“Conversion” of the Note to a Bond Leaves Confusion in the Courts

If you are seeking legal representation or other services call our South Florida customer service number at 954-495-9867 and for the West coast the number remains 520-405-1688. In Northern Florida and the Panhandle call 850-765-1236. Customer service for the livinglies store with workbooks, services and analysis remains the same at 520-405-1688. The people who answer the phone are NOT attorneys and NOT permitted to provide any legal advice, but they can guide you toward some of our products and services.

SEE ALSO: http://WWW.LIVINGLIES-STORE.COM

The selection of an attorney is an important decision  and should only be made after you have interviewed licensed attorneys familiar with investment banking, securities, property law, consumer law, mortgages, foreclosures, and collection procedures. This site is dedicated to providing those services directly or indirectly through attorneys seeking guidance or assistance in representing consumers and homeowners. We are available to any lawyer seeking assistance anywhere in the country, U.S. possessions and territories. Neil Garfield is a licensed member of the Florida Bar and is qualified to appear as an expert witness or litigator in in several states including the district of Columbia. The information on this blog is general information and should NEVER be considered to be advice on one specific case. Consultation with a licensed attorney is required in this highly complex field.

Brent Bentrim, a regular contributor to the dialogue, posed a question.

I am having some trouble following this.  The note cannot be converted any more than when a stock is purchased by a mutual fund (trust) it becomes a mutual fund share.

You’re close and I understand where you seem to be going…ie, the loans were serviced not based on the note and closing documents, but on the PSA.  What I do not understand is the assumption that the note was converted.  From a security standpoint, it cannot.

You are right. When I say it was “converted” I mean in the lay sense rather a legal one. Of course it cannot be converted without the borrower signing. That is the point. But the treatment of the debt was as if it had been converted and that is where the problem lies for the Courts — hence the diametrically opposed appellate decisions in GA and MA. Once you have pinned down the opposing side to say they are relying on the PSA for their authority to bring the foreclosure action, and relying on the “assignment” without value, the issue shifts —- because the PSA and prospectus have vastly different terms for repayment of interest and principal than the note signed by the borrower.There are also different parties. The investor gets a bond from a special purpose vehicle under the assumption that the money deposited with the investment bank goes to the SPV and the SPV then buys the mortgage or funds the origination. In that scenario the payee on the note would either be the SPV or the originator. But it can’t be the originator if the originator did not fulfill its part of the bargain by funding the loan. And there is no disclosure as to the presence of other parties in the securitization chain much less the compensation they received contrary to Federal Law. (TILA).

Under the terms of the PSA and prospectus the expectation of the investor was that the investment was insured and hedged. That is one of the places where there is a break in the chain — the insurance is not made payable to either the SPV or the investors. Instead it is paid to the investment bank that merely created the entities and served as a depository institution or intermediary for the funds. The investment bank takes the position that such money is payable to them as profit in proprietary trading, which is ridiculous. They cannot take the position that they are agents of the creditor for purposes of foreclosure and then take the position that they were not agents of the investors when the money came in from insurance and credit default swaps.

Even under the actual money trail scenario the same holds true — they were acting as agents of the principal, albeit violating the terms of the “lender” agreement with the investors. Here is where another break occurred. Instead of funding the SPV, the investment bank held all investor money in a commingled undifferentiated mega account and the SPV never even had any account or signatory on any account in which money was placed.

Hence the SPV cannot be said to have purchased the loan because it lacked the funding to do it. The banks want to say that when they funded the origination or acquisition of the loan they were doing so under the PSA and prospectus. But that would only be true if they were following the provisions and terms of those instruments, which they were not. The banks funded the acquisition of loans directly with investor money instead of through the SPV, hence the tax exempt claims of the SPV’s are false and the tax effects on the investors could be far different — especially when you consider the fact that the mega suspense account in the investment bank had funds from many other investors who also thought they were investing in many different SPVs.

The reality of the money trail scenario is that the SPV can’t be the owner of the note or the owner of the mortgage because there simply was no transaction in which money or other consideration changed hands between the SPV and any other party. The same holds true for all the parties is the false securitization trail — no money was involved in the assignments. Thus it was not a commercial transaction creating a negotiable instrument.

In both scenarios the debt was created merely by the receipt of money that is presumed not to be gift. The question is whether the note, the bond or both should be used to re-structure the loan and determine the amount of interest, principal, if any that is left to pay.

The further question is if the originator did not loan any money, how can the recording of a mortgage have been proper to secure a debt that did not exist in favor of the secured party named on the mortgage or deed of trust?

And if the lender is determined by the actual money trail then the lenders consist of a group of investors, all of whom had money deposited in the account from which the acquisition of the loan was funded. And despite investment bank claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that there was any attempt to actually segregate funds based upon the PSA and prospectus. So the pool of investors consists of all investors in all SPVs rather just one — a factor that changes the income and tax status of each investor because now they are in a common law general partnership.

