supporting as much as 42 times the face value of the note in hedges and derivatives. When confronted with a payoff of the loan, the institution is more than happy to take your money but will lie and cheat to avoid providing you with a real non-photo-shopped original note.

Unfortunately, most people are still taking it on FAITH that the note is indeed satisfied and that the mortgage is released and satisfied at the time of the payoff but they are very wrong if they don’t get the original note at closing, since THAT is what is presumptively the cash equivalent instrument that is traded in the secondary market, and since the mortgage usually is presumed to follow the note, that gives the actual owner of the note the opportunity to make a claim — something that is already happening and will occur with increasing frequency.

So whether you are buying property, selling property or paying off the “old” mortgage for any reason you are not only creating a title mess, you have no proof that the original note has been canceled. Which led me to suggest in a few articles that for those able to do it, call the bluff of the pretender lender. And for those investors looking to make an infinite return on their money, they should be helping homeowners do this in or out of court: OFFER TO PAY THE BALANCE IN FULL AS DEMANDED BY THE PRETENDER LENDER ON THREE CONDITIONS: (A) PRODUCTION OF THE ORIGINAL NOTE AND THE RIGHT TO INSPECT IT FOR AUTHENTICITY (B) PRODUCTION OF PROOF OF PAYMENT AT ORIGINATION AND ALL TRANSFERS UPON WHICH THE PRETENDER LENDER RELIES FOR ITS AUTHORITY TO COLLECT THE MONEY AND (C) PROOF OF LOSS BY ACCESS TO THOSE PEOPLE WHO MIGHT HAVE RECEIVED AN ASSIGNMENT OF THE LOAN OR WHO HAVE A BACK-DOOR OWNERSHIP INTEREST IN THE LOAN THROUGH OWNERSHIP OF A DERIVATIVE OR CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP.

This is not for the feint of heart nor the people who don’t have access to actual funds that can be tendered in full payment. It is possible for the occasional real note to pop up and perhaps even sufficient proof that the Judge would rule it is sufficient to close the deal in which case you will have paid 100 cents on the dollars demanded in exchange for a loan valued at perhaps half that amount. But most of the time it will look like the following case described to me last night. I’ve changed facts (identities and figures) to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. But the foundation of the case is accurately described.

Owner Schwartenheimer has a mortgage claimed by Bank of America. It is for $3 million on a private residence in the State of Florida. He has a buyer at $2 million which leaves him $1 million short of the amount demanded by the “bank” claiming to own and service his mortgage. An estoppel letter is issued by BofA indicating the payoff amount and the dates that the estoppel letters is effective and may be relied upon.

The closing is in 5 weeks. And the Owner has elected to payoff the extra $1 million rather than attempt a short-sale. So the Bank is going to get full payment at closing — $2 million from the buyer and $1 million from the seller.

But the Owner’s daughter, an astute business woman who happens to be an avid reader of this blog intervenes with the demand that the original note be produced at closing. BofA assures her that the original note will be produced. At closing without the daughter in attendance, the father, as instructed by his daughter, demands to see a copy of the original note before he turns over the money to BofA. His buyer is there with the money and he has a bank check ready and payable to BofA for $1 million.

The curious answer from BofA is that they have the note but were unable to get it to the closing agent in time for the morning closing, but that it would be available for delivery at 4PM that afternoon. The proper thing would have been to wait until they produce the note. The Owner asks his lawyer, who is also a title agent, for advice on what to do. The lawyer thinks that the daughter is nuts and so is Neil Garfield with his livinglies conspiracy blog.

The lawyer advises the client to proceed with the closing under the belief that BofA obviously MUST have the original note or else they would not have issued an estoppel letter and signed the papers to satisfy and discharge the mortgage in recordable form. Whether that advice will further be the subject of a malpractice case against the lawyer is another matter to consider at a later time. And the repercussions of that could extend to all sorts of situations where a “mortgage” and “note” are involved —even to the far reaches of family law.

As you have no doubt guessed, at 4pm the Owner and his daughter show up at 4pm to get the original note and of course it is not there, despite having been informed that it WAS there. The daughter although not a lawyer, is far from amused. She writes a bristling letter to BofA demanding that either they produce the original note or give the money back — and she demands not only the $3 million paid at “closing” but all the interest and principal paid before that for a total demand of $5 million.

BofA immediately responds with apologies and assures her and her father that the note will be provided.

[A word of context here: if BofA wanted to take the position that the note was lost or destroyed they could have filed an appropriate action to reconstitute the note and mortgage. But they didn't do that, for good reason --- the mortgage loan was supporting $60 million in credit derivatives, insurance and credit default swaps upon which BofA had already been paid. If they admit they don't have the note and they can't account for where it was last seen, and when it disappeared in the manner required to re-establish the note with assurance to the court that the real original won't show up at a later time in the hands of a different claimant, in that event they might be subject to claims from insurance companies and counter-parties of credit default swaps for repayment of $60 million they paid and which was received by BofA. [considerable over-simplification is being used here, but the point remains true].

So BofA and the owner (with the new owner in the background wringing his hands over whether he really received clear title and whether his title policy excluded claims from securitization) go back and forth until BofA counsel informs the owner he doesn’t need the original note because BofA has already signed the satisfaction.

The owner and daughter, unsatisfied with that response (as well they should be) file a lawsuit against BofA for return of all money ever paid to them, plus statutory interest. BofA defends the action with various motions to dismiss and has now delayed discovery 5 times.

Suddenly the senior partner of the prestigious law firm representing BofA calls the daughter and asks what she wants. She replies that she wants her money back and he says “well, without saying we agree to your demand, for settlement purposes what would you take to satisfy your demand for your money back.” He understands that even if they pay the father $5 million or more, they are still saving the client (a) the $60 million payback to insurers who already paid and (b) the prospect of facing a lot more of these lawsuits from people who have the money and the right fact pattern to prosecute the case.

The daughter wants to dig in her heals knowing she has BofA over a barrel.

The lawyer who represented the owner at closing is still clueless and believes the action filed by the father and daughter is totally without merit. His advice, perhaps self-serving, is that they demand nothing.

The daughter wants it all — if BofA can’t produce any evidence that they ever bought the loan, that they ever knew or anyone ever knew where the note was, then she wants all the payments, monthly or otherwise were made to BofA without BofA having any right or authority or even excuse to collect the money.

The father as previous and perhaps still owner of the property would be satisfied with the money paid at closing to BofA — $3 million. BofA’s attorneys are now in process of suggesting a modification to the claim filed by the father in court upon which they will settle — and from the looks of it, the settlement will be for the full amount paid at closing. Thus if the note is still in circulation, the father will have received the full value of it from BofA who accepted it under false pretenses. The case is not settled yet, but is looming on the horizon.

The moral of the story is that this is all about money. And if you can find a way to come up with actual cash you can make the same offer as the owner did above — and in my opinion achieve the same results. And if people pool their money and make the offer to refinance the property at the full value of the demand made by the pretender lender — whether in foreclosure or not — a bona fide actual offer can be made and cannot be ignored by either the court or the pretender lender.

For those with entrepreneurial spirit  this is a business plan that I wish to raise money for. Write to neilfgarfield@hotmail.com if you are interested in combining resources with other investors to execute this business plan.

In Summary: The refinance package signed by the present owner provides that if the payment is required to be made, they now owe the money to the hedge fund or whatever entity put up the money and provides modification terms acceptable to the owner — which means a net loss to the investor. But, if the usual case prevails, and the pretender lender is forced to back off, a quiet title action, plus refinance of the property at 1/3 of the amount demanded by the pretender lender results in a windfall note and mortgage to the source of refinancing without ever having paid the “prior note”.

These entrepreneurs, if I am right, will rarely have to pay an actual some of money to discharge the old note and mortgage while at the same time the owner gets the property free and clear except for a new mortgage to the investors for 1/3 of the original principal demanded plus a reasonable fixed interest rate with 40 year amortization, all of which can be sold into the secondary market. It is a virtually infinite return without putting very much money at risk and no risk of a total loss.

And for those without money — check the court file to see whether the original note has been tendered because most states, like Florida want the original note filed and out of circulation before they will allow a foreclosure sale even if it is determined that a foreclosure sale is proper in the circumstances. There is only one party that can submit a credit bid at auction — the party with the original note and proof of loss.

BEFORE EXECUTING ANY SUCH PLAN OR TAKING ANY ACTION BASED UPON THE GENERAL INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS ARTICLE YOU SHOULD CONSULT WITH LEGAL COUNSEL LICENSED IN THE JURISDICTION IN WHICH YOUR PROPERTY IS LOCATED.

Why Investors (Pension Funds) Should Link With Borrowers in Suits Against Investment Banks

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For assistance with presenting a case for wrongful foreclosure, please call 520-405-1688, customer service, who will put you in touch with an attorney in the states of Florida, California, Ohio, and Nevada. (NOTE: Chapter 11 may be easier than you think).

Editor’s Analysis and Strategic Tips: At a glance, anyone should be able to see that the issues upon which investors are suing the investment banks over bogus mortgage bonds are virtually identical to the issues present in every foreclosure case. It is not hard to see why: they are both the only real parties in interest, they were both told the same lies, and they were both victims of a scheme that was common to investors and borrowers alike in which title, money and insurance were intentionally diverted from the streams of money pouring through Wall Street. Both are injured parties resulting from the scheme and both should be compensated for the fraud at the bottom, in the middle and on top of the chain of lies.

And now they share one more thing adding insult to injury — they both are filing suits that are going nowhere, except in sporadic circumstances. It’s true that the tide is turning in many states, most recently Georgia, but the fact is that most foreclosures are “completed” using false documents, false demands for money and false credit bids.

In the article below it is revealed that Judges are ruling that investors can’t simply say they were defrauded by bogus mortgage bonds, but rather they must file a separate lawsuit on each loan that did not measure up to industry standards at the time of the alleged underwriting. This is interesting because now if the investors proceed, a borrower can look up to see whether his loan is being targeted by the investors, what they are saying about it, and whether there is discovery that can be shared between investor and borrower.

As long as 5 years ago I suggested that the only way the mortgage mess could truly be cleaned up is if the borrowers and lenders (investors) put their hands together and went after the investment banks and all the tentacles spreading out from those institutions now of ill repute.

A pincer action between investors coming from one end alleging they are the real parties in interest and the borrowers coming from another direction could and I think most likely would be successful.

The “curious” paragraphs that require 25% of the investors (who don’t know each other because the investment bank won’t give them names) to enforce put-backs reveals that the investment banks never really intended to do anything about bad loans but rather intended to screw the investors.

But if investors and borrowers complained that the lending was not actually performed by the originators who were mere nominees for undisclosed parties and that the note and mortgage were fatally defective for lack of consideration, ANY investor could join that suit because it wouldn’t be about put-backs, it would be about fraud, theft and PONZI schemes.

And if the investors alleged that the money was put into a  general fund instead of a trust fund for the REMIC they thought they were buying into, then the investors would not be bound by the constraints of the REMIC documents because the investment banks ignored those entities when they were moving the money around, doing and moving the documents and closing and selling paper that was fatally defective.

At that point both the lender and the borrower would be complaining that the mortgage documents were not real and they could directly create a clearinghouse where new mortgages were established based upon true fair market values and BOTH could still go after the investment banks for consequential and punitive or treble damages.

This would of course raise the myth or test the myth that the mega banks are too big to fail. I think that is simply not true and never was true. In fact, it is the major banks who are refusing to execute their promise to lend and revive the economy. The money siphoned out of the economy properly should be paid to the lenders (investors) and thus reduce the balance due on the lender’s receivables.

Any accounting from the MASTER SERVICER would show that the bond receivable, which ought to be roughly equal to the notes receivable, is deficient, with the gap  representing money diverted from the money chain by the investment banks contrary to the express terms of the offering made to the investors as stated in the prospectus and PSA.

By simply comparing notes with the borrowers, the investors could have iron  clad case. Unsecured loans that were toxic and fraudulent from the beginning could be converted to secured loans that are conventional and worth every penny written on the documents that describe them — like the note, mortgage etc. The investors should be mitigating damages instead of letting investment banks bang them over the head repeatedly with compounding lies. The mitigation of those damages should reduce  the loan balances to what they should have been in the first place without appraisal fraud.

As it stands now every mortgage transaction is suspect as to validity, enforceability and security. Getting the investors and borrowers together could change all that, and provide substantial fiscal stimulus to the economy without the government spending a dime — in fact, quite the opposite, the government could recover hundreds of billions of dollars paid in guarantees on the bogus bonds and loans.

Every day we wait, the damages to our economy the corruption of our title records and the confidence in our economy as presenting a fair playing field is compounded.

Dear Pension Fund Manager: I know you think of the borrowers as ants living in a remote world, but many of those “Ants” are the same people expecting pension benefits that will need to be reduced because of lack of money caused by your losses to the investment banks who still have the money.

Isn’t it time you got rid of your bias against homeowners and borrowers and realized that it is in your self interest to treat the borrowers, especially those who are fighting in the court system, with respect and dignity.

If you don’t these pensioners are going to come after you for not doing all you could to recover the funding for the pension fund you manage. You are being set up by the investment banks and they are in the process of throwing you under the bus without you realizing it.

From http://www.nakedcapitalism.com

New Ruling on Mortgage Putbacks a Potential Huge Win for Banks

Even though, for most people, the housing crisis is a thing of the past, the fight over who should bear the cost of sloppy and openly fraudulent mortgage origination and securities sales continues to grind through the courts.

We’ve written now and again about mortgage putback cases, which are also called representation and warranty, or “rep and warranty” litigation. Investors in mortgage-backed securities were not quite as dumb as the crisis aftermath had made them look. The sponsors of the securitizations made promises in the offering documents (called representations and warranties) about the quality of the loans. It turns out they lied.

Normally, when a loan is found to be worse than the sponsors promised, the remedy is a putback. The originator is required to take the bad loan back and replace it, either with cash or buy replacing it with a loan that was of the quality that the investors were promised. However, the mortgage securitizations put hurdles in front of the investors: it took a minimum level of investors (usually 25%) to demand putbacks and it was hard for any investor to know who else had bought a particular deal. Even then, the trustee (who was the party who was responsible for putting back the loan) almost always ignored and fought investor putback requests. They have ongoing relationships with the sponsors, so they don’t want to ruffle big meal tickets, plus the margins for acting as a mortgage securitization trustee are thin, so they don’t lift a finger unless they absolutely have to.

Investors have thus been going to court to enforce their putback rights. We haven’t been enthusiastic about these suits. It isn’t that the investors weren’t harmed or that the banks really didn’t lie about their wares. But we have always been of the view that ultimately, if these suits get anywhere, the plaintiff would have to show on a loan by loan basis that the default was due not to normal underwriting losses (as in death, disability, job loss) but specifically because the loan was bad (as the loan was so badly underwritten that default was highly likely). That is, the plaintiffs don’t just have to show that their contracts were breached (the loans were worse than they were supposed to be) but that the breach was what caused damages.

What makes these cases potential duds, or at best unlikely to produce damages within hailing distance of investor losses is the fact that they will likely require a loan by loan fight. Imagine the cost of each side doing discovery on a loan, and telling its version of the story as to why the borrower defaulted. Multiply that by thousands of loans and the cost of proving how much you are owed becomes very costly relative to what the plaintiff might recoup. That’s why the people we know who have experience in rep and warranty litigation have expected these cases to settle for comparatively small percentages of likely losses suffered (now having said that, in an important ruling last year in Syncora v. EMC, the judge agreed that misrepresentations about loan quality would increase the risk of an insured loan pools, meaning Syncora would not need to get into a huge analysis of how many loans defaulted and why. But that ruling was based on insurance statues, so that doesn’t help mortgage bond investors).

The cases that are furthest along are those involved monoline insurers, since they had stronger putback rights in their contracts than bond investors. In MBIA v Countrywide, the judge agreed to allow MBIA to construct a sample of the loans (the two sides will now fight over what is an adequate sample) but even within that sample, we’d expect both sides to do a loan level analysis, which would probably include loan level discovery. Ugh.

Alison Frankel of Reuters points to a new ruling which could make this investor-unfriendly picture even uglier. A new ruling has told bond investors to file separate cases on each loan they think was misrepresented. No, I am not making that up. From her post:

I did a double take Wednesday, when I noticed a pair of new suits by Lehman Brothers Holdings in federal court in Colorado. The complaints, which are almost identical, claim that the mortgage originator Universal American Mortgage breached representations and warranties about loans it sold to Lehman, which subsequently suffered losses as a result of those breaches. But here’s the thing: Each suit addresses only one supposedly deficient loan! Lehman’s lawyers at Akerman Senterfitt allege that Lehman sustained about $100,000 in damages on one of the loans and $120,000 on the other — numbers that are light years apart from the multibillion-dollar claims we’ve seen from groups of mortgage-backed securities investors who band together to assert contract breaches in thousands of loans at a time.

The Lehman complaints each also contained a curious paragraph, noting that the claims at issue were previously asserted as counts in an eight-loan put-back case Lehman was litigating in federal court in Miami. The judge in that case, Lehman said, had decided after a pretrial conference last week that “each loan must be filed separately, rather than joined within one action.”

That notation sent me to the docket in the Florida case, and to the order entered by U.S. District Judge James King on Jan. 9. It’s true: King ruled that every allegedly deficient loan has to be addressed in its own suit, not in a block case. “The lack of commonality among the various factual circumstances pertinent to each of the eight individual loans makes them all but impossible to be adjudicated together,” King wrote. “That lack of commonality flows from, among other things, the facts that each of these loans was made at a different time, to different borrowers, in different locations involving different purchases of different real properties; most fundamentally, each loan requires separate proof as to whether a breach occurred, what damages, if any, flowed from any such breach, and what the amounts of any such damages are.”

To add insult to injury, the eight loan case was far enough along that it was scheduled to go to trial in March. And even though this conclusion may seem barmy to some readers, it may have precedential value since few investor putback cases have gotten very far:
Universal American’s lawyer, Philip Stein of Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod, told me Wednesday that if other judges

following King’s lead, the ruling could have profound implications for put-back litigation, since it significantly increases the cost of asserting breach-of-contract claims. (Stein also blogged about the order at Bilzin’s Mortgage Crisis Watch site.) Few put-back cases, Stein said, have reached final pretrial conferences, so few judges have considered the kind of commonality challenges he raised back in 2011 in Universal American’smotion to dismiss the Lehman suit. The judge denied the dismissal motion in order to permit discovery, Stein said, but was receptive when Universal American revived its argument at a pretrial hearing on Jan. 4.

If this ruling does establish what Frankel correctly calls “a new paradigm”, you’d need your head examined to ever invest in anything other than government guaranteed mortgage bonds. And of more immediate import, investors who had hoped they would recover some of their losses will find, yet again, that they’ve spent a lot on lawyers to find out that they don’t have much protection under the law.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/new-ruling-on-mortgage-putbacks-a-potential-huge-win-for-banks.html#yAlWVFdlMDF6q1wI.99

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: 2013 AND BEYOND

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For assistance with presenting a case for wrongful foreclosure, please call 520-405-1688, customer service, who will put you in touch with an attorney in the states of Florida, California, Ohio, and Nevada. (NOTE: Chapter 11 may be easier than you think).

——————–HOW TO GET AWAY WITH IT——————–

“Thus under the current scenario each one ($1) dollar spent on criminalizing certain acts, prosecuting them and punishing them is met by a comparative figure of seventeen thousand ($17,000) dollars in damages caused solely by the Wall Street mortgage meltdown alone. It’s impossible to graph on a single piece of paper — it would take 12 reams of paper for economic crimes versus 1/4 inch on a single piece of paper for all other crimes.

‘If the current societal cost of all crimes including nonviolent drug related offenses was plotted at 1/4 inches, the next line down for economic crimes would be 68,000 inches long or 6,181 pages. Yet the number of people prosecuted and incarcerated for economic crimes is, thus far, less than 1% of the number of people snared in the 1980’s savings and loan scandal which all admit to have had far less reaching consequences than the PONZI “derivative” scheme of 1996-2012. ” Neil F Garfield, Esq., http://www.livinglies.me

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Do you think that a person who possesses marijuana should be given a state or federal pension? What would you do if you found out that this is exactly what is happening for 1,000,000 U.S. Citizens every year? What would you think if you were told that they were each getting a pension of $40,000 year, free medical care, plus the initial cost of processing their pension applications to the state or federal government which adds another $40,000 for each pensioner?  The cost is $40 Billion per year plus the cost of initial processing of another $15 Billion per year.