Thus the “conversion” language I have used, is merely shorthand to describe a far more complex process in which the written instruments were ignored, more written instruments were fabricated based upon nonexistent transactions, and no documentation was provided to the investors who were the real lenders. That leaves a common law debt that is undocumented by any promissory note or any secured interest in the property because the recorded mortgage or deed of trust was filed under false pretenses and hence was never perfected.

The conversion factor comes back in when you think about what a Judge might be able to do with this. Having none of the documentation naming and protecting the investors to document or secure the loan, the Judge must enter judgment either for the whole amount due, if any (after deductions for insurance and credit default swap proceeds) or in some payment plan.

If the Judge refers to the flawed documentation, he or she must consider the interests and expectation s of both the lender (investors) and the borrower, which means by definition that he must refer back to the prospectus and PSA as well as the promissory note.

The interesting thing about all this is that homeowners are of course willing to sign new mortgages that reflect the economic reality of the value of their homes, and the principal balance due, as well as money that continued to be paid to the creditor by the same same servicer that declared the default (and was therefore curing the default with each payment to the creditor).

The only question left is where did the money come from that was paid to the creditor after the homeowner stopped making payments and does that further complicate the matter by adding parties who might have an unsecured right of contribution against the borrower for money  advanced advanced by an intermediary sub servicer thereby converting the debt (or that part that was paid by the subservicer from funds other than the borrower) from any claim to being secured to a potential unsecured right of contribution from the borrower.

To that extent the servicer should admit that it is suing on its behalf for the unsecured portion of the loan on which it advanced payments, and for the secured portion they claim is due to other parties. They obviously don’t want to do that because it would focus attention on the actual accounting, posting and bookkeeping for actual transfers or payments of money. The focus on reality could be devastating to the banks and reveal liabilities and reduction of claimed assets on their balance sheets that would cause them to be broken up. They are counting on the fact that not too many people will understand enough of what is contained in this post. So far it seems to be working for them.Remember that as to the insurance and credit default swaps there are express waivers of subrogation or any right to seek collection from the borrowers in the mortgages. The issue arises because the bonds were insured and thus the underlying mortgage payments were insured — a fact that played out in the real world where payments continued being made to creditors who were advancing money for “investment” in bogus mortgage bonds. This leaves only the equitable powers of the court to fashion a remedy, perhaps by agreement between the parties by which the lenders are made parties to the action and the borrowers are of course parties to the action but he servicers are left out of the mix because they have an interest in continuing the farce rather than seeing it settled, because they are receiving fees and picking up property for free (credit bids from non-creditors).

This is precisely the point that the courts are missing. By looking at the paperwork first and disregarding the actual money trail they are going down a rabbit hole neatly prepared for them by the banks. If there was no commercial transaction then the UCC doesn’t apply and neither do any presumptions of ownership, right to enforce etc.

The question of “ownership” of the note and mortgage are a distraction from the fact that neither the note or the mortgage tells the whole story of the transaction. The actions of the participants and the real movement of money governs every transaction.

Whether the courts will recognize the conversion factor or something similar remains to be seen. But it is obvious that the confusion in the courts relates directly to their ignorance of the the fact that the actual money transaction is not brought to their attention or they are ignoring it out of pure confusion as to what law to apply.

Now UCC Me, Now You Don’t: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Ignores the UCC in Requiring Unity of Note and Mortgage for Foreclosure in Eaton v. Fannie Mae
http://4closurefraud.org/2013/05/20/now-ucc-me-now-you-dont-the-massachusetts-supreme-judicial-court-ignores-the-ucc-in-requiring-unity-of-note-and-mortgage-for-foreclosure-in-eaton-v-fannie-mae/

High court rules in favor of bank in Suwanee foreclosure case
http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/news/2013/may/20/high-court-rules-in-favor-of-bank-in-suwanee/

Wells Fargo slows foreclosure sales, BofA not so much
http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/morning_call/2013/05/wells-fargo-slows-foreclosure-sales.html

LAWYER BONANZA!: Wells Fargo Foreclosing on Homeowner Who Made all Payments and Paid Extra

WELLS FARGO MAKES HUGE ERROR ADMITTING LACK OF POWER TO BIND CREDITOR TO MODIFICATIONS OR SETTLEMENTS

The simple truth is that the banks are not nearly as interested in the property as they are in the foreclosure. It is the foreclosure sale that creates the illusion of a stamp of approval from the state government that the entire securitization scheme was valid and it creates the reality of a presumption of the validity of the deed issued at the so-called auction of the property upon submission of  false credit bid from a non-creditor who is a stranger (not in privity) to the transaction alleged. — Neil F Garfield, livinglies.me

see also http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/estoppel-when-the-bank-tells-you-to-stop-making-payments/

Editor’s Comment and Analysis: Wells Fargo is foreclosing on a man who has made his payments early and made extra payments to pay down the principal allegedly due on his mortgage. In response to media questions as to their authority to foreclose, the response was curious and very revealing. Wells Fargo said that the reason was that the securitization documents contain restrictions and prohibitions that prevent modifications of mortgage.

The fact that Wells Fargo offered a particular payment plan and the homeowner accepted it together with the fact that the homeowner made the required payments and even added extra payments, all of which was accepted by Wells Fargo and cashed  doesn’t seem to bother Wells Fargo but it probably will bother a judge who sees both the doctrine of estoppel and a simple contract in which Wells Fargo had the apparent authority to make the offer, accept the payments, and bind the actual creditors (whoever they might be).

It also corroborates our continuing opinion that when Wells Fargo and similar banks received insurance and creditable swap payments, they should have been applied to the receivable account of the investors which in turn would have resulted by definition in a reduction of the amount owed. The reduction in the amount owed would obviously decrease the amount payable by the borrower. If we follow the terms of the only contract that was signed by the borrower then any overpayments to the creditor beyond account receivable held by the creditor would be due and payable to the borrower. It is a violation of the spirit and content of the federal bailout to allow the banks to keep the money that is so desperately needed by the investors who supplied the money and the homeowners whose loans were paid in whole or in part by insurance and credit default swaps.

The reason I am interested in this particular case and the reason why I think it is of ultimate importance to understand the significance of the Wells Fargo response to the media is that it corroborates the facts and theories presented here and elsewhere that the original promissory note vanished and was replaced by a mortgage bond, the terms of which were vastly different than the terms of the promissory note signed by the homeowner.

Wells Fargo seeks to impose the terms, provisions, conditions and restrictions of the securitization documents onto the buyer without realizing that they have admitted that the original promissory note signed by the homeowner and therefore the original mortgage lien or deed of trust were never presented to the actual lenders for acceptance or approval of the loan.

CONVERSION OF PROMISSORY NOTE TO MORTGAGE BOND WITHOUT NOTICE

In fact, Wells Fargo has now admitted that the terms of the loan are governed strictly by the securitization documents. How they intend to enforce securitization documents whose existence was actively hidden from the borrower is going to be an interesting question.  If the position of the banks were to be accepted, then any creditor could change the essential terms of the debt or the essential terms of repayment without notice or consent from the borrower despite the absence of any reference to such power in the documents presented to the borrower for the borrower’s signature.

 But one thing is certain, to wit: the closing documents presented to the borrower  were incomplete and failed to disclose both the real parties in table funded loans (making the loans predatory per se as per TILA and Reg Z) and the existence and compensation of intermediaries, the disclosure of which is absolutely mandatory under federal law. Each borrower who was deprived of knowledge of multiple other parties and intermediaries and their compensation has a clear right of action for recovery of all undisclosed fees, interest, payments, attorney fees and probably treble damages.

This case also clearly shows that despite the representations by counsel and “witnesses” Wells Fargo has now admitted the basic fact behind its pattern of conduct wherein they claim to be the authorized sub servicer fully empowered by the real creditors and then claim to have no responsibility or powers with respect to the loan or the real creditors (which appears to include the Federal Reserve if their purchase of mortgage bonds had any substance).

Wells Fargo, US Bank, Bank of New York and of course Bank of America have all been sanctioned with substantial fines of up to seven figures so far in individual cases where they clearly took inconsistent positions and the judge found them to be in contempt of court because of the lies they told and levied those sanctions on both the attorneys and the banks.

It was only a matter of time before this entire false foreclosure mess blew up in the face of the banks. You can be sure that Wells Fargo will attempt to bury this case by paying off the homeowner and any other people that have been involved who could blow the whistle on their illegal, fraudulent and probably criminal behavior.

This is not the end of the game for Wells Fargo or any other bank, but it is one more concrete step toward revealing basic truth behind the mortgage mess, to it: the Wall Street banks stole the money from the investors, stole the ownership of the loans from the “trusts” and have been stealing houses despite the absence of any monetary or other consideration in the origination or acquisition of any loan. This absence of consideration removes the paperwork offered by the banks from the category of a negotiable instrument. None of the presumptions applicable to negotiable instruments apply.

Once again I emphasize that in practice lawyers should immediately take control of the narrative and the case by showing that the party seeking foreclosure possesses no records of any actual or real transaction in which money exchanged hands. This means, in my opinion, that the allegations of investors in lawsuits against the investment banks on Wall Street are true, to wit: they were entitled to an forcible notes and enforceable mortgages but they didn’t get it. That is an admission in the public record by the real parties in interest that the notes and mortgages are fabricated because they referred to commercial transactions that never occurred.