$55 Billion per year is spent on pensioning possessors of marijuana and other drugs, plus the cost of socialized medicine and care for all pensioners, which includes those who commit violent crimes when they are young who are now senior citizens posing no threat to society but nonetheless retain their room, board, and medical care. The total cost of this system exceeds $80 Billion per year, which using the ten year budgets that are being hotly debated in Washington, would reduce the deficit by about $1 TRILLION dollars.

Most of the pensioners would be forced to work if they were not on the pension system. The loss from taking these people out of the workforce is another $6 Billion per year, which over ten years is another $6 Billion and the loss to economic activity is at least another $25 Billion per year or over a ten year period $250 Billion to the federal and state government on income and sales taxes is another

There are 1,500,000 people incarcerated in the United States at any one time — more per capita than any other country in the world, most of whom have far lower violent crime rates than those in the U.S. which admittedly are declining due to factors not well understood (economic, abortion, lead in gasoline and other products etc. – nobody knows).

If you were to draw out a simple three stage pyramid of incarcerated people in this country the vast base of nearly 1 million people would be comprised of those committed non-violent acts which means by definition that nobody got hurt. The vast majority of those were given sentences of “pension” for minimum mandatory periods for possession of controlled substances, mostly, marijuana. Hence, these people committed acts that posed no threat to anyone in society, or to put it simply, posed no threat to society. We spend $40 billion per year, which with inflation and other factors will cost nearly a Trillion dollars over the next ten years on these people.

The next level comprising just half the size of the foundation of the pyramid consist of people who committed violent crimes. And the last level is composed of a tiny fraction of people who committed “economic” crimes that are presumed to be non-violent. The fact that these economic criminals altered the landscape of the finance and economies all over the world in whole or in part, resulting in inevitable suicides, mass shootings, riots, wars and billions of dollars in mental health costs which leads to tens of billions of dollars in physical ailments brought on stress does not get any consideration as to whether their crimes hurt society more than say, a murderer, who shoots his partner for stealing.

Up until thirty years ago the pyramid didn’t look anything like the pyramid today. Costs for incarcerated “pensioners” and other people held in prisons and jails were far less than 1/3 of what they are today. The reason that the cost of and size of the prison system has quadrupled in 3 decades is MONEY. The prison system was privatized and this is what happens when you privatize a societal function like police, fire, and prisons. After years of lobbying big business managed to support or convince legislators that privatizing the prison system was a good idea.

This was a great idea for business — but only if they kept the jails full, using the same business model as the hotels. If you have no guests staying there you lose money. The more you can count on a full prison or jail the more you can spend on new jails and prisons, using the Wall Street markets to bankroll you. The trick is to make sure that people are convicted of something and sent to prison. And if the prison industry had their way they would make breathing a criminal event because that would give them an unlimited number of people to choose from in filling their ever growing prison system.

The closest thing they could come to criminalized breathing is taking a puff of a cigarette and since there were many types of cigarettes — tobacco and other substances, they supported anyone who was “afraid” of marijuana and managed to pass a new era of prohibition where we all know is where organized crime got its start.

To make certain they were reaching the huge population of people who used marijuana they even made it a crime just to possess it. This coup enabled the prison industry to grow into one of the largest industries in our economy (over $60 Billion per year) and create one of the largest lobbying systems to make certain that as many thing could be criminalized as possible, so long as it was directed to large numbers of potential “guests.” Violent crimes were not as much fun as non-violent crimes because costs of insurance and other measures goes up exponentially as the risk goes up, guards demand more pay for assuming the risk of dealing with violent individuals and the list goes on. Hence the lower sentences on violent crimes than possession of pot.

As for the economic crimes, the pickings are slim. The prison business model views it as a loser. There are just not enough people committing them as those who commit drug offenses and violent crimes. So prosecutions are sparse and the number of guests is very limited — really of no consequence in the business model of the prison industry. Besides it was the kingpins of Wall Street that financed the privatization of prison systems with new bonds, stock offerings and hedge products like credit default swaps. The last thing the prison lobby wants are prosecutions of Wall Street titans who are supporting the prison industry. And the last thing a politician wants is to to decriminalize non-violent drug crimes if he or she is dependent upon Wall Street or direct donations to their campaigns from the prison industry. The two lobbies combined probably exceed the total of all other lobbying.

I submit that the pyramid is inverted and that any politician  who lacks the nerve to do what is best for society should be removed from office and replaced with someone who will vote with an eye towards what will most benefit his or her constituents and the country as a whole, as is stated in their oath of office. I submit that the reason why Wall Street criminals were not prosecuted is that they are indirectly in charge of criminal prosecution system and the departments of corrections in each state and federal prison or jail.

If you analyze the pyramid in terms of damage to society, the base would be economic crimes costing some 1/3 of the world’s wealth — $17 trillion — through an obvious PONZI scheme that was named “securitization.” The principal flag for recognizing a PONZI scheme is that it collapses when people stop buying in because the venture is using incoming investments to pay the old investors. That is exactly what happened.

Compounding the crime, the Wall Street Bankers took money from investors under false pretenses, intentionally diverted a large part of that money into their own pockets, and then funded mortgages from remote thinly capitalized entities of dubious or impossibility viability by manipulating property values, rating systems, mortgage brokers and nominees that became called “originators, as if that term means anything.

The Wall Street Banks diverted investor money into their own pockets, then compounded that with  making themselves (instead of the investors they were required to protect) beneficiaries of insurance, federal bailouts and proceeds from “hedge” products like credit default swaps.

Instead of protecting the investors by having them named as payee on the funded loans, they created plainly defective notes and mortgages that were patently wrong as potential liens on the homeowner’s property.

Instead of having the money that funded the loans come from REMIC trusts that issued the bogus mortgage backed bond, they funded the loans from other entities leaving the REMIC and the investor with nothing.

They had simply diverted the paperwork from the investors for whom they were supposedly acting as agents, and created the illusion that the Wall Street Banks owned the mortgage backed bonds that contained no mortgages, no notes, were not backed and therefore bogus bonds  with no capacity to pay the expected interest and principal back to the investor.

So the foundation of pyramid based upon societal damage would be $17 trillion, with a continuing cost of trillions of dollars per year caused by squeezing values of currency on which the banks made even more money, minimum, whereas the cost to society of even the most violent crimes would be under $10 billion using the most liberal formulas. The cost to society of non-violent drug crimes could be computed as high as $3 Billion per year depending upon whose analysis you look at.

Thus under the current scenario each one ($1) dollar spent on criminalizing certain acts, prosecuting them and punishing them is met by a comparative figure of seventeen thousand ($17,000) dollars in damages caused solely by the Wall Street mortgage meltdown alone. It’s impossible to graph on a single piece of paper. If the current societal cost of all crimes including nonviolent drug related offenses was plotted at 1/4 inches, the next line down for economic crimes would be 68,000 inches long or 6,181 pages.

The outcome is clear — the bigger the economic crime the less likely the punishment regardless of the damage to society. And, as we all know, criminals who are successful tend to escalate their criminality rather than say “‘enough.”

Unless the State and Federal and Local governments understand and act on these self-evident truths, it is virtually certain that whatever is left in world wealth will be taken on the next round of Wall Street exotic securities that only robotic supercomputers can properly value — on chips containing programs created on Wall Street and never reviewed by any regulatory agency.

I submit that like the FDA, an agency I have no love for, the labeling of products from Wall Street should await approval from a newly created division of the SEC that can review —- and understand — the tricks and tools of the new “securities” being offered and that the U.S. attorneys and Attorneys General get together a task force and claw back what they can to cure or assist their deficits.

Until that happens Wall Street will continue its 4 decades long pursuit of selling crap instead of investments.

Banks Keep Winning, But Borrowers Are Picking Up the Pace

What’s the Next Step? Consult with Neil Garfield

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For assistance with presenting a case for wrongful foreclosure, please call 520-405-1688, customer service, who will put you in touch with an attorney in the states of Florida, California, Ohio, and Nevada. (NOTE: Chapter 11 may be easier than you think).

Editors’ Analysis: Based upon reports coming from around the country, and especially in Florida, Nevada, New York, and other states, it seems that while the tide hasn’t turned, borrowers are finally mounting a meaningful challenge to the improper, illegal and fraudulent practices used at loan originations , assignments and foreclosures. As I have discussed with dozens of attorneys now, the strategies I suggested 6 years ago, once thought of as “fringe” are now becoming mainstream and the banks are feeling the pinch if not the bite of homeowners’ wrath.

The expression I like to use is that “At the end of the day everyone knows everything.” By using DENY and Discover tactics or strategies like that, borrowers are shifting the urden of persuasion onto the would-be foreclosers who in most cases do not have “the goods.” They are not a creditor, they didn’t fund the loan, they didn’t buy the loan and they don’t have any legal authorization to pursue foreclosure, submit a credit bid or otherwise trade in houses that were never subject to a perfected lien, and never owned by them.

It is becoming perfectly clear that something wrong is happening when the foreclosure strategies of the Wall Street puppets results in tens of thousands of homes being abandoned, blighting entire neighborhoods, towns and even cities. The banks are not stupid, although arrogance is not far from stupidity.

In ordinary times in any ordinary recession, the banks would do almost anything to avoid foreclose. They simply don’t have the money or the desire to acquire a portfolio of properties and they certainly don’t want to foreclose where the the end result is that the value of the collateral is diminished BELOW ZERO. And they certainly would not pursue policies that they knew would tank housing prices because it would only decrease the value of the loan and the likelihood of getting repaid for the loans they made.

But these are not ordinary times. Banks DO want price declines, so they can create REITS and other vehicles to pick up cheap properties. They DO want foreclosures even where the value of a blighted neighborhood is not worth the taxes, maintenance and insurance to keep the properties.

The reason is simple: if the loan is a total failure and under applicable state law they are able to create the appearance of a valid foreclosure, then the case is closed. Investors have not questioned the foreclosure process, mostly because they think that the basic problem was in the low underwriting standards which  certainly did contribute to the mortgage meltdown. If you look at most of the mortgages they have fatal flaws which increase the likelihood that the loan will fail — especially with blacks and other minorities who have been deprived of decent education and couldn’t possibly understand the deals they were signing.

Disclosure was required — but never made in terms that the borrowers understood — that the loans were being priced too high for the income of the household, and priced higher that the rates for which the household qualified. Blacks were 3.5x more likelihood to be steered into subprime loans when they qualified for conventional loans. People of Latin decent were treated like trash too being presented with documents that not only went above their education or sophistication in real estate transactions but also used words they never learned in English.

But the real reason I learned in my interviews was unrelated to the defective foreclosures. It goes back to the study made by Katherine Ann Porter when she was at the University of Iowa. Her study of thousands of mortgages and foreclosures came to the inescapable conclusion that at least 40% of all the origination documents were intentionally destroyed or claimed as lost. Other studies have shown the figure to be higher than 65%.

In ordinary times the  promissory note executed by the borrower in a conventional residential loan is a negotiable document supported by consideration from the payee who loaned money to the borrower. These notes were given to a custodian of records whose job was to preserve and protect these papers because they were considered by all accounting standards as CASH EQUIVALENT.

So on the balance sheet of the lender the cash was added to cash equivalents as total liquidity of the lender or bank. [What you are looking for on the balance sheet of the "lenders" are "loans receivable" and corresponding entry on the liability side of a reserve for bad debt. You won't find it in the "new mortgages" because they never had the real stake or risk of loss on that loan and therefore was excluded entirely from the balance sheet or placed in a category in loans held for sale along with a footnote or entry that zeroed out the asset of loans for sale because they were committed to third parties who had table funded the loan contrary to the express rules of TILA and Reg Z which state that the loans are presumptively predatory loans if the pattern of lending was  table funded loans.] See My workbooks on www.livinglies-store.com

The notes were considered liquid because there was always a secondary market in which to sell the notes and mortgages. And there, the proper chain of authorized signatures, resolutions, and endorsements was carefully followed, same as they would require from any borrower claiming an asset as proof of their credit-worthiness.

So why would any bank or any reasonable person intentionally destroy the original documents that constituted by definition the origination of the loan collateralize by a supposedly perfected lien? In my seminars and workbooks I answer this question with an example: “If you tell someone you have a hundred dollar bill and that they can have it if they buy to from you for $100, but that you will hold onto it because you will make some more money for them by lending it out, then the fraud is complete. And there you have the beginning of a PONZI scheme.

As long as you are paying them as though they had $100 invested, they are happy. But what if you were holding a $10 bill and not a $100 bill. What if they took your word for it that you were holding a $100 bill. AND what if now they want to see the $100 bill? Now you have a problem. You have no $100 bill to show them. You never did. For a while you could take incoming investor money and then show the original investor the money but when investors stop buying new deals, then you don’t have the $100 bills to show everyone you dealt with because all you ever had was a $10 bill.

So better to say that you destroyed it under the premise that the digitized copy would suffice or lost it because of the complexity of the securitization process than to admit that you never had it to begin with. If you admit it, you go to jail and you are ordered to pay restitution, your assets seized and marshaled to return as much money as possible to the victims of the PONZI scam.

If you don’t admit it, then there is the possibility that after probing why the investors didn’t get their money back, they start discovering how you were using their money, and what you were doing as business plan. The only way to shut that off and make it least likely that investors would ever question whether you had represented the deal correctly at the beginning, to avoid criminal prosecution, is to COMPLETE the FORECLOSURE Process which gives the further appearance that there is an official state government seal of approval on a perfectly illegal foreclosure and probably an economic crime.

See below for the suffering and light and lives lost because of this incredible crime that nobody seems to want to prosecute. A crime, by the way, they has corrupted title records that will haunt us for decades to come.

wall-street-kept-winning-on-mortgages-upending-homeowners.html

Lawyers cashing in on Class Action Lawsuits for Investors: What About Homeowners?

“I can’t predict the next scandal,” Mr. Berger said. “But I know that fraud is a growth industry, and so is greed.”

Editor’s Comment: Max W. Berger, partner of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, based in Manhattan has brought in over $1 Billion in damages for class action lawsuits filed ion behalf of investors. I’ve been predicting here that the amount of money that a lawyer can make correcting the malfeasance of the megabanks and servicers is staggering — far beyond profitable areas like personal injury and medical malpractice.

They are producing settlements rather than verdicts and judgments simply because the banks don’t really have a credible defense to what they did. They lied, cheated and stole. By diverting money from the securitization scheme that they said they were following and diverting the documentation away from the investors, as well as diverting huge payoffs and profits away from investors, the banks have screwed the investors (and all the pensioners and retirement account holders), screwed the taxpayers with creating false premises for bailouts, and screwed homeowners with false claims for foreclosures.

Is it time yet for lawyers to realize that even more money is to be made representing homeowners? The obstacles in the law create problems for certification of class actions but the possibilities remain. Any foreclosure pattern that REQUIRED the use of false documentation that was forged by unsophisticated clerks at the direction of the people who were claiming plausible deniability MUST be the target of such lawsuits and the answer to the problem of underwater mortgages, strategic defaults which are on the rise, and the limp economic recovery caused in large measure by the housing crash that cannot recover until the foreclosure scheme is stopped.

Lawyers for homeowners should be pouring through the discovery documents and pleading of the cases filed for investors, There they will find a treasure trove of information that drove the banks into offering billions in settlements of actions brought by civil action lawyers as well as government agencies. But the real question is why are the big name class action lawyers ignoring the horrendous damage to homeowners?

These lawyers have the resources and the knowledge that has been disclosed here on this blog and hundreds of other articles, mainstream news stories and bloggers across the country.

Iceland understood the problem and reduced household debt, bringing itself out from an actual economic depression into the fastest growth of western nations. Ireland is now about to require reductions in principal due to prevent the wave of foreclosures that has been hanging over that market as well, leading the way for other European countries to follow suit.

Each day thousands of lives are ruined by the false claims in foreclosures that dominate the “foreclosure industry” comprised of participants in a securitization chain to nowhere — the money wasn’t sent through that channel, the documents were diverted from that channel leaving the investors with nothing. Shareholders in the banks were misled and kept shares of the mega banks in their portfolios. Managed funds for pensions and retirement funds, have lost as much as 50% of their value endangering current pension benefits (a fact that will be revealed after the elections).

Why do I need to convince lawyers to make more money and do some good for society into action on behalf of homeowners when on the same facts, lawyers for the investors are making money hand over fist?

Business is booming for lawyers who care about investors, but not so much for lawyers representing the homeowners who were screwed worse than the investors. The homeowners in most cases have lost everything and more.

Their own pension benefits probably come from a managed funds that bought into the bogus mortgage bonds. Their pension benefits are in danger of being cut even while they lose their home and lifestyles from tricky defective mortgages that not even Alan Greenspan understood much less the unsophisticated home-buyer or homeowner refinancing homes that were in many cases in the family for generations.

Why is this so difficult for the lawyers and the judiciary to understand? Whose name would you put on the note and mortgage if you were lending money? Why wasn’t the name of the actual lender disclosed, much less shown as payee or mortgagee? If the REMIC trusts were real, no originator would have been allowed to place their name on the closing documents.

The money DID come from investors but did NOT come from the REMIC trusts that are alleged. The mortgage liens were not perfected and the underwriting process upon which the bank settlements with investors were based, was completely scuttled, especially where it came to intentionally inflated values of the property.

So where are the lawyers to take advantage of this huge opportunity where so much of the work has already been done for them by government agencies and class action lawyers for investors?

Investors’ Billion-Dollar Fraud Fighter
By PETER LATTMAN, NY Times

A few days after securing the largest shareholder recovery arising from the financial crisis – $2.43 billion from Bank of America – the plaintiffs’ lawyer Max W. Berger was not taking a victory lap.

“It makes me sad that in all of these scandals, no matter how good a job we do of getting results and inflicting pain, the government doesn’t seem to follow suit, and nobody learns, and it’s business as usual,” he said in an interview.

After a pregnant pause, Mr. Berger broke into a sly smile. He had another thought: “It gives us a lot of business, but it still makes me sad.”

With last month’s settlement with Bank of America, which resolved claims that the bank had misled shareholders about its acquisition of an ailing Merrill Lynch, Mr. Berger, 66, has now been responsible for six securities class-action settlements of more than $1 billion. His firm, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, based in Manhattan, has represented investors in five of the 10 largest securities-fraud recoveries. So far, it has recovered $4.5 billion for investors in cases connected to the subprime mortgage collapse.

“He is unquestionably one the giants of the plaintiffs’ bar,” said Brad S. Karp, the managing partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who represented Bank of America and has faced off against Mr. Berger in several other cases. “And what sets Max apart, beyond his talents as a lawyer, is that he’s a mensch, a person of real humility and integrity.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when the lions of the securities class-action bar were described in far less flattering terms. For decades, Melvyn I. Weiss and William S. Lerach, a pair of brash, crafty plaintiffs’ lawyers, dominated this lucrative pocket of the legal industry. Their firm, Milberg Weiss, revolutionized shareholder class-action suits by filing streams of cases against corporations, accusing them of accounting fraud. Critics called their aggressive tactics legalized blackmail. Congress passed laws aimed at reining in their practices.

The careers of Mr. Weiss and Mr. Lerach ended in disgrace in 2006, when their firm was indicted on charges that it had funneled illegal kickbacks to clients to induce them to sue. Mr. Weiss, Mr. Lerach and two other Milberg Weiss partners ultimately served prison terms. (It did not help the standing of the plaintiffs’ bar that at about the same time, Richard F. Scruggs, the Mississippi class-action lawyer, was imprisoned for trying to bribe a judge.)