Going back to my original articles when I started this blog in 2007, the solution to the current mortgage mess which includes the corruption of title records across the country is that the intermediaries should be cut out of the process of modification and settlement. A different agency should be given the power to match up investors and borrowers and facilitate the execution of new promissory notes new mortgages or deeds of trust that are in fact enforceable but based in reality as to both the value of the property and the viability of the loan. It is the intermediaries including the Wall Street banks, sub servicers, Master servicers, and so-called trustees that are abusing the court process and clogging the court calendars with false claims. Get rid of them and you get rid of the problem.

http://4closurefraud.org/2013/05/16/wells-fargo-forecloses-on-florida-man-who-paid-on-time-early/

SMOKE AND MIRRORS: HOW TO FOCUS ON MORTGAGE AND FORECLOSURE DEFECTS

It is obvious that I feel it is important to understand securitization and more particularly, how it was faked in the mortgage meltdown and used to cover-up a Ponzi scheme. That is why I publish this blog and that is why I have written books and manuals and of course that is why I issue expert declarations. The issue, in court, is how do you educate the Judge in 5 minutes. The actual answer is that you don’t but your knowledge gained from these pages and other sources should guide you to your goals and guide your voir dire and cross examination of the witnesses for the other side.

Theoretically, most of what I have been suggesting for tactics and strategy ought to be the burden of the party seeking affirmative relief. DENY and DISCOVER arose out of the realization that Judges were placing the burden on the borrower instead and hanging their legal hat on the fact that the borrower was raising affirmative defenses and therefore required to prove them.

Most borrowers, even through counsel, compounded the problem by admitting all required elements of a judicial foreclosure as they emerged from the starting gate making it even easier for the Judge to place the burden of persuasion on the borrower — to prove facts that are exclusively within the possession, care, custody and control of the other side. And that is why discovery is so important.

Even borrowers who commence the litigation in both judicial and non-judicial states commence their complaints with the allegation that they had a financial transaction with the named lender on the note and mortgage — when in fact the borrower has no evidence to support that allegation other than the appearance or illusion of a transaction supported by the fact that the money for the loan showed up at the same time as the “closing.”

In general, a  careful examination of any loan now subject to a claim of securitization will reveal a fun house series of smoke and mirrors. Factually, you need to subpoena the trust officer or manager in charge of REMIC trusts including the subject REMIC for the subject loan. They should bring proof of filing with the IRS and/or any state in which they are doing business as trustee for the REMIC and proof that the money from investors was deposited into an account bearing the name of the alleged Trustee for the benefit of the named trust that is claiming ownership of the loan. Your goal here is to establish that the money was not deposited into any account held or controlled by the trustee and that withdrawals for funding or purchasing loans came from somewhere else. But that only gets you half way home.

The next thing you have to do is subpoena the records of the entity to whom the Trustee will testify was the party to whom the trustee delegated the trustee’s duties. Here again you are looking for an account in the name of the REMIC trust claiming ownership of the loan into which the investor funds were deposited and from which the funding for origination or purchase of the loan took place. You will most likely find again that no such account exists but that there is agreement that the party receiving the investor money was the investment banker and that the account was a commingled account in which the investment bank made decisions as to how much it would take for itself under the  rubric of “proprietary trading.” The balance of the money was used for fees, costs and other expenses and then finally the balance after deductions was used for funding origination or purchase of mortgages.

The trustee should be encouraged to admit that if the loan is not performing or if the loan purchase or assignment, the trustee is prohibited from accepting such loans inasmuch as it would have an immediate negative economic and tax consequence to the investor. The trustee should also be encouraged to admit that the parties to whom duties were delegated were acting within the scope and course of their agency, with the Trustee (or the investors) as the principals and ultimate beneficiaries.

A subpoena to the CDO manager should expose the transactions entered into by the investment bank or an affiliate with respect to the value of the bonds or loans in the alleged investment pool. But under proper questioning, if the money for the loan didn’t come from the investment pool entity, then it came directly from the investors, not the REMIC trust. The point to be made is that the REMIC trust was ignored in all actual financial transactions in which money exchanged hands but principal-agent relationship still existed with the investors as principals and the investment bank et al as agents.

In all cases you wish to establish that no loan receivable account was established on the balance sheet of the REMIC trust claiming ownership of the loan, and probably that no such balance sheet or income statement exists. The investors were not given the note signed by the borrower. They were given a bond issued by the REMIC trust which was worthless because the proceeds of their investment never reached the REMIC trust.

Thus, oversimplifying a bit, you have established that the REMIC trust is not the payee, holder or owner of the debt because (1) it wasn’t the source of funds and (2) the transactions did not comply with the PSA and Prospectus, requiring strict adherence to the REMIC provisions of the Internal Revenue Code.

All of this is done not as an exercise in training the Judge on securitization but under the rubric of tracing the money to the real creditor who had a real loss that would entitle them, if they are secured, to enter a credit bid at the time of auction of a foreclosed property. This would be the same party(ies) that could faithfully execute a satisfaction of mortgage and deliver the note back in its original form with “Paid in Full” Stamped across the front of it. This latter point leads to more complications when you realize that the subject loan was a refinancing of another loan that was also subject to claims of securitization, potentially leaving the homeowner with multiple unsatisfied mortgages, notes or debts.

Your inquiry should focus on the actual receipts and statements showing deposits and withdrawals and transfer of money rather than an assignment which merely tells a story about the transaction. Just as the mortgage is not the note and the note is not the debt, the assignment is no substitute for the actual exchange of money in the sale of the loan. You will find that no such exchange of money took place and then be faced with the question that if the note terms differed from the bond terms, if the payee on the note and mortgage were different than the actual source of funds, and there was no consideration passed (for value received), is there any legally existing transaction? The answer, I think, is NO.

This leaves the situation in murky waters: the transaction about which the origination and transfer documents tell “the story” never took place. So you have documentation without the underlying debt. The actual transaction was with the investors not merely of the REMIC claiming ownership (and by this time has been proven not to own the loan), but all investors whose money was in the source account from which money was taken to fund the origination or purchase of the loan. This commingled account therefore creates under common law a general partnership of the investors that has nothing to do with the REMIC trust which has been ignored by all parties. Thus the partnership consists of all investors who had money in the commingled account. Those investors thought they were advancing money for the purchase of bonds issued by a worthless REMIC trust but found that the Trust had been ignored by their agents. Thus investors from multiple REMIC bond sales find themselves all in the same pot.

This accounts for the allegation from investors in suits against investment bankers that they have been subjected to illegal transactions with borrowers against whom they could enforce neither the note nor the mortgage — because although they did indeed loan money to the borrowers, the documents signed by the borrowers say otherwise. [You should have a couple of those lawsuits under your arm when arguing these points with the Judge]. This leaves the true transaction trail without any documentation other than a wire transfer receipt and perhaps wire transfer instructions. And what was intended to be a secured transaction turns out to be an unsecured transaction even though both sides intended it to be a secured transaction — but subject to different terms (the terms of the repayment on the mortgage bond issued by the empty REMIC trust and the terms of repayment on the promissory note signed by borrower).

The end of this is unclear except to say that settlements will become more frequent. But the negotiations start on a level playing field with the investors rather than the servicers. In most cases it is apparent that borrowers will consent to a new mortgage document directly with the investors thus securing the debt, after reducing it for payments received by the investors or their agents.

 

Shocking Bubble in Student Loans Adds to Economic Woes

If you are seeking legal representation or other services call our Florida customer service number at 954-495-9867 and for the West coast the number remains 520-405-1688. Customer service for the livinglies store with workbooks, services and analysis remains the same at 520-405-1688. The people who answer the phone are NOT attorneys and NOT permitted to provide any legal advice, but they can guide you toward some of our products and services.

The selection of an attorney is an important decision  and should only be made after you have interviewed licensed attorneys familiar with investment banking, securities, property law, consumer law, mortgages, foreclosures, and collection procedures. This site is dedicated to providing those services directly or indirectly through attorneys seeking guidance or assistance in representing consumers and homeowners. We are available to any lawyer seeking assistance anywhere in the country, U.S. possessions and territories. Neil Garfield is a licensed member of the Florida Bar and is qualified to appear as an expert witness or litigator in in several states including the district of Columbia. The information on this blog is general information and should NEVER be considered to be advice on one specific case. Consultation with a licensed attorney is required in this highly complex field.

Editor’s Comments: First let me say in the interest of transparency that I favor all education to be paid by the government from pre-k through graduate school. My reason is simple — a well informed well educated populace will be more productive, more competitive and less easily fooled by politicians issuing sound bites instead of facts. Information is king. If you want to progress toward the American dream it is no longer evident that working with your hands will get you there. You have to know things that employers need you to know and you have to process things cognitively that only a good education can instill.

Back to reality. The game has been on for at least three decades, perhaps four depending upon how you look at it. Unions were busted  wages declined or stagnated, while corporate profits and bonuses went to dizzying heights, leaving the rest of the country at or near the poverty level.

In lieu of wages, we made credit available that was spent like wages except that you had to spend it twice to be out of debt — once at the point of purchase with your credit card and again in installments at usurious rates when the bill came in. Homeowners were using the homes as ATM machines taking out equity loans just to maintain their standard of living. It doesn’t take an economist to know that one day that bubble had to break when the low wages paid to consumers would be insufficient to cover basic living expenses and certainly insufficient to pay the interest and principal on loans.

Conservatives can blame consumers all they want, but the fact remains that in order to create the illusion of a healthy economy, credit and debt was forced onto 99% of the population while wealth was transferred to the top 1%. To live within your means during this period meant you would live with in the most dangerous run-down neighborhoods with the worst schools. The peer pressure and pressure from life virtually forced the vast majority of Americans to accept debt in lieu of the wages they should have been paid.

Now we have the start of suicide and murders that have littered the landscape during the mortgage meltdown and which continue to this day. I know because I get calls from people who threaten suicide and then do it. It’s like the war in Afghanistan: how many people are aware that there were more suicides than those killed in action in 2012? We are numb to the results and our belief in our institutions is at an all-time low for good reason. This was a gradual process with plenty of people who know a lot about finance and economics screaming “STOP!” but were ignored.

In both the mortgage crisis and the student loan crisis, where defaults are skyrocketing, there is an opportunity for a fiscal stimulus to the country that won’t cost the government a dime. Trillions of dollars of stimulus money is locked up in the banks who have sequestered the money overseas along with Corporate America’s $3 trillion that they are holding and afraid to invest because they see what I see — at best an uncertain future for America and a profound distrust of American institutions to cope with the issues because the government is controlled by big business and big banks. It’s called an oligopoly when a group of companies control the marketplace.