“To be tarred by those brushes was very upsetting, but it was even worse to have everyone presume that we operated in the same way,” Mr. Berger said. “After they were charged, I can’t tell you how many people said, ‘Well, isn’t that what all of you do?’ “

Yet a half-decade after Milberg’s downfall, there has been a shift in the public image and reputation of the securities class-action bar. The Bank of America settlement, which is still subject to judicial approval, comes at a moment when plaintiffs’ lawyers are being praised for extracting stiff penalties from banks related to their actions during the housing boom and the subsequent economic collapse. At the same time, resource-constrained government regulators have been criticized for not being tough enough.

In several cases, private plaintiffs have settled lawsuits for amounts far greater than the government received in similar actions. Bank of America, for instance, paid the Securities and Exchange Commission just $150 million to settle the commission’s lawsuit connected to the Merrill acquisition. Judge Jed S. Rakoff reluctantly approved the S.E.C. settlement, calling it “inadequate and misguided” and the dollar amount “paltry.”

“The securities class-action bar has come under relentless assault over the years,” said J. Robert Brown Jr., a corporate law professor at the University of Denver. “Yet these suits, especially the ones tied to the financial crisis, actually have had real value in the capital markets because companies need to know that there is a heavy price to pay for their misconduct.”

There are still detractors who scoff at that notion. These critics view securities class-action lawyers as bounty hunters who file nuisance lawsuits against deep-pocketed targets and then force them to settle rather than engage in costly litigation. They argue that the settlements have little deterrent effect because the payments almost always come from the corporations, not the executives and directors running the companies.

And questions have arisen over plaintiffs’ lawyers’ campaign contributions to local politicians who control the selection of legal counsel for shareholder lawsuits filed by public pension funds.

But even the most vocal opponents of securities-fraud class actions acknowledge that a variety of factors, including a combination of federal legislation and court rulings, have curbed abuses in the system. Many of the weakest cases are now thrown out earlier, and large institutional shareholders like state pension funds and insurance companies have taken greater control of the lawsuits.

They are also reining in the lawyers’ fees. In the past, plaintiffs’ lawyers received 20 percent to one-third of the settlement amount. Today the average fee award as a percentage of the recovery is much lower. In Bank of America, for example, Bernstein Litowitz and two other firms – Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check and Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer – are expected to ask for about $150 million, or 6 percent of the settlement.

“Things have definitely improved,” said Theodore H. Frank, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a longtime critic of abusive class actions. “Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Yes.”

Legal experts say the class actions filed after the financial crisis highlight the improvements. The lawsuits were far more risky and complex than the template “strike suits” that plaintiffs’ firms once churned out every time a company’s share price plummeted. And unlike large corporate scandals like Enron or WorldCom, there were no balance-sheet restatements or criminal convictions to use as evidence.

“We never viewed these cases as easy but felt we needed to be in them in a big way, so we really doubled down,” Mr. Berger said.

Bernstein Litowitz’s recent settlements read like a who’s who of the “too big to fail” era. Wachovia and its auditor paid its bondholders $627 million to resolve charges related to its mortgage holdings. Merrill Lynch settled claims that it had misled buyers of mortgage products for $315 million. Lehman Brothers’ underwriters paid $426 million to end a lawsuit over its stock sales. Washington Mutual’s underwriters and insurers paid $205 million to investors in the now-collapsed bank.

The big mortgage-related settlements are expected to add up to hundreds of millions in fees for Bernstein Litowitz, a 52-lawyer firm. Mr. Berger and his three founding partners started the firm in 1983 after splitting off from Kreindler & Kreindler, a plaintiffs’ firm best known for its aviation-disaster litigation.

The Bank of America settlement is a boon for the firm, ending nearly four years of bruising litigation and coming less than a month before it was set for trial. The lawsuit accused Bank of America of concealing from its shareholders, who were voting on the Merrill acquisition, the billions of dollars in mounting losses at Merrill, as well as billions in bonuses being paid out to Merrill executives.

Bernstein Litowitz and two other firms represented five plaintiffs: two Ohio pension funds, a Texas pension fund and two European pensions. Working with Mr. Berger on the case were his partners Mark Lebovitch, Hannah Ross and Steven B. Singer.

“This case will now serve as Exhibit A for corporate directors tempted to withhold information from shareholders,” Mr. Berger said. “The message isn’t complicated: Just tell the truth.”

New matters, meanwhile, are coming in. Bernstein Litowitz was appointed lead plaintiffs’ counsel in a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase related to the bank’s multibillion-dollar trading loss out of a unit in London. And it is involved in the litigation against Facebook and Morgan Stanley over the social networking company’s botched initial public offering of stock.

Mr. Berger said finding cases had rarely been a problem.

“I can’t predict the next scandal,” Mr. Berger said. “But I know that fraud is a growth industry, and so is greed.”

CFPB Safe Harbor Rule Would Allow Homeowners to Fight Bad Mortgages

Editor’s Comment: The practice of disregarding normal loan underwriting standards creates a claim that homeowners were tricked into loans that they could never repay. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, built by Elizabeth Warren under Obama’s direction is about to pass a rule that addresses that very issue. The new Rule would allow homeowners contesting foreclosure to introduce evidence challenging whether the “lender” correctly determined a borrower’s ability to repay the loan.

The details of the test for the “safe harbor” provision that is being contested are not yet known. The objective is to separate those who are using general knowledge of bad practices in the industry from those who were actually hurt by those practices. It would provide the presiding judge with a simple, clear test to determine whether the evidence submitted (not merely allegations — so the burden is still on the homeowner) are sufficient to determine that the “lender” wrote a loan that it knew or should have known could not be repaid.

The game being indirectly addressed here is that the participants in the fake securitization scheme intentionally wrote bad loans and then were successful at entering into contracts that paid insurance, credit default swap and federal bailout proceeds to the participants in the scheme even though they neither made the loan nor did the forecloser actually buy the loan (no money exchanged hands).

Those who do not meet the test would have “frivolous” claims dismissed summarily by the Judge. But they would have other grounds to sue the “lender” or the party making false claims of default and foreclosure. Those who do meet the test, would defeat the foreclosure leaving the loan in a state of limbo.

The net legal effect of the rule could be that the mortgage is void and the note is no longer considered evidence of the entire transaction — because the risk of loss on the homeowner shifts to the lender, at least in part. This would clear the path for principal reduction and new loans that would correct the corruption of title in the county title records.

The rule is coming at the behest of the Federal Reserve, which has is own problems on how to account for the trillions they have advanced for “bad” mortgages or worthless bogus mortgage bonds.

The question remains whether the purchase of these bonds conveys some right of action to collect money that the investors advanced, and who would receive that money. It also leaves open the question of whether a mortgage bond purportedly owned by the Federal reserve or even sold by the the Federal Reserve changes the players with standing to bring lawsuits or other foreclosure proceedings.

This rule, when it is finally written and passed, won’t solve all the problems but it could have a cascading effect of restoring at least some homeowners to at least a better financial condition than the one in which they find themselves.

The issue that would be interesting to see litigated is whether the homeowners who meet the test now have a claim to recover part or all of the money they paid on the mortgage thus far or if they are given an additional credit for the overage they paid — another way of reducing principal.

The bottom line is that there is recognition at all levels of government agencies —Federal and State — that there are problems with the origination of the loans and not just with the robo-signed assignments, allonges endorsements and fake powers of attorney. This recognition is going to be felt throughout the regulatory and judicial system and will redirect the attention of Judges to the reality that Wall Street banks wanted bad loans so they could make millions on each bad loan through multiple sales of the same loans using insurance, credit default swaps, TARP and other schemes to cover it all up.

http://www.housingwire.com by John Prior

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray told a House committee Thursday that mortgage lenders would still not be safe if the bureau elects to grant a safe harbor provision to the upcoming Qualified Mortgage rule.

“The safe harbor versus rebuttable presumption is a mirage,” Cordray said. “Even safe harbor isn’t safe. You can always be sued for whether you meet the criteria or not to get into the safe harbor. It’s a bit of a marketing concept there. The more important point is are we drawing bright lines? If someone were to say to me safe harbor or anything else, I would go with a safe harbor. But I don’t think safe harbor is truly safe. And I think it oversimplifies the issue.”

Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y. then right away pressed Cordray on which he would choose: a safe harbor or rebuttable presumption. The director was forced to remind him the rule was still under development and would be finalized in January.

“I have not taken a position. I have discussed the issue,” Cordray said.

Mortgage industry lobbyists have been pressing the bureau since it overtook QM rulemaking responsibility from the Federal Reserve last year to install “clear, bright lines” and a legal safe harbor that protects lenders from future homeowner suits during foreclosure.

A rebuttable presumption provision allows homeowners to introduce evidence in court challenging whether the lender correctly determined a borrower’s ability to repay the loan before it was written. But a safe harbor allows a simple test for a judge to find if the mortgage met the QM rule, and frivolous suits could be dismissed early.

The Mortgage Bankers Association even showed the CFPB that attorney fees go up to an average $84,000 for a summary judgment from $26,000 if it’s dismissed. The risk of this increased cost would be passed on to borrowers, they claim.

Some consumer advocacy groups previously said such suits are rare, and a safe harbor could clear lenders from risks down the road rule makers cannot anticipate now.

Cordray repeatedly said in the hearing Thursday that his goal on QM and upcoming rules for the mortgage market is to protect consumers but not cut off access to credit. Forcing courts to define areas left gray by regulators is not something he would permit.

“As a former attorney general in Ohio, gray areas of the law are not appreciated,” Cordray said. “They’re difficult for people trying to comply. If we write rules that are murky, they’ll end up getting resolved in courts and it will take years and be very expensive. We are making real efforts to draw very bright lines.”

jprior@housingwire.com

Barofsky: We Are Headed for a Cliff Because of Housing

Editor’s Note: Hera research conducted an interview with Neil Barofsky that I think should be  read in its entirety but here the the parts that I thought were important. The After Words are from Hera.

After Words

According to Neil Barofsky, another financial crisis is all but inevitable and the cost will be even higher than the 2008 financial crisis. Based on the way that the TARP and HAMP programs were implemented, and on the watering down of the Dodd-Frank bill, it appears that big banks are calling the shots in Washington D.C. The Dodd-Frank bill left risk concentrated in a few large institutions while doing nothing to remove perverse incentives that encourage risk taking while shielding bank executives from accountability. Neither of the two main U.S. political parties or presidential candidates are willing to break up “too big to fail” banks, despite the gravity of the problem. The assumption that another financial crisis can be prevented when the causes of the 2008 crisis remain in place, or have become worse, is unrealistic. In the mean time, what Mr. Barofsky describes as a “parade of scandals” involving highly unethical and likely criminal behavior is set to continue unabated. Although the timing and specific areas of risk are not yet known, there is no doubt that U.S. taxpayers will be stuck with another multi-trillion dollar bill when the next crisis hits.

*Post courtesy of Hera Research. Hera Research focuses on value investing in natural resources based on original geopolitical, macroeconomic and financial market analysis related to global supply and demand and competition for natural resources

Excerpts from Interview:

HR: Did the TARP help to restore confidence in U.S. institutions and financial markets?

Neil Barofsky: Yes, but it was intended and required by Congress to do much more than that and Treasury said that it was going to deploy the money into banks to increase lending, which it never did.

HR: Were the initial goals of the TARP realistic?

Neil Barofsky: First, if the goals were unachievable, Treasury officials should never have promised to undertake them as part of the bargain. Second, even if the goals were not entirely achievable, it would have been worth trying. Treasury officials didn’t even try to meet the goals.

HR: Can you give a specific example?

Neil Barofsky: The justification for putting money into banks was that it was going to increase lending. Having used that justification, there was an obligation, in my view, to take policy steps to achieve that goal, but Treasury officials didn’t even try to do it. The way it was implemented, there were no conditions or incentives to increase lending.

HR: What policy steps could the U.S. Department of the Treasury have taken to help the economy?

Neil Barofsky: There are all sorts of things that Treasury could have done. For example, they could have reduced the dividend rate—the amount of money that the banks had to pay in exchange for being bailed out—for lending over a baseline, which would have decreased the bank’s obligations. Or, they could have insisted on greater transparency so that banks had to disclose what they were doing with the funds. Treasury chose not to do any of these things.

HR: Weren’t there other housing programs like the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP)?

Neil Barofsky: Yes, but there were choices made to help the balance sheets of struggling banks rather than homeowners. The HAMP program was a massive failure but it wasn’t preordained. It was the result of choices made by Treasury officials.

HR: What could have been done differently in the HAMP?

Neil Barofsky: HAMP was deeply flawed with conflicts of interest baked into the program. The management of the program was outsourced to the mortgage servicers, which were thoroughly unprepared and ill equipped. The program encouraged servicers to extend out trial modifications. It was supposed to be a three month period but it often turned into more than a year. The servicers, because they could accumulate late fees for each month during the trial period, were incentivized to string the trial periods out then pull the rug out from under the homeowner, putting them into foreclosure, without granting a permanent mortgage modification. The servicers could make more money doing that then by doing mortgage modifications. If they had done permanent mortgage modifications, the banks couldn’t have kept the late fees.

HR: Are you saying that the program encouraged banks to extract as much cash as possible from homeowners before foreclosing on them anyway?

Neil Barofsky: Yes. The mortgage servicers exploited the conflicts of interest that were in the program, and blatantly broke the rules, and Treasury did nothing.

HR: When you were serving as Inspector General for TARP, you issued a report indicating that government commitments totaled $23.7 trillion. What was that about?

Neil Barofsky: $23.7 trillion was simply the sum of the maximum commitments for all the financial programs related to the financial crisis. The number was misconstrued as a liability but the government never stood to lose that much. For example, the government guarantee of money market funds was a multi-trillion dollar commitment. Of course, not all of that money could have been lost because it would have required every fund to go to zero. The government guaranteed commercial paper but, again, for that commitment to have been wiped out, every company would have had to have defaulted. But the numbers were very important in terms of transparency. All of the data were provided by the agencies responsible for the various programs, so the $23.7 trillion number was simple arithmetic. It was important to understand the scope of the extraordinary actions that were being taken.

HR: What are the potential future losses that the U.S. government—that taxpayers—might have to absorb?

Neil Barofsky: The real issue is the potential for another financial crisis because we haven’t fixed the core problems of our financial system. We still have banks that are “too big to fail.” Standard & Poor’s estimated last year that the up-front cost of another crisis, including bailing out the biggest banks yet again, would be roughly 1/3 of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) or about $5 trillion. The resulting problems will be even bigger.

HR: What were the problems resulting from the 2008 financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: When you look at the fiscal impact of the 2008 crisis, you have to look at it not only in terms of lost tax revenues and increased government debt, but also in terms of the loss of household wealth. People who became unemployed suffered tremendous losses and the government’s social benefit costs expanded accordingly. One of the reasons we had the debt ceiling debate last year, when the U.S. credit rating was downgraded, and why we are facing a fiscal cliff ahead is the legacy of the 2008 crisis.

We have a lot less dry powder to deal with a new crisis and we almost certainly will have one.

HR: Why do you expect another financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: It just comes down to incentives. A normally functioning free market disciplines businesses. The presumption of bailout for “too big to fail” institutions changes the incentives of a normally functioning free market. In a free market, if an institution loads up on risky assets with too little capital standing behind them, it will be punished by the market. Institutions will refuse to lend them money without extracting a significant penalty. Counterparties will be wary of doing business with companies that have too much risk and too little capital. Allowing “too big to fail” institutions to exist removes that discipline. The presumption is that the government will stand in and make the obligations whole even if the bank blows up. That basic perversion of the free market incentivizes additional risk.

HR: Are “too big to fail” banks taking more risks today than they did before?

Neil Barofsky: Bailouts give bank executives an incentive to max out short term profits and get huge bonuses, because if the bank blows up, taxpayers will pick up the tab. The presumption of bailout increases systemic risk by taking away the incentives of creditors and counterparties to do their jobs by imposing market discipline and by incentivizing banks to act in ways that make a bailout more likely to occur.

HR: Is it just a matter of the size of banking institutions?

Neil Barofsky: The big banks are 20-25% bigger now than they were before the crisis. The “too big to fail” banks are also too big to manage effectively. They’ve become Frankenstein monsters. Even the most gifted executives can’t manage all of the risks, which increases the likelihood of a future bailout.

HR: Since bank executives are accountable to their shareholders, won’t they regulate themselves?

Neil Barofsky: The big banks are not just “too big to fail,” they’re ‘too big to jail.’ We’ve seen zero criminal cases arising out of the financial crisis. The reality is that these large institutions can’t be threatened with indictment because if they were taken down by criminal charges, they would bring the entire financial system down with them. There is a similar danger with respect to their top executives, so they won’t be indited in a federal criminal case almost no matter what they do. The presumption of bailout thus removes for the executives the disincentive in pushing the ethical envelope. If people know they won’t be held accountable, that too will encourage more risk taking in the drive towards profits.

HR: So, it’s just a matter of time before there’s another crisis?

Neil Barofsky: Yes. The same incentives that led to the 2008 crisis are still in place today and in many ways the situation is worse. We have a financial system that concentrates risk in just a handful of large institutions, incentivizes them to take risks, guarantees that they will never be allowed to fail and ensures that the executives will never be held accountable for their actions. We shouldn’t be surprised when there’s another massive financial crisis and another massive bailout. It would be naïve to expect a different result.

HR: Didn’t the Dodd-Frank bill fix the financial system?

Neil Barofsky: Nothing has been done to remove the presumption of bailout, which is as damaging as the actual bailout. Perception becomes reality. It’s perception that ensures that counterparties and creditors will not perform proper due diligence and it’s perception that encourages them to continue doing business with firms that have too much risk and inadequate capital. It’s perception of bailout that drives executives to take more and more risk. Nothing has been done to address this. The initial policy response by Treasury Secretaries Paulson and Geithner, and by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, was to consolidate the industry further, which has only made the problems worse.

HR: The Dodd-Frank bill contains 2,300 pages of new regulations. Isn’t that enough?

Neil Barofsky: There are tools within Dodd-Frank that could help regulators, but we need to go beyond it. The parade of recent scandals and the fact that big banks are pushing the ethical and judicial envelopes further than ever before makes it clear that Dodd-Frank has done nothing, from a regulatory standpoint, to prevent highly unethical and likely criminal behavior.

HR: Is the Dodd-Frank bill a failure?

Neil Barofsky: The whole point of Dodd-Frank was to end the era of “too big to fail” banks. It’s fairly obvious that it hasn’t done that. In that sense, it has been a failure. Dodd-Frank probably has been helpful in the short term because it increased capital ratios, although not nearly enough. If we ever get over the counter (OTC) derivatives under control, that would be a good thing and Dodd-Frank takes some initial steps in that direction. I think that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a good thing.

Nonetheless, the financial system is largely in the hands of the same executives, who have become more powerful, while the banks themselves are bigger and more dangerous to the economy than before.

HR: How are OTC derivatives related to the risk of a new financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: Credit default swaps (CDS) were specifically what brought down AIG, and synthetic CDOs, which are entirely dependent on derivatives contracts, contributed significantly to the financial crisis. When you look at the mind numbing notional values of OTC derivatives, which are in the hundreds of trillions, the taxpayer is basically standing behind the institutions participating in these very opaque and, potentially, very dangerous markets. OTC derivatives could be where the risks come from in the next financial crisis.

HR: Can anything be done to prevent another financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: We have to get beyond having institutions, any one of which can bring down the financial system. For example, Wells Fargo alone does 1/3rd of all mortgage originations. Nothing can ever happen to Wells Fargo because it could bring down the entire economy. We need to break up the “too big to fail” banks. We have to make them small enough to fail so that the free market can take over again.

HR: Does the political will exist to break up the largest banks?

Neil Barofsky: The center of neither party is committed to breaking up “too big to fail” banks. Of course, pretending that Dodd-Frank solved all our problems, as some Democrats do, or simply saying that big banks won’t be bailed out again, as some Republicans have suggested, is unrealistic. Congress needs to proactively break up the “too big to fail” banks through legislation. Whether that’s through a modified form of Glass-Steagall, size or liability caps, leverage caps or remarkably higher capital ratios, all of which are good ideas, we need to take on the largest banks.

HR: Do you think the U.S. presidential election will change anything?