Simple logic: why is it that while unemployment remains high and wages remain too low to survive, that Wall Street and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are reaching historic highs? Somebody is paying for those results. Since we cannot support those results through spending discretionary income because we don’t have any, and since we can’t spend our way out using credit because there isn’t any, Big Banks and Big Business are now burying their heads in the public trough taking corporate welfare and dodging liabilities with the full support of all three branches of government.

Doesn’t it bother anyone that during the last three decades the amount of GDP measured by standard means includes financial services which went from 16% of GDP to nearly 50% of GDP. That means that the loss of real productive businesses has been replaced by trading paper on the same deals over and over again so we maintain the illusion that the United States is an economic superpower. And eventually the euphoria in the stock market will be replaced with something less than that when the correction turns into a crash.

If we really want to save our economy, our world status (aside from military power) and the prospects for future generations we need real jobs with real services and real products to be produced here and to stop treating trading paper as somehow adding to GDP.

The solution is right in front of us. In the mortgage markets, the appraisals were untrue and unsustainable and the responsible party, according to existing law, is the lending entity. The loans were unworkable and bound to fail in both the real estate loans and student loans. And the risk was transferred from the loan originator, which is supposed to be the gatekeeper to undisclosed third parties who funded the loan without any disclosure or documentation provided to the borrower.

In short, predatory loan practices and outright fraud, proven by the robo-signing scandal in which fabrication of entire loan files cost only $95 according to its price sheet, convinced millions of people to borrow sums of money they could never repay on terms that were guaranteed to fail at he borrower level. In the meanwhile, the lenders (investors) were sold a different set of terms. The intermediaries tricked the lender, tricked the borrower and then set out to claim the loans as their own, getting the insurance proceeds and proceeds from credit default swaps and federal bailout.

Look under any rock in the private student loan landscape and you’ll find lost documents, robo-signed documents, fabrications, forgery and perjury. It’s the same tune as the mortgage mess.

In any normal situation where bankers go wild, hundreds of people go to jail and receivers are appointed with the express purpose of clawing back as much as possible to provide restitution and reparation to the victims. Following the existing rule of law, that is exactly what should happen here with real estate loans and student loans. It won’t fix everything, but it will fix a lot more than current policy and give a boost to an ailing economy whose foundation is rotting and cracking under the weight of  shadow banking.

Lawyer’s Student Loans May Driven Him To Murder, Police Say
http://www.businessinsider.com/john-conrad-wagner-murder-motive-2013-3

http://gawker.com/5988302/its-eerie-how-perfectly-student-debt-is-following-the-financial-meltdown-script

http://www.businessinsider.com/one-law-school-finally-lets-students-know-how-poor-theyll-be-after-graduation-2013-3

Bond Buyers Beware: Student Loans Mirror Mortgage Meltdown

CHECK OUT OUR EXTENDED DECEMBER SPECIAL!

What’s the Next Step? Consult with Neil Garfield

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, Tennessee, Georgia, California, Ohio, and Nevada. (NOTE: Chapter 11 may be easier than you think).

Editor’s Comments: Close your eyes. Imagine an upside down world in which the borrowers are having the most trouble keeping their loans current are the very same loans that investors can’t get enough of. Sound like the mortgage meltdown? That is because Wall Street is using the same business model. “Demand for the riskiest bunch—those that will lose money first if the loans go bad—was 15 times greater than the supply, people familiar with the deal said.”

So why would fund managers intentionally invest money in which they are most likely to lose money and their jobs? Answer: they wouldn’t. Somehow wall Street has again convinced or coerced fund managers to buy bogus bonds backed by student loans that are spiraling down the toilet even as we speak.

The “experts” attribute the surge to investor demand. I would scratch the surface and see why investor demand was so high, besides the obvious need to increase yield at a time when yields have never been lower.

The problem is that there is still no accountability for these loans or bonds. A young student asks for a loan and the bank showers him with “extra” amounts beyond what he requested. The payment is zero, so it is like free money and the novice financial victim doesn’t have the knowledge or skills to understand the flaws in what is being proposed to him or her.

Before you know it, the $25,000 loan he asked for is now $50,000 to take care of incidentals and living expenses, and the real amount borrowed will go up by anywhere from 6%-15% as interest accumulates is added to the principal. Once out of school, the interest rates shoots up and the next he or she knows, she now has around a $60,000 loan (despite asking for $25,000) with an interest rate of 8%, which means that interest alone is $4800 per year or $400 per month — the payment for a small car and insurance.

The mystery of why demand is so high when on the last round there was such a disaster can only be explained by reference to the sales talk given to fund managers and perhaps some overlapping or conflicting areas of interest.

This is not rocket science. The number of student loans failing is spiking and getting worse every day. Any asset backed security using student loans is depreciated worse than a new car driving off the show room floor. And listening to the bankers selling this stuff is like getting medical advice from a crack dealer.

So why are they putting pension fund money into an obviously failing investment? That is my quest. When I have the answer i will probably be able to further unravel the mortgage backed bonds a little further as well.

I keep  wondering if the bankers are actually doing the same thing they did with the mortgage backed bonds — tell the investor the investment is triple A rated, insured and hedged with credit default swaps. And I wonder if the fund managers understand that the triple A rating is subject to revision down to unrated, and that the insurance and hedges are payable not to the investors but to the investment bankers.

I also wonder if the notes will again disappear because of misrepresentations as to their content, and if the intermediary banks will again retain control over the collection process, create fabricated forged documents and offer of perjured testimony and affidavits from incompetent witnesses?

And I wonder if once again we have a stream of money coming from an unidentified funding source whose name is not included in the closing documents, and who agreed to repayment terms different than those set forth on the promissory note signed by the borrower.

This is why I am including Student Loans as an area of concentration on this blog and I will include other subjects as well that inform and assist those “in trouble” due to the greed and predatory lending tactics used by private bankers. It is worth mentioning that the private banking loans are in the process of being phased out for precisely the reasons stated above.

Now SOMEBODY must be making money on these bad loans and the good loans far in excess of the basis points usually applicable to lending. Where is that profit coming from? It can only come from the investors since they are the only ones who are putting their money at risk.

So to recap, after the mortgage meltdown we have what appears to be a repeat situation going on with student loans. The investment bankers are skimming deeply into investor money before they lend out anything. The loans were mostly bad loans that will eventually fail. The  bankers will collect insurance, credit default swaps and potentially another federal bailout. Nobody ends up with what they wanted except the investment bankers, of course.

Student-Loan Securities Stay Hot
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323293704578334542910674174.html

What’s Really Behind the Student Debt Boom
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/05/whats-really-behind-the-student-debt-boom.aspx

Rating Agencies Finally Drawing Fire They Richly Deserve — But Will They be Prosecuted?

“The Justice Department claims that the faulty projections were not simply naïveté, but rather a deliberate effort to produce inflated, fraudulent ratings. “The complaint asserts that S.& P. staff chose not to update computer programs because the changes would have led to harsher ratings, and a potential loss of business,” (e.s.)

“I was there. It is not possible that companies like S&P, Fitch and other rating agencies didn’t know how to do securities analysis — they invented it. The S&P Book was widely used as a shorthand method of evaluating a stock or bond for decades before I arrived on Wall Street. They were known and trusted for their data and their crunching of data. It isn’t possible that they wouldn’t know that the ratings were artificially inflated. They were only concerned with collecting fees and covering their behinds with “plausible deniability.”What they gave up was the their reputation for truth and clarity. Now they can’t be trusted.

And the same goes triple for the investment banks who brought those bogus mortgage bonds to market. Wall Street is a small place. Everyone but the customers and borrowers knew what was going on and everyone knew a huge bust was coming. If they knew and the regulators knew, why did they allow it play out when the warning signs were already clear in the early 2000′s.” Neil F Garfield, http://www.livinglies.me

CHECK OUT OUR EXTENDED DECEMBER SPECIAL!

What’s the Next Step? Consult with Neil Garfield

For assistance with presenting a case for wrongful foreclosure or to challenge whoever is taking your money every month, please call 520-405-1688, customer service, who will put you in touch with an attorney in the states of Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, California, Ohio, and Nevada. (NOTE: Chapter 11 may be easier than you think).

Editor’s Analysis: When you see movies like Too Big to Fail and read any of the hundreds of books published on the great recession, you must be left with a sense of outrage  and/or disappointment that our government and our major banks tacitly approved of the illegal activities undertaken by all the participants in what turned out to be a PONZI scheme covered over by a fraudulent scheme they called “Securitization.”

Despite some people raising the concern that the homeowners were hit hardest by the criminal enterprise, any concern for them vanished in the face of an invalid assumption by Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke that the economy would fail and society would fall apart if they didn’t bail out the banks. If anything, the behavior of the banks was the equivalent of NOT bailing them out because they never honored their part of the bargain — increasing the flow of capital into the economy through loans and investments. While that understanding should have been reduced to writing, it was obvious that the banks would lend out money with extra capital infused into their balance sheet. Except they didn’t.

And the world didn’t end, but there was chaos all over the world because the banks were and continue sitting on a bounty that has not been subject to any audit or accounting.

As I expected, the rating agencies are now being sued not for negligence but for intentionally skewing the ratings knowing that stable managed funds were restricted from investing in anything but the safest securities (meaning the highest rating from a qualified rating agency). It is the same story as the appraisers of real property who were pressured into inflating and then re-inflating the prices of property whose value was left far behind. Both the rating agencies and the appraisers who participated in this illicit scheme caved in to threats from Wall Street that they would never see any business again if they didn’t “play ball.”