Neil Barofsky: No. There’s very little daylight between Romney and Obama on the crucial issue of “too big to fail” banks. Romney recently said, basically, that he thinks big banks are great and the Obama Administration fought against efforts to break up “too big to fail” banks in the Dodd-Frank bill. Geithner, serving the Obama White House, lobbied against the Brown-Kaufman Act, which would have broken up the “too big to fail” banks.

HR: What will it take for U.S. lawmakers to finally take on the largest banks?

Neil Barofsky: Some candidates have made reforms like reinstating Glass-Steagall part of their campaigns but the size and power of the largest banks in terms of lobbying campaign contributions is incredible. It may well take another financial crisis before we deal with this.

HR: Thank you for your time today.

Neil Barofsky: It was my pleasure.

Illinois Tops List of Most Foreclosures

Starting last month, the mega banks began an aggressive campaign to avoid modification, settlements or principal reductions and seek foreclosures before they are forced to modify.

Yes, we can help at livinglies, but the numbers are so high that there is no way we have the resources to help everyone. I am pitching in too, having become attorney of record for some. Like you, I am tired of waiting for lawyers who get it. I get it and although I am licensed in Florida we can help anyway.

Lawyers, accountants, analysts and others should be seeing this as a major opportunity to do well for themselves and for the owners of these homes by challenging the rights of the those collectors who are taking their money now, or demanding payment or threatening foreclosure. Lawyers have been slow on the uptake and in so doing are potentially setting themselves up for future malpractice claims for anyone, whether they aid or not, who received advice from the lawyer that was not based upon the realities of the securitization scam.

Call 520-405-1688, where you can get help in documenting the fraud, help in drafting the documents, and help in finding a lawyer. If you are a lawyer involved in foreclosure defense, bankruptcy or family law, you need to to start studying the real facts and the strategies that get traction in court.

We are planning a possible new Chicago seminar for lawyers, paralegals and sophisticated investors or homeowners. But we will only schedule it if we get enough calls to indicate that the workshop will at least pay for itself and that there will be volunteers to help on the ground to set up the the venue. It is a full day of information, strategy, role-playing and tactics to use in the court room.

Editor’s Analysis: Despite loosening standards for principal reductions and modifications, the foreclosure activity across the country is increasing or about to increase due to many factors.

The bizarre reason why the titans of Wall Street want these homes underwater combined with the miscalculation of the real number does not bode well for the housing market nor the economy. With median income now reported by the Wall Street Journal at 1995 levels, and the direct correlation between median income and housing prices you only need a good memory or a computer to see the level of housing prices in 1995 — which is currently where we are headed. As the situation gets worse, the foreclosure and housing problem will become a disaster beyond the proportions seen today. And that is exactly what Wall Street wants and needs — the investors be damned. Millions of proposals far  in excess of foreclosure proceeds have been rejected and forced into foreclosure and millions more will follow.

Wall Street NEEDS foreclosures — not modifications, principal write-downs or settlements. Foreclosures are food for the lions. The reason is simple. They have already received trillions in bailouts from the Federal Government. All of that was predicated upon the homes going into foreclosure. If the loans turn out to be capable of performing, many of those trillion of dollars ( generally reported at $17 trillion, which is more than the total principal loaned out to all borrowers during the meltdown period), the mega banks could be facing trillions of  dollars in liability as the demands are properly made for payback. The banks should not be allowed to collect the money and the houses too. Neither should they be allowed to collect the bailout money and keep the mortgages.

The “underwater” calculation is far off the mark. If selling expenses and discounts are taken into consideration, the value of homes used in that calculation is at least 10% less than what is used in the underwater calculation, which would increase the number of underwater homes by at least 15% bringing the total to nearly 10,000,000 homeowners who know now that they will never see valuation even coming close to the amount owed. The prospect for strategic defaults is staggering —- totaling more than 10 million homes  — or nearly twice the number of foreclosures already “completed”, albeit defectively.

Illinois is now getting hit hard, as the foreclosure menace spreads. Jacksonville up 30% in Florida, South Florida at 22 month high, Arizona with more than 600,000 homes underwater, all the paths lead to foreclosure. With that bogus deed on foreclosure in hand, Wall Street figures it is a  get out of jail free card.

Wall Street wants the foreclosures, needs the foreclosures and is going to get them — unless they are stopped in the courts. Don’t think you won’t end up in foreclosure just because you are current in mortgage payments. They have playbook that will trick you too into a foreclosure. If anyone tells you to stop making payments, watch out!

There’s A NEW Worst State For Foreclosures

By Mamta Badkar

Foreclosure activity in the United States fell 15 percent year-over-year in August. But housing is a local story and a few regions in the country were exceptions to the trend.

With one in every 298 properties receiving a foreclosure filing, Illinois had the highest foreclosure rate in the country for the first time since 2005, according to RealtyTrac’s latest foreclosure report.

Illinois pushed usual suspects like California, Arizona, and Nevada down the list.

The prairie state’s foreclosure rate jumped 29 percent month-over-month (MoM), and 42 percent year-over-year (YoY), with 17,781 properties in the state received a foreclosure filing in August.

And every detail in the state’s foreclosure report was ugly. Foreclosure starts – the pace at which mortgages enter the foreclosure process – were up 18 percent on the year. Scheduled foreclosure auctions were up 116 percent YoY. Bank repossessions climbed 41 percent YoY.

As a state that requires foreclosures to go through the judicial process, Illinois’ foreclosure rate was “artificially low” last year, according to Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac.

5,268 homeowners in Illinois received a total of $357.3 million in assistance as part of the $25 billion national mortgage foreclosure settlement as of June 30, 2012, according to a report by the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight. That’s roughly $67,817 per borrower but it’s unlikely to have a large impact in reducing foreclosures in the future.

Foreclosure activity in the Chicago-Naperville-Joliet metro area was up 44 percent YoY, making it the metro with the eighth highest foreclosure rate in the country.

Blomquist told Business Insider in an email interview that in the case of the Chicago metro area, a land bank, like the ones set up in Cleveland and Detroit that rehabilitate properties or demolish them, could help ease the burden of distressed properties.

He doesn’t however expect any improvements in Illinois’ foreclosure rate anytime soon. “The foreclosures coming through the pipeline in Illinois and other states now are likely on mortgages that the banks do not deem are a good fit for any of the foreclosure alternatives outlined in the mortgage settlement.” He does however think that a program similar to Oregon’s foreclosure mediation program could help slow down foreclosures.

This chart from RealtyTrac shows the recent surge in Illinois’ foreclosure activity as its banks and courts push through foreclosures:

RealtyTrac

RealtyTrac’s report also broke down US metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates.

Click Here To See The 20 Metros Getting Slammed By Foreclosures

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/illinois-has-the-countrys-highest-foreclosure-rate-2012-9#ixzz26MreqXxo

Homeowners Settlements, Shortsales and Modifications Opportunities Arise for Investors

Whether it is in Bankruptcy Court, Federal Civil, or State Civil, the trend is obvious — more and more cases are being settled, modified or otherwise resolved outside the courtroom. In some cases, the settlement is relatively easy, with the pretender lender agreeing to sharp principal reductions and long term paybacks at low fixed rates. The homeowner need only be wary of getting an Order from a Judge through a new or existing lawsuit that quiets title and a new title policy that not exclude risks associated with securitization, assignment or sale into the secondary market. If you need help with this call our customer service line and we will find someone to help settle the matter or help your attorney. 520-405-1688.
But in other cases, especially in bankruptcy court, we have a growing list of homeowners who seek “hard money” sources that will enable them to buy the house out of the bankruptcy estate at deep discounts. In some cases these are loans and in others it is an outright purchase by the investor with an option granted to the homeowner to purchase from the investor. In the meanwhile the homeowner rents from the hard money source on a triple net lease, meaning that the homeowner takes care of everything from utilities to repairs and maintenance. That reduces the monthly rent for the homeowner but it also eliminates any landlord liability.

As an example, we have someone who is in bankruptcy court with 2 1/2 acres, two completed structures on the block and the ability to buy the property out of the estate for 20% of the original finance appraised value. She needs a hard money source who will lend or buy. The specs on the deal make it about as risk free as one could get. And the return make it about as high a return as anyone could even imagine. So if there are investors out there who are looking for deals, look no further. Just call our customer service line (520-405-1688) and ask for a telephone appointment with me and I’ll put you in touch with the right people.

It’s Down to Banks vs Society

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We are trying to rescue the creditors and restart the world that is dominated by the creditors. We have to rescue the debtors instead before we are going to see the end of this process. — Economist Steve Keen

Bankers Are Willing to Let Society Crash In Order to Make More Money

Editor’s Comment: 

I was reminded last night of a comment from a former bond trader and mortgage bundler that the conference calls are gleeful about the collapse of economies and societies around the world. Wall Street will profit greatly on both the down side and then later when asset prices go so low that housing falls under distressed housing programs and 125% loans become available in bulk. They think this is all just swell. I don’t.

The obvious intent on the part of the mega banks and servicers is to bring everything down with a crash using every means possible. When you look at the offers state and federal government programs have offered for the banks to modify, when you see the amount of money poured into these banks by our federal government in order to prop them up, you cannot conclude otherwise: they want our society to end up closed down not only by foreclosure but in any other way possible. They withhold credit from everyone except the insider’s club.

So now it is up to us. Either we take the banks apart or they will take us apart. I had a recent look at many modification proposals. In the batch I saw, the average offer from the homeowner was to accept a loan 20%-30% higher than fair market value and 50%-75% higher than foreclosure is producing. It seems we are addicted to the belief that this can’t be true because no reasonable person would act like that. But the answer is that the system is rigged so that the intermediaries (the megabanks) control what the investors and homeowners see and hear, they make far more money on foreclosures than they do on modifications, and they make far money on all the “bets” about the failure of the loan by foreclosing and not modifying.

The reason for the unreasonable behavior, as it appears, is that it is perfectly reasonable in a lending environment turned on its head — where the object was to either fund a loan that was sure to fail, or keep a string attached that would declare it as part of a failed “pool” that would trigger insurance and swaps payments.Steve Keen: Why 2012 Is Shaping Up To Be A Particularly Ugly Year

At the high level, our global economic plight is quite simple to understand says noted Australian deflationist Steve Keen.

Banks began lending money at a faster rate than the global economy grew, and we’re now at the turning point where we simply have run out of new borrowers for the ever-growing debt the system has become addicted to.

Once borrowers start eschewing rather than seeking debt, asset prices begin to fall — which in turn makes these same people want to liquidate their holdings, which puts further downward pressure on asset prices:

The reason that we have this trauma for the asset markets is because of this whole relationship that rising debt has to the level of asset market. If you think about the best example is the demand for housing, where does it come from? It comes from new mortgages. Therefore, if you want to sustain he current price level of houses, you have to have a constant flow of new mortgages. If you want the prices to rise, you need the flow of mortgages to also be rising.

Therefore, there is a correlation between accelerating and rising asset markets. That correlation applies very directly to housing. You look at the 20-year period of the market relationship from 1990 to now; the correlation of accelerating mortgage debt with changing house prices is 0.8. It is a very high correlation.

Now, that means that when there is a period where private debt is accelerating you are generally going to see rising asset markets, which of course is what we had up to 2000 for the stock market and of course 2006 for the housing market. Now that we have decelerating debt — so debt is slowing down more rapidly at this time rather than accelerating — that is going to mean falling asset markets.

Because we have such a huge overhang of debt, that process of debt decelerating downwards is more likely to rule most of the time. We will therefore find the asset markets traumatizing on the way down — which of course encourages people to get out of debt. Therefore, it is a positive feedback process on the way up and it is a positive feedback process on the way down.

He sees all of the major countries of the world grappling with deflation now, and in many cases, focusing their efforts in exactly the wrong direction to address the root cause:

Europe is imploding under its own volition and I think the Euro is probably going to collapse at some stage or contract to being a Northern Euro rather than the whole of Euro. We will probably see every government of Europe be overthrown and quite possibly have a return to fascist governments. It came very close to that in Greece with fascists getting five percent of the vote up from zero. So political turmoil in Europe and that seems to be Europe’s fate.

I can see England going into a credit crunch year, because if you think America’s debt is scary, you have not seen England’s level of debt. America has a maximum ratio of private debt to GDP adjusted over 300%; England’s is 450%. America’s financial sector debt was 120% of GDP, England’s is 250%. It is the hot money capital of the western world.

And now that we are finally seeing decelerating debt over there plus the government running on an austerity program at the same time, which means there are two factors pulling on demand out of that economy at once. I think there will be a credit crunch in England, so that is going to take place as well.

America is still caught in the deleveraging process. It tried to get out, it seemed to be working for a short while, and the government stimulus seemed to certainly help. Now, that they are going back to reducing that stimulus, they are pulling up the one thing that was keeping the demand up in the American economy and it is heading back down again. We are now seeing the assets market crashing once more. That should cause a return to decelerating debt — for a while you were accelerating very rapidly and that’s what gave you a boost in employment —  so you are falling back down again.

Australia is running out of steam because it got through the financial crisis by literally kicking the can down the road by restarting the housing bubble with a policy I call the first-time vendors boost. Where they gave first time buyers a larger amount of money from the government and they handed over times five or ten to the people they bought the house off from the leverage they got from the banking sector. Therefore, that finally ran out for them.

China got through the crisis with an enormous stimulus package. I think in that case it is increasing the money supply by 28% in one year. That is setting off a huge property bubble, which from what I have heard from colleagues of mine is also ending.

Therefore, it is a particularly ugly year for the global economy and as you say, we are still trying to get business back to usual. We are trying to rescue the creditors and restart the world that is dominated by the creditors. We have to rescue the debtors instead before we are going to see the end of this process.

In order to successfully emerge on the other side of this this painful period with a more sustainable system, he believes the moral hazard of bailing out the banks is going to have end:

[The banks] have to suffer and suffer badly. They will have to suffer in such a way that in a decade they will be scared in order to never behave in this way again. You have to reduce the financial sector to about one third of its current size and we have to also ultimately set up financial institutions and financial instruments in such a way that it is no longer desirable from a public point of view to borrow and gamble in rising assets processes.

The real mistake we made was to let this gambling happen as it has so many times in the past, however, we let it go on for far longer than we have ever let it go on for before. Therefore, we have a far greater financial parasite and a far greater crisis.

And he offers an unconventional proposal for how this can be achieved:

I think the mistake [central banks] are going to make is to continue honoring debts that should never have been created in the first place. We really know that that the subprime lending was totally irresponsible lending. When it comes to saying “who is responsible for bad debt?” you have to really blame the lender rather than the borrower, because lenders have far greater resources to work out whether or not the borrower can actually afford the debt they are putting out there.

They were creating debt just because it was a way of getting fees, short-term profit, and they then sold the debt onto unsuspecting members of the public as well and securitized their way out of trouble. They ended up giving the hot potato to the public. So, you should not be honoring that debt, you should be abolishing it. But of course they have actually packaged a lot of that debt and sold it to the public as well, you cannot just abolish it, because you then would penalize people who actually thought they were being responsible in saving and buying assets.

Therefore, I am talking in favor of what I call a modern debt jubilee or quantitative easing for the public, where the central banks would create ‘central bank money’ (we cannot destroy or abolish the debt, which would also destroy the incomes of the people who own the bonds the banks have sold). We have to create the state money and give it to the public, but on condition that if you have any debt you have to pay your debt down — no choice. Therefore, if you have debt, you can reduce the debt level, but if you do not have debt, you get a cash injection.

Of course, this would then feed into the financial sector would have to reduce the value of the debts that it currently owns, which means income from debt instruments would also fall. So, people who had bought bonds for their retirement and so on would find that their income would go down, but on the other hand, they would be compensated by a cash injection.

The one part of the system that would be reduced in size is the financial sector itself. That is the part we have to reduce and we have to make smaller.  That is the one that I am putting forward and I think there is a very little chance of implementing it in America for the next few years not all my home country [Australia] because we still think we are doing brilliantly and all that. But, I think at some stage in Europe, and possibly in a very short time frame, that idea might be considered.

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Fine Print: The Real Story on the “$25 Billion” Multistate Settlement

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One of the things I heard from a high ranking official in state government is that only a tiny fraction of the “settlement” is translating into actual dollars from the banks to anyone. In Arizona the $1.3 billion is subject to an “earn-down” as it was described to me and the net amount turned out to be $97 million and then on the website for the attorney general of the state, the $97 million became $47 million.

So I brought up my calculator and discovered that out of the “settlement” the banks were paying themselves around $1.2 billion out of the $1.3 billion (some say it is $1.6 billion, but the net left for the state remains unchanged at $97 million) and that some of the balance of the money is “unaccounted for.” By the way this has NOTHING to do with the Arizona Department of Housing, which is as close to non-political as you can get in any government.

So in plain language, the banks are taking money from their left pocket and putting int heir right pocket and saying it was a deal. This sounds a lot like the fake claims of securitization and assignment of debt on housing, student loans, credit cards, auto loans etc. In the end, no money will move except a tiny percentage because since the banks are simply paying themselves out of their own money how bad can the accounting be for them?

In Arizona, the legislature decided, as per the terms of the “settlement” to take the money and use it as part of general operating funds leaving distressed homeowners with nothing. So now there is something of an uproar in Arizona. Here is a $1.3 billion settlement that could have reversed a downward economic spiral for the state that will be felt for decades, and we end up with only 7% of that figure and then at least half, if not all of that is being taken for uses other than homeowner relief that is essential for economic recovery.

My guess is that they will say they are stopping the move to use the homeowner relief funds for perks to corporate donors and then quietly go out and do it anyway. What is your guess?

——————————————–

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

State officials agreed Tuesday to delay the transfer of $50 million of disputed mortgage settlement funds, at least for the time being.

Assistant Attorney General David Weinzweig made the offer during a hearing where challengers were hoping to get a court order blocking the move while its legality is being decided by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Mark Brain. Attorney Tim Hogan of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, who represents those opposed to the transfer, readily agreed.

“You don’t want to rush the judge,” said Hogan, whose clients are people he believes would be helped by the funds.

“You want him to take his time on important questions like this,” Hogan said. “And so it’s reasonable to agree not to transfer the funds for a certain period of time to give the judge the opportunity to do that.”

The move sets the stage for a hearing in August on the merits of the issue.

Weinzweig told Brain he believes the transfer, ordered by state lawmakers earlier this year, is legal. Anyway, he said, Hogan’s clients have no legal standing to challenge what the Legislature did.

The fight surrounds a $26 billion nationwide settlement with five major lenders who were accused of mortgage fraud.

Arizona’s share is about $1.6 billion, with virtually all of that earmarked for direct aid to those who are “under water” on their mortgages — owing more than their property is worth — or have already been forced out of their homes.

But the deal also provided $97 million directly to the state Attorney General’s Office. The terms of that pact said the cash was supposed to help others with mortgage problems as well as investigate and prosecute fraud.

Lawmakers, however, seized on language which also said the money can be used to compensate the state for the effects of the lenders’ actions. They said the result of the mortgage crisis was lower state revenues, giving them permission to take $50 million from the settlement to balance the budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Hogan’s suit is based on his contention that the settlement terms put the entire $97 million in trust and makes Attorney General Tom Horne, who was authorized by state law to sign the deal, responsible for ensuring the cash is properly spent.

Horne urged lawmakers not to take the funds. But once the budget deal was done, he went along and took the position that, regardless of whether the cash could have been better spent elsewhere, the transfer demand is legal.

Whatever Brain rules is likely to be appealed.

The challenge was brought on behalf of two people who would benefit by the state having more money to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The lawsuit said both are currently “at risk” of losing their homes.

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State Programs with Real Money Going Unused

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Millions for Principal Reduction and Moving Expenses and No Applicants

Editor’s Comment: 

I had the pleasure of listening last night to Michael Trailor, the Director of the Arizona Department of Housing. It was like a breath of fresh air. He was a home builder for decades and when the market crashed he went into this obscure post of this obscure state agency that turns out to have its counterparts in many if not all states. Each of these agencies has received money and authority to help homeowners and they are willing to pay down principal reductions, buy the loans and then modify and pay for moving expenses in short sales and other events.

Trailor is a plain-speaking non-politician who tells it like it is. His agency has programs based upon the premise that principal reduction is the only thing that works and he has working relationships with some small banks where his agency literally pays the principal down while the Bank shares in that loss. The small banks see the sense in it. He can’t get cooperation from the big banks and servicers.

In the meeting at Darrell Blomberg’s Tuesday Strategist presentation (every week at Macayo’s restaurant in downtown Phoenix), we heard straight talk and we heard about a number of programs that I had advocated before Trailor became director. My suggestions fell on deaf ears. Trailor’s programs are of the same variety and creativity with the objective of saving the Arizona economy from destruction.

He reported that three states got together under the same program to make the offer of sharing the reduction of principal because the banks said that Arizona was not big enough on its own to motivate the banks to participate in the program. So he got three states — Arizona, California and Nevada. The banks did the old familiar two-step with him and his counterparts in the other states and essentially refused to pparticipate. Every borrower knows that two-step by heart.

I made some suggestions for programs that could be introduced in bankruptcy court, where the power of the Banks is much less. Right now if they don’t want to modify the loan, they can’t be forced. If they don’t want to SELL the loan and then modify it as the beneficiary or mortgagee, the mega bank can and does say no (while the small bank can and does say yes).

That’s right. His agency said they would buy the loan from the bank for 100 cents on the dollar, and then modify the loan the principal and payments to something the borrower could afford and that would not lead to future foreclosures (the fate of practically all modifications). The mega banks killed the idea. Don’t you wonder why banks would contrary to the interest of a ‘lender” who can minimize their losses with government money that has already been allocated but is not yet spent?

This is exactly what I predicted back in 2008. The small banks agree because it is the smart thing to do and THEY are actually owed the money. The mega banks refuse to go along with the deal because hanging on the now invisible and non-existent trunk of an existing debt-tree are hundreds of branches of swaps, insurance and credit enhancements upon which Wall Street has made and is continuing to make billions of dollars in “trading profits” at the expense of the investors and to the detriment of the homeowners.

In other words, they sold the loan multiple times — up to 40 times as I read the data. So hanging on your $200,000 loan could be as much as $8 MILLION in derivatives, swaps etc. That could mean $8 million in claims on the proceeds of sale of the obligation or note or satisfaction of the note or obligation.

Here is my suggestion for those homeowners’ attorneys that have started a bankruptcy proceeding. Where the so-called creditor has sent out a notice of sale and has filed a motion to lift the automatic stay, apply for assistance from the Arizona Department of Housing or whatever the equivalent is in your state. If the agency agrees to assist in refinancing or buying the loan so the homeowner can stay and pay, then the bank would need to explain the basis on which they are responding negatively. After all they are being offered 100 cents on the dollar — why isn’t that enough?

Make sure you notify the Trustee and Court of the pending application made to the agency and don’t use it in a silly fashion promising things that the agency will not corroborate.

I believe that Trailor’s agency and his counterparts would respond with some program that would essentially be an offer to the supposed creditor — provided that the true creditor steps forward and can prove that they are the actual party to whom the money from the homeowner’s obligation is owed. Darrell and I are starting talks with Trailor’s agency to get specific programs that will work in bankruptcy court and maybe other situations.

Once the Notice of Sale is sent,  the “creditor” has committed itself to selling. How can they turn around and say no when they are being offered the full amount? In that court, once the “lender” has committed to selling the property they can hardly say they don’t want to sell the loan — especially if they are receiving 100 cents on the dollar. The offer would be accepted by the Trustee, I am fairly certain, and the Judge since there really is no choice.

Now here is where the fun begins. The Judge would agree as would the U.S. Trustee that only the party to whom the money is owed can get the money. Some of you might recall my frequent diatribes about who can submit a credit bid — only the actual creditor to whom the original loan is now owed or an authorized representative who submits the bid on behalf of THAT creditor.

So assuming the Trustee and Judge agree that the “creditor” who filed the Motion to Lift Stay MUST sell the loan or release it upon receiving full payment, then they are stuck with coming up with the real creditor, which is going to be impossible in many cases, difficult in virtually all other cases. Trailor is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars to help homeowners and he can’t use it because nobody will play ball under circumstances that he “naively” thought would be a no-brainer.

For those versed in bankruptcy you know the rest. The “lender” must admit that it is not the lender, that is has no authority to represent the creditor, that it doesn’t know who the creditor is or even if one still exists. The mortgage can be attacked as not being a perfected lien on the property and the obligation is wiped out or reduced by the  final order entered in the bankruptcy court.

Now the banks and servicers are going to fight this one tooth and nail because while the loan might be $200,000, there is an average of around $4 million in derivatives and exotic credit enhancements hanging on this loan. If it is paid off, then all accounts must settle. There are going to be gains and losses, but the net effect might well be that the bank “Sold” the loan 20 times. And the best part of it is that you don’t need t prove the theft. If will simply emerge from the failure of the “lender” to conform with the order of the court approving the deal. 

This is a classic case of the scam used in the “The Producers” which has been done on Broadway and movies. You sell 10,000% of a show you know MUST fail. They select “Springtime for Hitler” right after World War II and expect it to crash. After all it is musical comedy. But the show is a spectacular success. So whereas the news of the show’s closing would have sent investors to their accountants to write it off for tax purposes, now they were all clamoring for an accounting for their share of the profits. Since the producers had sold the show 100 times over it was impossible to pay the investors and they went to jail.

THAT is the problem here. It is only if the show closes with a foreclosure that the investors will not ask for the accounting. If the show succeeds (the loan is paid off) then all the investors will want their share of the payments that are due — unless they had the misfortune of taking the wrong side of a “bet” that the loan would fail. Not many investors did that. But the investment banks that sold the show (the loan) many times over used those bets as a way of selling the show over and over again.

If I’m lying I’m dying. That is what is happening and when people realize that as homeowners they are sitting on leverage worth 20 times their loan and they use it against the banks and servicers, they will get some very nice results. Agencies like Arizona’s Department of Housing can save the day like the cavalry just by making the offer and getting a judge to enforce it and watch in merriment how the “lenders” insist that they don’t want the payment and they can’t be forced to take it. That is what happens  when you turn the conventional and reasonable lending model on its head.

So now the banks and servicers must come up with a whole new set of fabricated, forged and fraudulent documents in which the investors assigned their interest in the obligation or note or mortgage to some other entity that is now the “creditor” — but the question that will be asked by every Trustee and Judge in bankruptcy court “who paid for this, how much did they pay, and how do we know a transaction actually happened.” That is the problem with a VIRTUAL TRANSACTION. At some point, like every PONZI scheme, the house of cards falls down.

Check with Arizona Department of Housing

Of course if you are not in Arizona check with the equivalent agency in your state. Chances are they have hundreds of millions of dollars and no place to spend it for homeowners because the banks won’t agree to no-brainer solutions that any bank can and does accept if they were playing the “Securitization game.” Don’t expect the agency to march into court and save the day. The agency is not going to litigate your case for you. But they probably will give you plenty of support and encouragement and offers of real money to end this nightmare of foreclosures. You must do the work, fill out applications and get the process underway before you can go to the court with a motion that says we have a settlement vehicle pending with a state agency and you can prove it is true.

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How the Servicers and Investment Banks Cheat Investors and Homeowners

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Master Servicers and Subservicers Maintain Fictitious Obligations

Editor’s Comment: 

This article really is about why discovery and access to the information held by the Master Servicer and subservicer, investment bank and Trustee for the REMIC (“Trust”) is so important. Without an actual accounting, you could be paying on a debt that does not exist or has been extinguished in bankruptcy because it was unsecured. In fact, if it was extinguished in bankruptcy, giving them the house or payment might even be improper. Pressing on the points made in this article in order to get full rights in discovery (interrogatories, admissions and production) will yield the most beneficial results.

Michael Olenick (creator of FindtheFraud) on Naked Capitalism gets a lot of things right in the article below. The most right is that servicers are lying and cheating investors in addition to cheating homeowners.

The subservicer is the one the public knows. They are the ones that collect payments from the “borrower” who is the homeowner. In reality, they have no right to collect anything from the homeowner because they were appointed as servicer by a party who is not a creditor and has no authority to act as agent for the creditor. They COULD have had that authority if the securitization chain was real, but it isn’t.

Then you have the Master Servicers who are and should be called the Master of Ceremonies. But the Master Servicer is basically a controlled entity of the investment bank, which is why everyone is so pissed — these banks are making money and getting credit while the rest of us can’t operate businesses, can’t get a job, and can’t get credit for small and medium sized businesses.

Cheating at the subservicer level, even if they were authorized to take payments, starts with the fees they charge against the account, especially if it becomes (delinquent” or in “default” or “Nonperforming.” At the same time they are telling the investors that the loan is a performing loan and they are making payments somewhere in the direction of the investors (we don’t actually know how much of that payment actually gets received by investors), they are also declaring defaults and initiating a foreclosure.

What they are not reporting is that they don’t have the paperwork on the loan, and that the value of the portfolio is either simply over-stated, which is bad enough, or that the portfolio is worthless, which of course is worse. Meanwhile the pension fund managers do not realize that they are sitting on assets that may well have a negative value and if they don’t handle the situation properly, they might be assessed for the negative value.

It gets even worse. Since the money and the loans were not handled, paid or otherwise organized in the manner provided in the pooling and servicing agreement and prospectus, the SPV (“Trust”) does not exist and has no assets in it — but it might have some teeth that could bite the hand that fed the banks. If the REMIC was not created and the trust was not created or funded, then the investors who in fact DID put up money are in a common law general partnership. And since the Credit Default Swaps were traded using the name of  entities that identified groups of investors, the investors might be hit with an assessment to cover a loss that the “pool” can’t cover because they only have a general partnership created under common law. Their intention to enter into a deal where there was (a) preferential tax status (REMIC) and (b) limited liability would both fall apart. And that is exactly what happened.

The flip side is that the credit default swaps, insurance, credit enhancements, and so forth could have and in most cases did produce a surplus, which the banks claimed as solely their own, but which in fact should have at least been allocated to the investors up to the point of the liability to them (i.e., the money taken from them by the investment bank).

AND THAT is why borrowers should be very interested in having the investors get their money back from the trading, wheeling and dealing made with the use of the investors’ money. Think about it. The investors gave up their money for funding mortgages and yours was one of the mortgages funded. But the vehicle that was used was not a simple  one. The money taken from the investors was owed by the REMIC in whose name the trading in the secret derivative market occurred.

Now think a little bit more. If the investors get their rightful share of the money made from the swaps and insurance and credit enhancements, then the liability is satisfied — i.e., the investor got their money back with interest just like they were expecting.

But, and here is the big one, if the investor did get paid (as many have been under the table or as part of more complex deals) then the obligation to them has been satisfied in full. That would mean by definition that the obligation from anyone else on repayment to the investor was extinguished or transferred to another party. Since the money was funded from investor to homeowner, the homeowner therefore does not owe the investor any money (not any more, anyway, because the investor has been paid in full). The only valid transfer would be FROM the REMIC partnership not TO it. But the fabricated, forged and fraudulent documents are all about transferring the loan TO the REMIC that was never formed and never funded.

It is possible that another party may be a successor to the homeowner’s obligation to the investor. But there are prerequisites to that happening. First of all we know that the obligation of the homeowner to the investor was not secured because there was no agreement or written instrument of any kind in which the investor and the borrower both signed and which set forth terms that were disclosed to both parties and were the subject of an agreement, much less a mortgage naming the investor. That is why the MERS trick was played with stating the servicer as the investor. That implies agency (which doesn’t really exist).

Second we know that the SWAPS and the insurance were specifically written with expressly worded such that AIG, MBIA etc. each waived their right to get payment from the borrower homeowner even though they were paying the bill.

Third we know that most payments were made by SWAPS, insurance and the Federal Reserve deals, in which the Fed also did not want to get involved in enforcing debts against homeowners and that is why the Federal Reserve has never been named as the creditor even though they in fact, would be the creditor because they have paid 100 cents on the dollar to the investment bank who did NOT allocate that money to the investors.

Since they did not allocate that money to the investors, as servicers (subservicer and Master Servicer), they also did not allocate the payment against the homeowner borrower’s debt. If they did that, they would be admitting what we already know — that the debt from homeowner to investor has been extinguished, which means that all those other credit swaps, insurance and enhancements that are STILL IN PLAY, would collapse. That is what is happening in our own cities, towns, counties and states and what is happening in Europe. It is only by keeping what is now only a virtual debt alive in appearance that the banks continue to make money on the Swaps and other exotic instruments. But it is like a tree without the main trunk. We have only branches left. Eventually in must fall, like any other Ponzi scheme or House of Cards.

So by cheating the investors, and thus cheating the borrowers, they also cheated the Federal Reserve, the taxpayers and European banks based upon a debt that once existed but has long since been extinguished. If you waded through the above (you might need to read it more than once), then you can see that your  feeling, deep down inside that you owe this money, is wrong. You can see that the perception that the obligation was tied to a perfected mortgage lien on the property was equally wrong. And that we now have $700 trillion in nominal value of derivatives that has at least one-third in need of mark-down to zero. The admission of this inescapable point would immediately produce the result that Simon Johnson and others so desperately want for economic reasons and that the rest of us want for political reasons — the break-up of banks that are broken. Only then will the market begin to function as a more or less free trading market.

How Servicers Lie to Mortgage Investors About Losses

By Michael Olenick

A post last week reviewed a botched foreclosure for a mortgage loan in Ace Securities Home Equity Loan Trust 2007-HE4 dismissed with prejudice, meaning that the foreclosure cannot be refilled; a total loss for investors. Next, we reviewed why the trust has not yet recorded the loss despite the six month old verdict.

As an experiment, I gave my six year-old daughter four quarters. She just learned how to add coins so this pleased her. Then I told her I would take some number of quarters back, and asked her how many I should take. Her first response was one – smart kid – then she changed her mind to two, because we’d each have two and that’s the most “fair.” Having mastered the notion of loss mitigation and fairness, and because it’s not nice to torture six year-old children with experiments in economics, I allowed her to keep all four.

When presented with a similar question – whether to take a partial loss via a short-sale or principal reduction, or whether to take a larger loss through foreclosure – the servicers of ACE2007-HE4 repeatedly opt for the larger losses. While the dismissal with prejudice for the Guerrero house is an unusual, the enormous write-off it comes with through failure to mitigate a breach – to keep overall damages as low as possible – is common. When we look more closely at the trust, we see the servicer again and again, either through self-dealing or laziness, taking actions that increase losses to investors. And this occurs even though the contract that created the securitization, a pooling and servicing agreement, requires the servicer to service the loans in the best interest of the investors.

Let’s examine some recent loss statistics from ACE2007-HE4. In May, 2012 there were 15 houses written-off, with an average loss severity of 77%. Exactly one was below 50% and one, in Gary, IN, was 145%; the ACE investors lent $65,100 to a borrower with a FICO score of 568 then predictably managed to lose $94,096. In April, there were 23 homes lost, with an average loss severity of 82%, three below 50%, though one at 132%, money lent to a borrower with an original FICO score of 588.

Of course, those are the loans with finished foreclosures. There are 65 loans where borrowers missed at least four consecutive payments in the last year with yet there is no active foreclosure. Among those are a loan for $593,600 in Allendale, NJ, where the borrower has not made a payment in about four years, though they have been in and out of foreclosure a few times during that period. It’s not just the judicial foreclosure states; a $350,001 loan in Compton, CA also hasn’t made a payment in over a year and there is no pending foreclosure.

There is every reason to think the losses will be higher for these zombie borrowers than on the recent foreclosures. First, every month a borrower does not pay the servicer pays the trust anyway, though the servicer is then reimbursed the next month, mainly from payments of other borrowers still paying. This depletes the good loans in the trust, so that the trust will eventually run out of money leaving investors holding an empty bag. And on top of that, when the foreclosure eventually occurs, the servicer also reimburses himself for all sorts of fees, late fees, the regular servicing fee, broker price opinions, etc. Longer times in foreclosure mean more fees to servicers. Second, the odds are decent that the servicers are holding off on foreclosing on these homes because the losses are expected to be particularly high. Why would servicers delay in these cases? Perhaps because they own a portfolio of second mortgages. More sales of real estate that wipe out second liens would make it harder for them to justify the marks on those loans that they are reporting to investors and regulators. Revealing how depressed certain real estate markets were if shadow inventory were released would have the same effect.

These loans will eventually end up either modified or foreclosed upon, but either way there will be substantial losses to the trust that have not been accounted for. Of course, this assumes that the codes and status fields are accurate; in the case of the Guerreros’ loan the write-off – with legal fees for the fancy lawyers who can’t figure out why assignments are needed to the trust – is likely to be enormous. How much? Nobody except Ocwen knows, and they’re not saying.

Knowing that an estimated loss of 77%, is if anything an optimistic figure, even before we get to the unreported losses on the Guerrero loan, it seems difficult to understand why Ocwen wouldn’t first try loss mitigation that results in a lower loss severity. If they wrote-off half the principal of the loan, and decreased interest payments to nothing, they’d come out ahead.

Servicers give lip service to the notion that foreclosure is an option of last resort but, only when recognizing losses, do their words seem to sync with their behavior. But it’s all about the incentives: servicers get paid to foreclose and they heap fees on zombie borrowers, but even with all sorts of HAMP incentives, they don’t feel they get paid enough to do the work to do modifications. Servicers are reimbursed for the principal and interest they advance, the over-priced “forced placed insurance” that costs much more and pays out much less than regular insurance, “inspections” that sometimes involve goons kicking in doors before a person can answer, high-priced lawyers who can’t figure out why an assignment is needed to bind a property to a trust, and a plethora of other garbage fees. They’re like a frat-boy with dad’s credit-card, and a determination to make the best of it while dad is still solvent.

Despite the Obama campaign promise to bring transparency to government and financial markets, the investors in trusts remain largely unknown, so we’re not sure who bears the brunt of the cost of Ocwen’s incompetence in loss mitigation (to be fair Ocwen is not atypical; most servicers are atrocious). But, ACE2007-HE4 has a few unique attributes allowing us to guess who is affected.

ACE2007-HE4 is named in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which has sued ACE, trustee Deutsche Bank, and a few others citing material misrepresentations in the prospectus of this trust. As pointed out in the prior article, both the Guerreros’ first and second loans were bundled into the same trust – so there were definitely problems – though the FHFA does not seem to address that in their lawsuit.

With respect to ACE2007-HE4, the FHFA highlights an investigation by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which found that Deutsche Bank “‘continued to refer customers to its prospectus materials to the erroneous [delinquency] data’”even after it ‘became aware that the static pool information underreported historical delinquency rates.”

The verbiage within the July 16, 2010 FINRA action is more succinct: “… investors in these 16 subsequent RMBS securitizations were, and continue to be, unaware that some of the static pool information .. contains inaccurate historical data which underreported delinquencies.” FINRA allowed Deutsche Bank to pay a $7.5 million fine without either admitting or denying the findings, and agreed never to bring another action “based on the same factual findings described herein.”

Despite the finding and the fine, FINRA apparently forgot to order Deutsche Bank to knock off the conduct, and since FINRA did not reserve the right to circle back for a compliance check maybe Deutsche Bank has the right to produce loss reports showing whatever they wish to.

It is unlikely that Deutsche Bank had trouble paying their $7.5 million fine since the trust included an interest swap agreement that worked out pretty well for them. Note that these swap agreements were a common feature of post 2004 RMBS. Originators used to retain the equity tranche, which was unrated. When a deal worked out, that was nicely profitable because the equity tranche would get the benefit of loss cushions (overcollateralization and excess spread). Deal packagers got clever and devised so-called “net interest margin” bonds which allowed investors to get the benefit of the entire excess spread for a loan pool. The swaps were structured to provide a minimum amount of excess spread under the most likely scenarios. But no one anticipated 0% interest rates.

From May, 2007, when the trust was issued, to Oct., 2007, neither party paid one another. In Nov., 2007, Deutsche Bank paid the trust $175,759.04. Over the next 53 months that the swap agreement remained in effect the trust paid Deutsche Bank $65,122,194.92, a net profit of $64,946,435.88. Given that Deutsche traders were handing out t-shirts reading “I’m Short Your House” when this trust was created, I can see why they’d bet against steep interest rates over the next five years, as the Federal Reserve moved to mitigate the economic fallout of their mischievousness with low interest rates.

In any event, getting back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the FHFA does not disclose which), one of the GSEs purchased $224,129,000 of tranche A1 at par; they paid full freight for this fiasco. Since this trust is structured so that losses are born equally by all A-level tranches once the mezzanine level tranches are destroyed by losses, which they have been, to find the party taking the inflated losses you just need to look in the nearest mirror. Fannie and Freddie are, of course, wards of the state so it is the American taxpayer that gets to pay out the windfall to the Germans. In this we’re like Greece, albeit with lousier beaches and the ability to print more money.

If the mess with the FHFA and FINRA were not enough, ACE2007-HE4 is also an element in the second 2007 Markit index, ABX.HE.AAA.07-2, a basket of tranches of subprime trusts that – taken as a whole – show the overall health of all similar securities. This is akin to being one of the Dow-Jones companies, where a company has its own stock price but that price also affects an overall index that people place bets on. Tranche A-2D, the lowest A-tranche, is one of the twenty trusts in the index. Since ACE2007-HE4 is structured so that all A-tranches wither and die together once the mezzanine level tranches are destroyed it has the potential to weigh in on the rest of the index. Therefore, the reporting mess – already known to both the FHFA and FINRA – stands to be greatly magnified.

The problems with this trust are numerous, and at every turn, the parties that could have intervened to ameliorate the situation failed to take adequate measures.

First there is the botched securitization, where a first and second lien ended up in the same trust. Then, there is failure to engage in loss mitigation, with the result that refusing to accept the Guerrero’s short-sale offers or pleas for a modification, resulting in a more than 100% loss. Next, there is defective record-keeping related to that deficiency and others like it. And the bad practices ensnarled Fannie /Freddie when they purchased almost a quarter billion dollars of exposure to these loans. Then there’s the mismanaged prosecution by FINRA, where they did not require ongoing compliance, monitoring, or increasing fines for non-compliance. There’s the muffed FHFA lawsuit, where the FHFA did not notice either the depth of the fraud, namely two loans for the same property in the same trust, and that the reporting fraud they cited continues. I’m not sure if the swap agreement was botched, but you’d think FINRA and the FHFA would and should do almost anything to dissolve it while it was paying out massive checks every month. Finally, returning full circle, there’s the fouled up foreclosure that the borrowers fought only because negotiations failed that resulted in a the trust taking a total loss on the mortgage plus paying serious legal fees.

It is an understatement to say this does not inspire confidence in any public official, except Judge Williams, the only government official with the common sense to lose patience with scoundrels. We’d almost be better off without regulators than with the batch we’ve seen at work.

US taxpayers would have received more benefit by burning dollar bills in the Capitol’s furnace to heat the building than we received from bailing out Fannie, Freddie, Deutsche Bank, Ocwen, and the various other smaller leaches attached to the udder of public funds. We could and should have allowed the “free market” they worship to work its magic, sending them to their doom years ago. That would have left investors in a world-o-hurt but, in hindsight, that’s where they’re ending up anyway with no money left to fix the fallout. It is long past time public policy makers did something substantive to rein in these charlatans.

My six year-old daughter understands the concept of limiting losses to the minimum, and apportionment of those losses in the name of fairness. Maybe Tim Geithner should take a lesson from her about this “unfortunate” series of events, quoting Judge Williams, before wasting any more money that my daughter will eventually have to repay.

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ALLONGES, ASSIGNMENTS AND ENDORSEMENTS: THE REAL DEAL

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ALLONGES, ASSIGNMENTS AND INDORSEMENTS

Excerpt from 2nd Edition Attorney Workbook, Treatise and Practice Manual

AND Subject Matters to be Covered in July Workshop

ALLONGE: An allonge is variously defined by different courts and sources. But the one thing they all have in common is that it is a very specific type of writing whose validity is presumed to be invalid unless accompanied by proof that the allonge was executed by the Payor (not the Payee) at the time of or shortly after the execution of a negotiable instrument or a promissory note that is not a negotiable instrument. People add all sorts of writing to notes but the additions are often notes by the payee that are not binding on the Payor because that is not what the Payor signed. In the context of securitization, it is always something that a third party has done after the note was signed, sometimes years after the note was signed.

A Common Definition is “An allonge is generally an attachment to a legal document that can be used to insert language or signatures when the original document does not have sufficient space for the inserted material. It may be, for example, a piece of paper attached to a negotiable instrument or promissory note, on which endorsements can be written because there isn’t enough room on the instrument itself. The allonge must be firmly attached so as to become a part of the instrument.”

So the first thing to remember is that an allonge is not an assignment nor is it an indorsement (UCC spelling) or endorsement (common spelling). This distinction was relatively unimportant until claims of “securitization” were made asserting that loans were being transferred by way of an allonge. By definition that is impossible. An allonge is neither an amendment, nor an assignment nor an endorsement of a loan, note, mortgage or obligation. Lawyers who miss this point are conceding something that is basic to contract law, the UCC and property law in each state.

It is important to recognize the elements of an allonge:

1. By definition it is on a separate piece of paper containing TERMS that could not fit on the instrument itself. Since the documents are prepared in advance of the “closing” with the borrower, I can conceive of no circumstances where the note or other instrument would be attached to an allonge when there was plenty of time to reprint the note with all the terms and conditions. The burden would then shift to the pretender lender to establish why it was necessary to put these “terms” on a separate piece of paper.
2. The separate piece of paper must be affixed to the note in such a manner as to demonstrate that the allonge was always there and formed the basis of the agreement between all signatories intended to be bound by the instrument (note). The burden is on the pretender lender to prove that the allonge was always present — a burden that is particularly difficult without the signature or initials of the party sought to be bound by the “terms” expressed in the allonge.
3. The attached paper must contain terms, conditions or provisions that are relevant to the duties and obligations of the parties to the original instrument — in this case the original instrument is a promissory note. The burden of proof in such cases might include foundation testimony from a live witness who can testify that the signor on the note knew the allonge existed and agreed to the terms.
4. ERROR: An allonge is not just any piece of paper attached to the original instrument. If it is being offered as an allonge but it is actually meant to be used as an assignment or indorsement, then additional questions of fact arise, including but not limited to consideration. In the opinion of this writer, the reason transfers are often “documented” with instruments called an “allonge” is that by its appearance it gives the impression that (1) it was there since inception of the instrument and (2) that the borrower agreed to it. An additional reason is that the issue consideration for the transfer is avoided completely if the “allonge” is accepted as a document of transfer.
5. As a practice pointer, if the document contains terms and conditions of the loan or repayment, then it is being offered as an allonge. But it is not a valid allonge unless the signor of the original instrument (the note) agreed to the contents expressed on the allonge, since the proponent of this evidence wishes the court to consider the allonge part of the note itself.
6. If the instrument contains language of transfer then it is not an allonge in that it fails to meet the elements required for proffering evidence of the instrument as an allonge.

ASSIGNMENT: All contracts require an offer, acceptance and consideration to be enforced. An assignment is a contract. In the context of mortgage loans and litigation, an assignment is a document that recites the terms of a transaction in which the loan, note, obligation, mortgage or deed of trust is transferred and accepted by the assignee in exchange for consideration. Within the context of loans that are subject to securitization claims or claims of assignment the documents proffered by the pretender lender are missing two out of three components: consideration and acceptance. The assignment in this context is an offer that cannot and in fact must not be accepted without violating the authority of the manager or “trustee” of the SPV (REMIC) pool.

Like all contracts it must be supported by consideration. An assignment without consideration is probably void, almost certainly voidable and at the very least requires the proponent of this instrument as evidence to be admitted into the record to meet the burden of proof as to foundation.

The typical assignment offered in foreclosure litigation states that “for value received” the assignor, being the owner of the note described, hereby assigns, transfers and conveys all right, title and interest to the assignee. The problem is obvious — there was no value received if the loan was not funded by the assignee or was being purchased by the assignee at the time of the alleged transfer. A demand for records of the assignor and assignee would show how the parties actually treated the transaction from an accounting point of view.

In the same way as we look at the bookkeeping records of the “payee” on the original note to determine if the payee was in fact the “lender” as declared in the note and mortgage, we look to the books and records of the assignor and assignee to determine the treatment of the transaction on their own books and records.

The highest probability is that there will be no entry on either the balance sheet categories or the income statement categories because the parties were already paid a fee at the inception of the “loan” which was not disclosed to the borrower in violation of TILA. At most there might be the recording of an additional fee for “processing” the “assignment”. At no time will the assignor nor the assignee show the transaction as a loan receivable, the absence of which is powerful evidence that the assignor did not own the loan and therefore conveyed nothing, and that the assignee paid nothing in the assignment “transaction” because there was no transaction.

Any accountant (CPA) should be able to render a report on this limited aspect. Such an accountant could recite the same statements contained herein as the reason why you are in need of the discovery and what it will show. Such a statement should not say that the evidence will prove anything, but rather than this information will lead to the discovery of admissible evidence as to whether the party whose records are being produced was acting in the capacity of servicer, nominee, lender, real party in interest, assignee or assignor.

The foundation for the assignment instrument must be by way of testimony (I doubt that “business records” could suffice) explaining the transaction and validating the assignment and the facts showing consideration, offer and acceptance. Acceptance is difficult in the context of securitization because the assignment is usually prepared (a) long after the close out date in the pooling and servicing agreement and (b) after the assignor or its agents have declared the loan to be in default. Both points violate virtually all pooling and servicing agreements that require performing loans to be pooled, ownership of the loan to be established by the assignor, the assignment executed in recordable form and many PSA’s require actual recording — a point missed by most analysts.

If we assume for the moment that the origination of the loan met the requirements for perfecting a mortgage lien on the subject property, the party managing the “pool” (REMIC, Trust etc.) would be committing an ultra vires act on its face if they accepted the loan, debt, obligation, note, mortgage or deed of trust into the pool years after the cut-off date and after the loan was declared in default. Acceptance of the assignment is a key component here that is missed by most judges and lawyers. The assumption is that if the assignment was offered, why wouldn’t the loan be accepted. And the answer is that by accepting the loan the manager would be committing the pool to an immediate loss of principal and income or even the opportunity for income.

Thus we are left with a Hobson’s choice: either the origination documents were void or the assignments of the origination documents were void. If the origination documents were void for lack of consideration and false declarations of facts, there could not be any conditions under which the elements of a perfected mortgage lien would be present. If the origination was valid, but the assignments were void, then the record owner of the loan is party who is admitted to have been paid in full, thus releasing the property from the encumbrance of the mortgage lien. Note that releasing the original lien neither releases any obligation to whoever paid it off nor does it bar a judgment lien against the homeowner — but that must be foreclosed by judicial means (non-judicial process does not apply to judgment liens under any state law I have reviewed).

INDORSEMENTS OR ENDORSEMENTS: The spelling varies depending upon the source. The common law spelling and the one often used in the UCC begins with the letter “I”. They both mean the same thing and are used interchangeably.

An indorsement transfers rights represented by the instruments to another individual other than the payee or holder. Indorsements can be open, qualified, conditional, bearer, with recourse, without recourse, requiring a subsequent indorsement, as a bailment (collection), or transferring all right title and interest. The types of indorsements vary as much as human imagination which is why an indorsement, alone, it frequently insufficient to establish the rights of the parties without another evidence, such as a contract of assignment.

The typical definition starts with an overall concept: “An indorsement on a negotiable instrument, such as a check or a promissory note, has the effect of transferring all the rights represented by the instrument to another individual. The ordinary manner in which an individual endorses a check is by placing his or her signature on the back of it, but it is valid even if the signature is placed somewhere else, such as on a separate paper, known as an allonge, which provides a space for a signature.” Another definition often appearing in cases and treatises is “ the act of the owner or payee signing his/her name to the back of a check, bill of exchange, or other negotiable instrument so as to make it payable to another or cashable by any person. An endorsement may be made after a specific direction (“pay to Dolly Madison” or “for deposit only”), called a qualified endorsement, or with no qualifying language, thereby making it payable to the holder, called a blank endorsement. There are also other forms of endorsement which may give credit or restrict the use of the check.”

Entire books have been written about indorsements and they have not exhausted all the possible interpretations of the act or the words used to describe the writing dubbed an “indorsement” or the words contained within the words described as an indorsement. As a result, courts are justifiably reluctant to accept an indorsed instrument on its face with parole evidence — unless the other party makes the mistake of failing to object to the foundation, and in the case of the mortgage meltdown practices of fabrication, forgery and fraud, by failing to deny the indorsement was ever made except for the purposes of litigation and has no relation to any legitimate business transaction.

Once the indorsement is put in issue as a material fact that is disputed, then the discovery must proceed to determine when the indorsement was created, where it was done, the parties involved in its creation and the parties involved in the execution of the indorsement, as well as the circumstantial evidence causing the indorsement to be made. A blank indorsement is no substitute for an assignment nor is it evidence that any transaction took place win which consideration (money) exchanged hands. Further blank indorsements might be yet another violation of the PSA, in which the indorsement must be with recourse and be unqualified naming the assignee.

A “trustee” of an alleged SPV (REMIC) who accepts such a document would no doubt be acting ultra vires (acting outside of the authority vested in the person purported to have acted) and it is doubtful that any evidence exists where the trustee was informed that the proposed indorsement or assignment involved a loan and a pool which was five years past the cutoff, already declared in default and which failed to meet the formal terms of assignment set forth in the PSA. A deposition upon written questions or oral deposition might clear the matter up by directing the right questions to the right person designated to be the person who represents the entity that claims to manage the SPV (REMIC) pool. In order to accomplish that, prior questions must be asked and answered as to the identity of such individuals and entities “with sufficient specificity such that they can be identified in subsequent demands for discovery or the issuance of a subpoena.”

Throughout this process, the defender in foreclosure must be ever vigilant in maintaining control of the narrative lest the other side wrest control and redirect the Judge to the allegation (without any evidence in the record) that the debt exists (or worse, has been admitted), the default occurred (or worse, has been admitted) and that the pretender is the lender (or worse, has been admitted as such).

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Bribery or Business as Usual?

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Editor’s Comment and Analysis:

There is only one way this isn’t an outright bribe that should land the senator in jail — and that is proving that he received nothing of value. Stories abound in the media about haircut rates given to members of government particularly by Countrywide, now owned by Bank of America. Now we see it on the way down where others go through hoops and ladders to get a modification of short-sale but members of Congress get special treatment.

The only way this could be considered nothing of value is if the banks that gave this favor knew that they didn’t lend the money, didn’t purchase the loan and didn’t have a dime in the deal. They can prove it but they won’t because the fallout would be that there are no loans in print and that there are no perfected mortgage loans. The consequence is that there can be no foreclosures. And it would mean that the values carried on the books of these banks are eihter overstated or entirely fictiouos. The general consensus is that capital requirments for the banks should be higher. But what if the capital they are reporting doesn’t exist?

We are seeing practically everyday how Congress is bought off by the Banks and yet we do nothing. How can you expect to be taken seriously by the executive branch and the judicial branch of goveornment charged with enforcing the laws? If you are doing nothing and complaining, it’s time to get off the couch and do something with the Occupy Movement or your own private war with the banks. If you are not complaining, you should be — because this tsunami is about to hit the front door of your house too whether you are making the payments or not.

The power of the new aristocracy in American and European politics is felt around the globe. People are suffering in the U.S., Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and other places because the smaller banks in all those countries got taken to the cleaners by huge conglomerate Wall Street Banks. Ireland is reporting foreclosures and defaults at record rates. It was fraud with an effect far greater than any other act of domestic or international terrorism. And it isn’t just about money either. Suicides, domestic violence ending in death and mental illness are pandemic. And nobody cares about the little guy because the little guy is just fuel for the endless appetite of Wall Street. 

If Obama rreally wants to galvanize the electorate, he must be proactive on the fierce urgency of NOW! Those were his words when he was a candidate and he owes us action because that urgency was felt in 2008 and is a vice around everyone’s neck now.

JPMorgan Chase & the Senator’s Short Sale:

It’s Hypocritical -But Is It Corrupt?

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

There’s a lot we have yet to learn about the story of Sen. Mike Lee, Tea Party Republican of Utah, and America’s largest bank. But we already know something’s very, very wrong:

Why is it that most Americans can’t get a principal reduction from Chase or any other bank, but JPMorgan Chase was so very flexible with a sitting member of the United States Senate?

The hypocrisy from Sen. Lee and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon overfloweth. But does the Case of the Senator’s Short Sale rise to the level of full-blown corruption? We won’t know until we get some answers.

People should be demanding those answers now.

When Jamie Met Mike

It’s not a pretty picture: In one corner is the Senator who wants to strike down Federal child labor laws and offer American residency to any non-citizen who buys a home with cash. In the other is the bank whose CEO said that the best way to relieve the crushing burden of debt on homeowners is by seizing their homes.

“Giving debt relief to people that really need it,” said Dimon, “that’s what foreclosure is.” That comment is Dickensian in its insensitivity – and Dimon’s bank offered real relief to the Senator from Utah.

The story of the short sale on Sen. Mike Lee’s home broke broke shortly not long after the world learned that JPM lost billions of dollars through trading that might have been illegal, and about which it certainly misled investors.

A Senator who doesn’t believe in child labor laws, and a crime-plagued bank that was just plunged into a trading scandal after losing billions in the London markets.

Why, they were practically made for one another.

Here in the Real World

This was also the week we learned from Zillow, one of the nation’s leading real estate data companies, that there are far more underwater homeowners than previously thought. Zillow collated all the information on home loans, including second mortgages, in order to develop this larger and more accurate number.

The new estimated amount of negative equity – money owed to the banks for non-existent home value – is $1.2 trillion.

Zillow found that nearly 16 million homeowners, representing roughly a third of all homes with a mortgage, were “underwater” (meaning they owe more than the home is now worth). That’s about 50 percent more than had been previously believed. Many of these homeowners are desperate for principal reduction, which would allow them to get back on their feet.

Banks can reduce the amount owed to reflect the current value of the house, which would lower monthly payments for many struggling homeowners. Another option is the “short sale,” in which the bank lets them sell the house for its current value and walk away. That would allow many of them to relocate in search of work.

But the banks, along with their allies in Washington DC, have been fighting principal reduction and resisting any attempts to increase the number of short sales. They remain out of reach for most struggling homeowners.

Mike’s Deal

But Mike Lee didn’t have that problem. Lee was elected to the Senate after buying his luxury home in Alpine, Utah at the height of the real estate boom. JPMorgan Chase agreed to a short sale, and it sold for nearly $400,000 less than the price Lee paid for it four years ago.

Sen. Lee says that he made a down payment on the home, although he hasn’t said how much was involved. But if he paid 15 percent down and put it $150,000, for example, then the Senator from Utah was just allowed to walk away from a quarter of a million dollars in debt obligations to JPMorgan Chase.

Let’s see: A troubled bank gives a sitting member of the United States Senate an advantageous deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? You’d think a story like that would get a little more attention than it has so far.

The Right’s Outrageous Hypocrisy

We haven’t seen this much hypocrisy in the real estate world since the Mortgage Bankers Association walked away from loans on its own headquarters even as its CEO, John Courson, was lecturing Americans their “legal obligation” and the terrible “message they would send” by walking away from their mortgages.

Then he did a short sale on the MBA’s headquarters. It sold for a reported $41 million, just three years after the MBA – those captains of real estate – paid $74 million for it.

The MBA calls itself “the voice of the mortgage banking industry.”

The hypocrisy may be even greater in this case. Sen. Mike Lee is a member in good standing of the Tea Party, a movement which began on the floor of Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a protest against the idea that the government might help underwater homeowners, even though many of the angry traders had enriched themselves thanks to government bailouts.

When their ringleader mentioned households struggling with negative equity, these first members of the Tea Party broke into a chant: “Losers! Losers! Losers!”

Mike Lee’s Outrageous Hypocrisy

Which gets us to Mike Lee. Lee accepted a handout of JPMorgan Chase after voting to end unemployment for jobless Americans. Lee also argued against Federal child labor laws, although he did acknowledge that child labor is “reprehensible.”

How big a hypocrite is Mike Lee? His website (which, curiously enough, went down as we wrote these words) says he believes “the federal government’s out-of-control spending has evolved into a major threat to our economic prosperity and job creation” and that he came to Washington to, among other things, “properly manage our finances”. Lee’s website also scolds Congress because, he says, it “cannot live within its means.”

As Ed McMahon used to say, “Write your own joke.”

Needless to say, Lee also advocates drastic cuts to Social Security and Medicare while pushing lower taxes for the wealthy – and plumping for exactly the same kind of deregulation which let bankers to run amok and wreck the economy in 2008 by doing things like … well, like what JPMorgan Chase just did in London.

“Give Me Your Wired, Your Wealthy, Your Upper Classes Yearning to Buy Cheap”

Lee has also co-sponsored a bill with Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senator from Wall Street New York, that would grant US residency to foreigners who purchase a home worth at least $500,000 – as long as they paid cash.

The Lee/Schumer bill would be a big boon to US banks – banks, in fact, like JPMorgan Chase. If it passes, the Statue of Liberty may need to be reshaped so that Lady Liberty is holding a book of real estate listings in her right hand while wearing a hat that reads “Million Dollar Sellers’ Club.”

Mike Lee’s bill would also have propped up the luxury home market, offering a big financial boost to people who are struggling to hold to the equity they’ve put into high-end homes, people like … well, like Mike Lee.

Jamie Dimon’s Outrageous Hypocrisy

Then there’s Jamie Dimon, who spoke for his fellow bankers during negotiations that led up to the very cushy $25 billion settlement that let banks like his off the hook for widespread lawbreaking in their foreclosure fraud crime wave.

“Yeah,” Dimon said of principal reductions for homeowners like Sen. Lee, “that’s off the table.”

Dimon’s been resisting global solutions to the negative equity problems for years. He said in 2010 that he preferred to make decisions about homeowners on a “loan by loan” basis.

The Rich Are Different – They Have More Mortgage Relief

“The rich are different,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and (in a quote often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway) literary critic Mary Colum observed that ” the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.”

And they apparently find it a lot easier to walk away from their underwater homes.There’s been a dramatic increase in short sales lately, and the evidence suggests that most of the deals have been going to luxury homeowners. Among other things, this trend toward high-end short sales the lie to the popular idea that bankers and their allies don’t want to “reward the underserving,” since hedge fund traders who overestimated next year’s bonus are clearly less deserving than working families who purchased a modest home for themselves.

Nevertheless, that’s where most of the debt relief seems to be going: to the wealthy, and not to the middle class.

Guess that’s what happens when loan officers working for Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs handle these matters on a “loan by loan” basis.

Immoral Logic

While this “loan by loan” approach lacks morality, there’s some financial logic to it. Banks typically have a lot more money at risk in an underwater luxury home than they do in more modest houses. A short sale provides them with a way to clear things up, recoup what they can, and get their books in a little more order than before. That’s why JPMorgan Chase has been offering selected borrowers up to $35,000 to accept short sales. You can bet they’re not offering that deal to middle class families.

There are other reasons to offer short sales to the wealthy: JPM, like all big banks, is pursuing very-high-end banking clients more aggressively than ever. That’s where the profits are. So why alienate a high-value client when they may offer you the opportunity to recoup losses elsewhere?

(“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Dimon, but it’s London calling.”)

Corruption Or Not: The Questions

Both the bank and the Senator need to answer some questions about this deal. Here’s what the public deserves to know:

Could the writedown on the home’s value be considered an in-kind gift to a sitting Senator?

If so, then we have a very real scandal on our hands. But we don’t know enough to answer that question yet.

What are JPMorgan Chase’s procedures for deciding who receives mortgage relief and who doesn’t?

Dimon may prefer to handle these matters on a “loan by loan” basis, but there must be guidelines that bank officers can follow. And presumably they’ve been written down somewhere. Were they followed in Mike Lee’s case?

Who was involved in the decision to offer this deal to Mike Lee?

Offering mortgage relief to a sitting Senator is, to borrow a phrase, “a big elfin’ deal.” A mid-level bank officer isn’t likely to handle a case like this without taking it up the chain of command. So who made the final decision on Mike Lee’s mortgage?

It wouldn’t be unheard of if a a sensitive matter like this one was escalated to all the way to the company’s most senior executive – especially if that executive has eliminated any checks on his power, much less any independent input from shareholders, by serving as both the Chair(man) of the Board and the CEO.

In this, as in so many of JPM’s scandals, the question must be asked: What did Jamie know, and when did he know it?

Is Mike Lee a “Friend of Jamie”?

Which raises a related question: Is there is a formal or informal list of people for whom JPM employees are directed to give preferential treatment?

Everybody remembers the scandal that surrounded Sen. Chris Dodd when it was learned that his mortgage was given favorable treatment by Countrywide – even though the Senator apparently knew nothing about it at the time. The world soon learned then that Countrywide had a VIP program called “Friends of Angelo,” named for CEO Angelo Mozilo, and those who were on the list got special treatment.

Is there a “Friends of Jamie” list at JPMorgan Chase – and is Mike Lee’s name on it?

Were there any discussions between the bank’s executives and the Senator regarding the foreign home buyer’s bill or any other legislation that affected Wall Street?

Until this question is answered the issue of a possible quid pro quo will hang over both the Senator and JPMorgan Chase.

Seriously, guys – this doesn’t look good.

Was MERS used to evade state taxes and recording requirements on Sen. Lee’s home? 

JPMorgan Chase funded, and was an active participant, in the “MERS” program which was used, among other things, to bypass local taxes and legal requirements for recording titles.

As we wrote when we reviewed hundreds of internal MERS documents, MERS was instrumental in allowing banks to bundle and sell mortgage-backed securities in a way that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008. It also helped bankers artificially inflate real estate prices, encourage homeowners to take out loans at bubble prices, and then leave them holding the note (as underwater homeowners) after the collapse of national real estate values that they had artificially pumped up.

“Today’s Wall Street Corruption Fun Fact”: MERS was operated by the Mortgage Bankers Association – the same group of real estate geniuses who lost $30 million on a single building in three years, then gave a little lecture on morality to the homeowners they’d been so instrumental in shafting.

Q&A

I was also asked some very reasonable questions by a policy advocacy group. Here they are, with my answers:

If this happened to the average American, would they be able to walk away from the mortgage as well?

If by “average American” you mean “most homeowners,” then the answer is: No. Although short sales are on the rise, most underwater homeowners have not been given the option of going through a short sale. Mike Lee was. The question is, why?

Will Mike Lee’s credit rating be adversely affected?

This is a very important question. The credit rating industry serves banks, not consumers, and it operates at their beck and call.

The answer to this question depends on how JPM handled the paperwork. Many (and probably most) homeowners involved in a short sale take a hit to their credit rating. If Lee did not, it smacks of special treatment.

Given the fact that it was JPMorgan who financed the loss, does that mean, indirectly through the bailout, that the taxpayers paid for Lee’s mortgage write-off?

That gets tricky – but in a moral sense, you could certainly say that.

Short Selling Democracy

There’s no question that this deal is hypocritical and ugly, and that it reflects much of what’s still broken about both our politics and Wall Street. Is it a scandal? Without these answers we can’t know. This was either a case of the special treatment that is so often reserved for the wealthy, or it’s something even worse: influence peddling and political corruption.

it’s time for JPMorgan Chase and Sen. Mike Lee to come clean about this deal. If they did nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide. Either way the public’s entitled to some answers.

Still Pretending the Servicers Are Legitimate

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Editor’s Comment:

I keep waiting for someone to notice. We all know that the foreclosures were defective. We all know that in many cases independent auditors found that strangers to the transaction submitted credit bids that were accepted by the auctioneer, and that in the non-judicial states where substitutions of trustees are always used to replace an independent trustee with one owned or controlled by the “new creditor” the “credit bid” is accepted by the creditor’s agent even if the trustee has notice from the borrower that neither the substitution of trustee nor the foreclosure are valid, that the borrower denies the debt, denies the default and denies the right of the “new creditor” to do anything.

In the old days when we followed the law, the trustee would have only one option: file an interpleader lawsuit in court claiming two stakeholders and that the trustee is not a stakeholder and should be reimbursed for fees and costs. Today instead of an interpleader, it is a foreclosure because the “creditor” is holding all the cards.

So why is anyone surprised that modifications are rejected when in the past the debtor and borrower always worked things out because foreclosure was not as good as a work-out?

Why do the deeds found to be lacking in consideration with false credit bids still remain on the books? Why hasn’t the homeowner been notified that he still owns the property and has the right to possession?

And why are we so sure that the original mortgage has any more validity than the false documents to support fraudulent foreclosures? Is it because the borrower’s signature is on it? OK. If we are going to look at the borrower’s signature then why do we not look at the rest of the document and the facts alleged to have occurred in those documents. The note says that the payee is the lender. We all know that isn’t true. The mortgage says the property is collateral for payment to the payee on the note. What first year law student would fail to spot that if the note recited a loan transaction that never occurred, then the mortgage securing the payments on the false transaction is no better than the note?

So if the original transaction was defective and the servicer derives its status or power from the origination documents, then who is the servicer and why is he standing in your living room demanding payment and declaring you in default?

If any reader of this blog somehow convinced another reader of the blog to sign a note and mortgage, would the note and mortgage be valid without any actual financial transaction. No. In fact, the attempt to collect on the note where I didn’t make the loan might be considered fraud or even grand theft. And rightfully so. I am told that in some states the Judges say it is the absence of anyone else making an effort to collect on the note that proves the standing of the party seeking to enforce it. Really?

This sounds like a business plan. A lends B money. B signs papers indicating the loan came from C and C gets the mortgage. B is delinquent by a month and having lost his job he abandons the property. D comes in and seeks to enforce the mortgage and note and nobody else is around. The title record is still clear of any foreclosure activity. D says he has an assignment and produces a false forged assignment. Nobody else shows up. THAT is because the parties in the securitization chain are using MERS instead of the public record title registry so they didn’t get any notice. D gets the foreclosure after substituting trustees in a non-judicial state or doing absolutely nothing in a judicial state. The property is auctioned and D submits a credit bid which is accepted by the auctioneer. The clerk or trustee issues D a deed upon foreclosure and D immediately transfers the property to XYZ corporation that he formed the day before. XYZ sells the property to E for $300,000. E pays D $60,000 down payment and gets a mortgage from ABC Lending Corp. for the other $240,000. ABC Lending Corp. sells the note and mortgage into the secondary market where it is sliced and diced into parcels that are allocated into one or more REMIC special purpose vehicles.

Now B comes back and finds out that he was never foreclosed on by his lender. C wakes up and says they never released the mortgage. D took the money and ran, never to be heard from again. The investors in the REMIC trusts are told they bought an invalid mortgage or one in which the mortgage has second priority instead of first priority. E, who bought the property with $60,000 of his own money is now at risk, and when he looks at his title policy and makes a claim he is directed to the schedules of exclusions and exceptions that specifically cover this event. So no title carrier is going to pay. In fact, the title company might concede that B still owns the property and that C has the first mortgage on it, but that leaves E with two mortgages instead of one. The two mortgages together total around $500,000, a price that E’s property will never reach in 20 years. Sound familiar?

Welcome to USA property law as it was summarily ignored, changed and enforced for the past 10 years? Why? Especially when it turns out that the investment broker that sold the mortgage bonds of the REMIC knew about the whole story all along. Why are we letting this happen?

We Are Drowning in False Debt While Realtors Push “Recovery”

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Editor’s Comment:

The figures keep coming in while the words keep coming out the mouths of bankers and realtors. The figures don’t match the words. The net result is that the facts show that we are literally drowning in debt, and we see what happens as a result of such conditions with a mere glance at Europe. They are sinking like a stone, and while we look prettier to investors it is only when we are compared to other places — definitely not because we have a strong economy.

Iceland and other “players” crashed but stayed out of the EU and stayed away from the far flung central banking sleeping arrangements with Banks. Iceland knows that banks got us into this and that if there is any way out, it must be the banks that either lead their way out or get nationalized so their assets can take the hit of these losses. In Phoenix alone, we have $39 BILLION in negative equity. 

This negative equity was and remains illusory. Iceland cut the household debt in each home by 25% or more and is conitinuing to do so. The result? They are the only country with the only currency that is truly recovering and coming back to real values. What do we have? We have inflated property appraisals that STILL dominate the marketplace. 

The absence of any sense of reality is all around us in Arizona. I know of one case where Coldwell Banker, easily one of the most prestigious realtors, actually put lots up for sale asking $40,000 when the tax assessed value is barely one quarter of that amount and the area has now dried up — no natural water supply without drilling thousands of feet or hauling water in by truck. Residents in the area and realtors who are local say the property could fetch at most $10,000 and is unsalable until the water problem is solved. And here in Arizona we know the water problem is not only not going to get solved, it is going to get worse because of the “theory” of global climate change.

This “underwater” mess is political not financial. It wouldn’t exist but for the willingness of the government to stay in bed with banks. The appraisals they used to grant the loan were intentionally  falsified to “get rid of” as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, to complete deals and justify taking trillions of dollars from investors. The appraisals at closing were impossibly high by any normal industry accepted standard and appraisers admit it and even predicted it it in 2005. Banks coerced appraisers into inflating appraisers by giving them a choice — either come in with appraisals $20,000 over the contract price or they will never get work again.

The borrower relied upon this appaisal, believing that the property value was so hot that he or she couldn’t lose and that in fact, with values going so high, it would be foolish not to get in on the market before it went all the way out of reach. And of course there were the banks who like the cavalry came in and provided the apparently cheap money for people to buy or refinance their homes. The cavalry was in a movie somewhere, certainly not in the marketplace. It was more like the hordes of invaders in ancient Europe chopping off the heads of men, women and children and as they lie dying they were unaware of what had happened to them and that they were as good as dead.

So many people have chosen death. They see the writing on the wall that once was their own, and they cannot cope with the loss of home, lifestyle and dignity. They take their own lives and the lives of those around them. Citi contributes a few million to a suicide hotline as a PR stunt while they are causing the distress through foreclosure and collection procedures that are illegal, fraudlent, and based upon forged, robosigned documents with robo-notarized attestations  that the recording offices still won’t reject and the judges still accept.

There is no real real economic recovery without reality in housing. Values never went up — but prices did. Now the prices are returning back to the values left in the dust during the big bank push to “get rid of” money advanced by investors. It’s a game to the banks where the homeowner is the lowly deadbeat, the bottom of the ladder, a person who doesn’t deserve dignity or relief like the bank bailouts. When a person gets financial relief from the government it is a “handout.” When big banks and big business get relief and subsidies in industries that were already profitable, it is called economic policy. REALITY CHECK: They are both getting a “handout” and economic policy is driven by politics instead of common sense. French arisocrats found that out too late as their heads rolled off the guillotine platforms.  

But Iceland and other places in the world have taught us that in reality those regarded as deadbeats are atually people who were herded into middle class debt traps created by the banks and that if they follow the simple precept of restoring victims to their previous state, by giving restitution to these victims, the entire economy recovers, housing recovers and everything resumes normal activity that is dominated by normal market forces instead of the force of huge banks coercing society and government by myths like too big too fail. The Banks are doing just fine in Iceland, the financial system is intact and the government policy is based upon the good of the society as a whole rather the banks who might destroy us. Appeasement is not a policy it is a surrender to the banks.

Cities with the Most Homes Underwater

Michael B. Sauter

Mortgage debt continues to be a major issue in the United States, nearly six years after home prices peaked, according to a report released Thursday by online real estate site Zillow. Americans continue to owe more on their homes than they are worth. Nearly one in three mortgages are underwater, amounting to more than 15 million homes and a total negative equity of $1.19 trillion.

In some of America’s largest metropolitan regions, however, the housing crash dealt a far worse blow. In these areas — most of which are in California, Florida and the southwest — home values were cut in half, unemployment skyrocketed, and 50% to 70% of borrowers now find themselves with a home worth less than the value of their mortgage. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 100 largest housing markets and identified the 10 with the highest percentage of homes with underwater mortgages. Svenja Gudell, senior economist at Zillow, explained in an interview with 24/7 Wall St. that the markets with the highest rates of underwater borrowers are in trouble now because of the rampant growth seen in these cities prior to the recession. Once home prices peaked, which was primarily in late 2005 through 2006, all but one of these 10 housing markets lost at least 50% of their median home value.

Making matters worse for families with high negative equity in these markets is the increased unemployment. “If you have a whole lot of unemployment in an area, you’re more likely to see home values continue to decline in the area as well,” says Gudell. While in 2007 many of these markets had average or below average unemployment rates, the recession took a heavy toll on their economies. By 2011, eight of the 10 markets had unemployment rates above 10%, and three — all in California — had unemployment rates of above 16%, nearly double the national average.

24/7 Wall St. used Zillow’s first-quarter 2012 negative equity report to identify the 10 housing markets — out of the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country — with the highest percentage of underwater mortgages. Zillow also provided us with the decline in home values in these markets from prerecession peak values, the total negative equity value in these markets and the percentage of homes underwater that have been delinquent on payments for 90 days or more.

These are the cities with the most homes underwater.

10. Orlando, Fla.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 53.9%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 205,369
> Median home value: 113,800
> Decline from prerecession peak: -55.9%
> Unemployment rate: 10.4% (25th highest)

In 2012, Orlando moved into the top 10 underwater housing markets, bumping Fresno, Calif., to number 11. From its prerecession peak in June 2006, home prices fell 55.9% to $113,800, a loss of roughly $90,000. In 2007, the unemployment rate in the region was just 3.7%, the 17th-lowest rate among the 100 largest metros. By 2011, that rate had increased to 10.4%, the 25th highest. As of the first quarter of this year, there were more than 205,000 underwater mortgages in the region, with total negative equity of $16.7 billion.

9. Atlanta, Ga.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 55.5%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 581,831
> Median home value: $107,500
> Decline from prerecession peak: 38.8%
> Unemployment rate: 9.6% (37th highest)

Atlanta is the largest city on this list and the eighth-largest metropolitan area in the U.S. But of all the cities with the most underwater mortgages, it has the lowest median home value. In the area, 55.5% of homes have a negative equity value. With more than 500,000 homes with underwater mortgages, the city’s total negative home equity is in excess of $38 billion. Over 48,000 of these underwater homeowners, or nearly 10%, are delinquent by at least 90 days in their payments, which is also especially troubling. With home prices down 38.8% since June, 2007, the Atlanta area certainly qualifies as one of the cities hit hardest by the 2008 housing crisis.

8. Phoenix, Ariz.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 55.5%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 430,527
> Median home value: $128,000
> Decline from prerecession peak: 54.2%
> Unemployment rate: 8.6% (44th lowest)

At 55.5%, Phoenix has the same percentage of borrowers with underwater mortgages as Atlanta. Though Phoenix’s median home value is $21,500 greater than Atlanta’s, it experienced a far-greater decline in home prices from their prerecession peak in June 2007 of 54.2%. This has led to a total negative equity value of almost $39 billion. The unemployment rate also has skyrocketed in the Phoenix area from 3.2% in 2007 to 8.6% in 2011.

7. Visalia, Calif.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 57.7%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 33,220
> Median home value: $110,500
> Decline from prerecession peak: 51.7%
> Unemployment rate: 16.6% (3rd highest)

Visalia is far smaller than Atlanta or Phoenix and has less than a 10th the number of homes with underwater mortgages. Nonetheless, the city has been especially damaged by a poor housing market. Home values have fallen dramatically since before the recession, and the unemployment rate, at 16.6% in the first quarter of 2012, is third-highest among the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas, behind only Stockton and Modesto. Presently, almost 58% of homes are underwater, with these homes carrying a total negative equity of $2.6 billion dollars.

6. Vallejo, Calif.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 60.3%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 44,526
> Median home value: $186,200
> Decline from prerecession peak: 60.6%
> Unemployment rate: 11.4% (16th highest)

In the Vallejo metropolitan area, more than 60% of the region’s 73,800 homeowners are underwater. This is largely due to a 60.6% decline in home values in the region from prerecession highs. Through the first quarter of this year, homes in the region fell from a median value of more than $300,000 to just $186,200. Of those homes with underwater mortgages, more than 10% have been delinquent on mortgage payments for 90 days or more.

5. Stockton, Calif.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 60.3%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 60,349
> Median home value: $146,500
> Decline from prerecession peak: 64.3%
> Unemployment rate: 16.8% (tied for highest)

With an unemployment rate of 16.8%, Stockton is tied for the highest rate among the 100 largest metropolitan areas. Few cities have been hit harder by the sinking of the housing market than Stockton, where 60.3% of home mortgages are underwater. Though there are only 100,014 houses with mortgages in Stockton, 60,348 of these are underwater and have a total negative home equity of slightly more than $6.9 billion. Meaning, on average, homeowners in Stockton owe at least $100,000 more than their homes are worth.

4. Modesto, Calif.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 60.3%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 46,598
> Median home value: $130,600
> Decline from prerecession peak: 64.5%
> Unemployment rate: 16.8% (tied for highest)

Since peaking in December 2005, home prices in Modesto have plunged 64.5%. This is the largest collapse in prices of any large metro area examined. As a result, 46,598 of 77,222 home mortgages in Modesto are underwater. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate rose to 16.8% in 2011. This number was 7.9 percentage points above the national average of 8.9% and almost double Modesto’s 2007 unemployment rate of 8.7%.

3. Bakersfield, Calif.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 60.5%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 70,947
> Median home value: $116,700
> Decline from prerecession peak: 57.0%
> Unemployment rate: 14.9% (5th highest)

From its peak in May 2006, the median home value in Bakersfield has plummeted from more than $200,000 to just $116,700, or a 57% loss of value. From 2007 through 2011, the unemployment rate increased from 8.2% to 14.9% — the fifth-highest rate in the country. To date, more than 70,000 homes in the region have underwater mortgages, with total negative equity of just over $6 billion.

2. Reno, Nev.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 61.7%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 46,115
> Median home value: $150,600
> Decline from prerecession peak: 58.3%
> Unemployment rate: 13.1%

There are fewer than 75,000 households in Reno, Nevada. Yet 46,115 home mortgages in the city are underwater, accounting for 61.7% of mortgaged homes. From January 2006 through the first quarter of 2012, home prices were more than halved, and negative home equity reached $4.39 billion. Additionally, the unemployment rate almost tripled in rising from 4.5% in 2007 to 13.1% by 2011. In 2007, Reno had the 54th-worst unemployment rate among the 100 largest metros. By 2007, Reno had the eighth-worst unemployment rate.

1. Las Vegas, Nev.
> Pct. homes w/underwater mortgages: 71%
> Number of mortgages underwater: 236,817
> Median home value: $111,600
> Decline from prerecession peak: 63.2%
> Unemployment rate: 13.9%

At 71%, no city has a greater percentage of homes with underwater mortgages than Las Vegas. The area with the second-worst percentage of underwater mortgages, Reno, has less than 62% mortgages with negative. The corrosive effects the housing crisis had on Las Vegas are evident in the more than 200,000 home mortgages that are underwater, 14.3% of which are at least 90 days delinquent on payments. Additionally, home values have dropped 63.2% from their prerecession peak, the third-greatest decline among the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. Largely because of the collapse of the area’s housing market, unemployment in the Las Vegas area has soared. In 2007, the unemployment rate was 4.7%, only marginally different from the nation’s 4.6% rate. Yet by 2011, the unemployment rate had increased to 13.9%, considerably higher than the nationwide 8.9% unemployment rat.e.

Message on the Forensic TILA Analysis — It’s a Lot More Than it Appears

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No doubt some of you know that we have had some challenges regarding the Forensic TILA analysis. It’s my fault. I decided that the plain TILA analysis was insufficient for courtroom use based upon the feedback that I was getting from lawyers across the country. Yet I believed then as I believe now that the only law that will actually give real help to the homeowners — past, present and future — is TILA, REG Z and RESPA. Once it dawns on more people that there were two closings, one that was hidden from the borrower which included the real money funding his loan and the other being a fake closing purporting to loan money to the homeowner in a transaction that never happened, the gates will start to open. But I am ahead of the curve on that.

For those patiently waiting for the revisions, I appreciate your words of kindness. And your words of wisdom regarding the content of the report which I have been wrestling with. I especially appreciate your willingness to continue doing business with us despite the lack of organizational skills and foresight that might have prevented this situation. I guess the problem boils down to the fact that when I started the blog in 2007 I never intended it to be a business. But as it evolved and demands grew we were unable to handle it without help from the outside. If I had known I was starting a business at the beginning I would have done things much differently.

At the moment I am wrestling with exactly how I want to portray the impact of the appraisal fraud on the APR and the impact on “reset” payments have on the life of the loan, which in turn obviously effects the APR. I underestimated the computations required to do both the standard TILA Audit and the extended version which I think is the only thing of value. The standard TILA audit simply doesn’t tell the story although there is some meat in there by which a borrower could recover some money. There is also the standard issue of steering the borrower into a more expensive loan than that which he qualified for.

The other thing I am wrestling with is the computational structure of the HAMP presentation so that we can show that we are using reasonable figures and producing a reasonable offer. This needs to be credible so that when the rejection comes, the borrower is able to say that the offer was NOT considered by the banks and servicers because of the obvious asymmetry of results — the “investor” getting a lot less money from the proceeds of foreclosure.

And THAT in turn results in the ability of the homeowner to demand proof (a) that they considered it (b) that it was communicated to the investor (with copies) and (c) that there was a reasonable basis for rejection — meaning that the servicer must SHOW the analysis that was used to determine whether to accept or reject the HAMP proposal. Limited anecdotal evidence shows that like that point in discovery when the other side has “lost” in procedural attempts to block the borrower, the settlement is achieved within hours of the entry of the order.

So I have approached the analysis from the standpoint of another way to force disclosure and discovery as to exactly what money the investor actually lost, whether the investor still exists and whether there were payments received by agents of the creditor (participants in the securitization chain) that were perhaps never credited to the account of the bond holder and therefore which never reduced the amount due to the creditor from the homeowner. My goal here is to get to the point where we can say, based upon admissions of the banks and servicers that there is either nobody who qualifies as a creditor to submit a “credit bid” at auction or that such a party might exist but is different than the party who was permitted to initiate the foreclosure proceedings.

The complexity of all this was vastly underestimated and I overestimated the ability of outside analysts to absorb what I was talking about, take the ball and run with it. Frankly I am wondering if the analysis should be worked up by the people who do our securitization work, whose ability to pierce through the numerous veils has established a proven track record. In the meantime, I will plug along until I am satisfied that I have it right, since I am actually signing off on the analysis, and thus be able to confidently defend the positions taken on the analytical report (Excel Spreadsheet) etc.

Now It’s the Servicers Betting Against Homeowners

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Editor’s Analysis:

Start with some premises that were speculation but are now known to be true. First, banks and servicers need as many properties in foreclosure as possible. There are many reasons. The banks want it because it covers up the outright bold lies they told investors to get them to “buy” non-existent mortgage bonds most of which involved either no paper certificate at all or they were simply not worth the paper they were written on. Second, the bankers (management) could make a killing depressing Market prices and then relieving the pressure when they wanted prices to go up. Third, servicers make far more money in fees as long as they are “servicing” a loan in default because their fees are higher on loans in distress. Fourth in many cases the servicers actually get to “own” the property if the foreclosure sale occurs.

The tactic used now is that if you miss a mortgage payment or even if you don’t, the servicer can say they were required to obtain insurance on their own because you didn’t. This is forced place insurance and nearly all of it is a bold-faced lie. Now the servicer adds to your mortgage payment the cost of forced place insurance even if they paid nothing. If you are on the edge, the cost of forced placed insurance (many times 3-4 times normal rates) is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The result? Many homes that were otherwise current in their payments end up in foreclosure.

This can be stopped. On challenge, most servicers back off of forced place insurance claims, but getting them to stop the foreclosure is more difficult — usually because by the time the homeowner challenges the forced place insurance some scheduled payments have been missed. But upon further challenge it can usually be shown that the scheduled payments were in fact made by the servicer to the creditor, meaning that the declaration of a default and notice of sale were bogus — just like everything else in this mess.

Servicers incentivized to bet against homeowners, may hurt housing

by Tara Steele

Insurance policies are not often pointed to as the problem with housing, but one news outlet says homeowners are being pushed off of the foreclosure cliff by force-place insurance.

Force-placed insurance’s impact on housing

“Force-placed” insurance, or property insurance the bank takes out for homeowners who miss an insurance payment has recently come under fire by Bloomberg News Editors¹ who say the policies cover less and cost more, and will likely end up putting homeowners into foreclosure regardless of the force-placed insurance policies.

Deeper analysis of the forced-place policies revealed that the loss ratio is much lower than expected, in other words, the percentage of premiums paid out on claims is severely low, paying out $0.20 cents on the dollar, when the average $0.55 cents on the dollar payout of most other types of policies. The implication is that the insurance companies are charging extremely high premiums, and when the policies actually pay out, they barely cover the bank’s losses.

Bloomberg reports that banks not only receive commissions on the forced-place policies, they make even more money by re-insuring them, so the bank takes out a policy to protect the property but is making a more lucrative bet that the policy will never pay out. Fannie Mae has already instructed servicers of Fannie-backed loans to reduce the cost of insurance premiums, but Bloomberg implies that these directives are weak and more can be done.

Although the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking into forced-place insurance, Bloomberg urges the CFPB to require all servicers to pick up the homeowner’s lapsed policy when possible, otherwise seek bids for lower cost options, and notes that Freddie mac should demand its servicers to get competitive bids on insurance policies.

The crux of the forced issue

The CFPB should investigate the commissions made by banks on these policies, says Bloomberg, as they are a major incentive to put homeowners into policies they cannot possibly afford. “Many homeowners who experience coverage gaps have severe financial problems that lead them to stop paying their insurance bills,” notes Bloomberg. “They are already at great risk of foreclosure. Banks and insurers shouldn’t be allowed to add to the likelihood of default by artificially inflating the cost of insurance.”

Like I said, the loans never made into the “pools”

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Editor’s Comment:

When I first suggested that securitization itself was a lie, my comments were greeted with disbelief and derision. No matter. When I see something I call it the way it is. The loans never left the launch pad, much less flew into a waiting pool of investor money. The whole thing was a scam and AG Biden of Đelaware and Schniedermann of New York are on to it.

The tip of the iceberg is that the note was not delivered to the investors. The gravitas of the situation is that the investors were never intended to get the note, the mortgage or any documentation except a check and a distribution report. The game was on.

First they (the investment banks) took money from the investors on the false pretenses that the bonds were real when anyone with 6 months experience on Wall street could tell you this was not a bond for lots of reasons, the most basic of which was that there was no borrower. The prospectus had no loans because there were no loans made yet. The banks certainly wouldn’ t take the risks posed by this toxic heap of loans, so they were waiting for the investors to get conned. Once they had the money then they figured out how to keep as much of it as possible before even looking for residential home borrowers. 

None of the requirements of the Internal Revenue Code on REMICS were followed, nor were the requirements of the pooling and servicing agreement. The facts are simple: the document trail as written never followed the actual trail of actual transactions in which money exchanged hands. And this was simply because the loan money came from the investors apart from the document trail. The actual transaction between homeowner borrower and investor lender was UNDOCUMENTED. And the actual trail of documents used in foreclosures all contain declarations of fact concerning transactions that never happened. 

The note is “evidence” of the debt, not the debt itself. If the investor lender loaned money to the homeowner borrower and neither one of them signed a single document acknowledging that transaction, there is still an obligation. The money from the investor lender is still a loan and even without documentation it is a loan that must be repaid. That bit of legal conclusion comes from common law. 

So if the note itself refers to a transaction in which ABC Lending loaned the money to the homeowner borrower it is referring to a transaction that does not now nor did it ever exist. That note is evidence of an obligation that does not exist. That note refers to a transaction that never happened. ABC Lending never loaned the homeowner borrower any money. And the terms of repayment intended by the securitization documents were never revealed to the homeowner buyer. Therefore the note with ABC Lending is evidence of a non-existent transaction that mistates the terms of repayment by leaving out the terms by which the investor lender would be repaid.

Thus the note is evidence of nothing and the mortgage securing the terms of the note is equally invalid. So the investors are suing the banks for leaving the lenders in the position of having an unsecured debt wherein even if they had collateral it would be declining in value like a stone dropping to the earth.

And as for why banks who knew better did it this way — follow the money. First they took an undisclosed yield spread premium out of the investor lender money. They squirreled most of that money through Bermuda which ” asserted” jurisdiction of the transaction for tax purposes and then waived the taxes. Then the bankers created false entities and “pools” that had nothing in them. Then the bankers took what was left of the investor lender money and funded loans upon request without any underwriting.

Then the bankers claimed they were losing money on defaults when the loss was that of the investor lenders. To add insult to injury the bankers had used some of the investor lender money to buy insurance, credit default swaps and create other credit enhancements where they — not the investor lender —- were the beneficiary of a payoff based on the default of mortgages or an “event” in which the nonexistent pool had to be marked down in value. When did that markdown occur? Only when the wholly owned wholly controlled subsidiary of the investment banker said so, speaking as the ” master servicer.”

So the truth is that the insurers and counterparties on CDS paid the bankers instead of the investor lenders. The same thing happened with the taxpayer bailout. The claims of bank losses were fake. Everyone lost money except, of course, the bankers.

So who owns the loan? The investor lenders. Who owns the note? Who cares, it was worth less when they started; but if anyone owns it it is most probably the originating “lender” ABC Lending. Who owns the mortgage? There is no mortgage. The mortgage agreement was written and executed by the borrower securing terms of payment that were neither disclosed nor real.

Bank Loan Bundling Investigated by Biden-Schneiderman: Mortgages

By David McLaughlin

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Delaware’s Beau Biden are investigating banks for failing to package mortgages into bonds as advertised to investors, three months after a group of lenders struck a nationwide $25 billion settlement over foreclosure practices.

The states are pursuing allegations that some home loans weren’t correctly transferred into securitizations, undermining investors’ stakes in the mortgages, according to two people with knowledge of the probes. They’re also concerned about improper foreclosures on homeowners as result, said the people, who declined to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The probes prolong the fallout from the six-year housing bust that’s cost Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and other lenders more than $72 billion because of poor underwriting and shoddy foreclosures. It may also give ammunition to bondholders suing banks, said Isaac Gradman, an attorney and managing member of IMG Enterprises LLC, a mortgage-backed securities consulting firm.

“The attorneys general could create a lot of problems for the banks and for the trustees and for bondholders,” Gradman said. “I can’t imagine a better securities law claim than to say that you represented that these were mortgage-backed securities when in fact they were backed by nothing.”

Countrywide Faulted

Schneiderman said Bank of America Corp. (BAC)’s Countrywide Financial unit last year made errors in the way it packaged home loans into bonds, while investors have sued trustee banks, saying documentation lapses during mortgage securitizations can impair their ability to recover losses when homeowners default. Schneiderman didn’t sue Bank of America in connection with that criticism.

The Justice Department in January said it formed a group of federal officials and state attorneys general to investigate misconduct in the bundling of mortgage loans into securities. Schneiderman is co-chairman with officials from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The next month, five mortgage servicers — Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Ally Financial Inc. (ALLY) — reached a $25 billion settlement with federal officials and 49 states. The deal pays for mortgage relief for homeowners while settling claims against the servicers over foreclosure abuses. It didn’t resolve all claims, leaving the lenders exposed to further investigations into their mortgage operations by state and federal officials.

Top Issuers

The New York and Delaware probes involve banks that assembled the securities and firms that act as trustees on behalf of investors in the debt, said one of the people and a third person familiar with the matter.

The top issuers of mortgage securities without government backing in 2005 included Bank of America’s Countrywide Financial unit, GMAC, Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual, according to trade publication Inside MBS & ABS. Total volume for the top 10 issuers was $672 billion. JPMorgan acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in 2008.

The sale of mortgages into the trusts that pool loans may be void if banks didn’t follow strict requirements for such transfers, Biden said in a lawsuit filed last year over a national mortgage database used by banks. The requirements for transferring documents were “frequently not complied with” and likely led to the failure to properly transfer loans “on a large scale,” Biden said in the complaint.

“Most of this was done under the cover of darkness and anything that shines a light on these practices is going to be good for investors,” Talcott Franklin, an attorney whose firm represents mortgage-bond investors, said about the state probes.

Critical to Investors

Proper document transfers are critical to investors because if there are defects, the trusts, which act on behalf of investors, can’t foreclose on borrowers when they default, leading to losses, said Beth Kaswan, an attorney whose firm, Scott + Scott LLP, represents pension funds that have sued Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BK) and US Bancorp as bond trustees. The banks are accused of failing in their job to review loan files for missing and incomplete documents and ensure any problems were corrected, according to court filings.

“You have very significant losses in the trusts and very high delinquencies and foreclosures, and when you attempt to foreclose you can’t collect,” Kaswan said.

Laurence Platt, an attorney at K&L Gates LLP in Washington, disagreed that widespread problems exist with document transfers in securitization transactions that have impaired investors’ interests in mortgages.

“There may be loan-level issues but there aren’t massive pattern and practice problems,” he said. “And even when there are potential loan-level issues, you have to look at state law because not all states require the same documents.”

Fixing Defects

Missing documents don’t have to prevent trusts from foreclosing on homes because the paperwork may not be necessary, according to Platt. Defects in the required documents can be fixed in some circumstances, he said. For example, a missing promissory note, in which a borrower commits to repay a loan, may not derail the process because there are laws governing lost notes that allow a lender to proceed with a foreclosure, he said.

A review by federal bank regulators last year found that mortgage servicers “generally had sufficient documentation” to demonstrate authority to foreclose on homes.

Schneiderman said in court papers last year that Countrywide failed to transfer complete loan documentation to trusts. BNY Mellon, the trustee for bondholders, misled investors to believe Countrywide had delivered complete files, the attorney general said.

Hindered Foreclosures

Errors in the transfer of documents “hampered” the ability of the trusts to foreclose and impaired the value of the securities backed by the loans, Schneiderman said.

“The failure to properly transfer possession of complete mortgage files has hindered numerous foreclosure proceedings and resulted in fraudulent activities,” the attorney general said in court documents.

Bank of America faced similar claims from Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, who accused the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender of conducting foreclosures without authority in its role as mortgage servicer due improper document transfers. In an amended complaint last year, Masto said Countrywide failed to deliver original mortgage notes to the trusts or provided notes with defects.

The lawsuit was settled as part of the national foreclosure settlement, Masto spokeswoman Jennifer Lopez said.

Bank of America spokesman Rick Simon declined to comment about the claims made by states and investors. BNY Mellon performed its duties as defined in the agreements governing the securitizations, spokesman Kevin Heine said.

“We believe that claims against the trustee are based on a misunderstanding of the limited role of the trustee in mortgage securitizations,” he said.

Biden, in his complaint over mortgage database MERS, cites a foreclosure by Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) as trustee in which the promissory note wasn’t delivered to the bank as required under an agreement governing the securitization. The office is concerned that such errors led to foreclosures by banks that lacked authority to seize homes, one of the people said.

Renee Calabro, spokeswoman for Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank, declined to comment.

Investors have raised similar claims against banks. The Oklahoma Police Pension and Retirement System last year sued U.S. Bancorp as trustee for mortgage bonds sold by Bear Stearns. The bank “regularly disregarded” its duty as trustee to review loan files to ensure there were no missing or defective documents transferred to the trusts. The bank’s actions caused millions of dollars in losses on securities “that were not, in fact, legally collateralized by mortgage loans,” according to an amended complaint.

“Bondholders could have serious claims on their hands,” said Gradman. “You’re going to suffer a loss as bondholder if you can’t foreclose, if you can’t liquidate that property and recoup.”

Teri Charest, a spokeswoman for Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp (USB), said the bank isn’t liable and doesn’t know if any party is at fault in the structuring or administration of the transactions.

“If there was fault, this unhappy investor is seeking recompense from the wrong party,” she said. “We were not the sponsor, underwriter, custodian, servicer or administrator of this transaction.”