The very structure and the actual movement of money and documents would tip off an amateur securities analyst. Starting with the premise of securitization and an understanding of how it works (easily obtained from numerous sources) any analysis would have revealed that something was wrong. Securities analysis is not just sitting at a desk crunching numbers. It is investigation.

Any investigation at random picking apart the loan deals, the diversion of title from the REMIC trusts, the diversion of money from the investors to a mega-account in which the investors’ money was indiscriminately commingled, thus avoiding the REMICs entirely, would lead to the inevitable conclusion that even the highest rated tranches and the highest rated bonds, were a complete sham. Indeed internal memos at S&P shows that it was well understood by all — they even made up a song about it.

The analysis by the people at S&P omitted key steps so they wouldn’t be accused of knowing what was going on. It is the same as the underwriting of the loans themselves where the underwriting process was reduced to a computer platform in which the aggregator approved the loan — not he originator — and the investment banker wired the funds for the loan on behalf of the Investors, but the documents showed that it was the originator, who was not allowed to touch any of the money funded for loans, whose name was placed on the note and mortgage. Why?

Any good analyst would have and several did ask why this was done. They got back a double-speak answer that would have resulted in an unrated or low-rated mortgage bond, with a footnote that the REMICs may never have been funded and that therefore without other sources of capital they could not possibly have purchased the loans. Which means of course that the REMICs named in foreclosures over the past 5-6 years.

Some of the best analysts on Wall Street saw at a glance that this was a PONZI scheme and a fraudulent play on the word “Securitization.” Simply tracing the parties to their real function would and still will reveal that all of them were acting in nominee capacities and not as true agents of the investors or participants in the securitization scheme.

And the nominees include but are not limited to the REMIC itself, the Trustee for the REMIC, the subservicer, the Master Servicer, the Depositor, the aggregator, the originator, and the law firms, foreclosure mills and companies like LPS and DOCX who sprung up with published price sheets on fabrication of documents and forgeries of of those documents to convince a court that the foreclosure was real and valid. The whole thing was a sham.

If I saw it at a glance after being out of Wall STreet for many years, you can bet that the new financial and securities analysts at the rating agencies also saw it. Instead they buried their true analysis behind a mountain of fabricated data that in itself was a nominee for the real data and then crunched the numbers in the way that the Wall Street firms dictated.

The fact that there were algorithms that took the world’s fastest computers a full weekend to process without the ability to audit the results should have and did in fact alert many people that the bogus mortgage bonds were unratable because there was no way to confirm their assumptions or their outcome.

The government is very close, now that it is moving in on the ratings companies. They are close to revealing that this was not excessive risk taking it was excessive taking — theft — and that the rating companies should lose their status as rating companies, the officers and analysts who signed off should be prosecuted, and the receiver appointed over the assets should claw back the excessive fees paid to the ratings companies from officers of the ratings companies and, following the yellow brick road, the CEO’s of the investment banks.

We have found out, thanks to the greed and deception practiced by the banks on officers at the highest level of your government what will happen if the credit markets free up without the TARP money being used to free up those markets. It isn’t pretty but it isn’t apocalypse either. The proof is in. The mega banks should be taken down piece by piece and their function should be spread out over a wide swath of more than 7,000 community banks, credit unions and savings and loan associations — all of whom have access to the utilities at SWIFT, VISA, MasterCard, check 21, and other forms of interbank electronic funds transfer.

If the administration really wants a correction and really wants to increase confidence in the marketplaces around the world and the financial system supporting those markets, then it MUST take the harshest action possible against the people and companies who engineered this world-wide crisis. Eventually the truth will all be out for everyone to see. Which side of history do we mean to be aligned — the bank oligopoly or a capitalist, free, democratic society.

BY WILLIAM ALDEN, DealBook NY TIMES

DOCUMENTS IN S.&P. CASE SHOW ALARM Documents included in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Standard & Poor’s provide a glimpse at the company’s inner working in the run-up to the financial crisis. “Tensions appeared to be escalating inside the firm’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan as it publicly professed that its ratings were valid, even as the home loans bundled into mortgage-backed securities, or M.B.S., were failing at accelerating rates,” Mary Williams Walsh and Ron Nixon write in DealBook. “Together, the documents show a portrait of some executives pushing to water down the firm’s rating models in the hope of preserving market share and profits, while others expressed deep concerns about the poor performance of the securities and what they saw as a lowering of standards.”

Some of the documents also showed some of the snark among the rank-and-file over the impending crisis. One analyst in March 2007 borrowed from the Talking Heads, creating new lyrics to “Burning Down the House,” according to the complaint: “Subprime is boi-ling o-ver. Bringing down the house.” In a confidential memo reproduced in the complaint, one executive said: “This market is a wildly spinning top which is going to end badly.”

At the heart of the civil case are the computer models S.&P. used to rate complex mortgage securities. The Justice Department claims that the faulty projections were not simply naïveté, but rather a deliberate effort to produce inflated, fraudulent ratings. “The complaint asserts that S.& P. staff chose not to update computer programs because the changes would have led to harsher ratings, and a potential loss of business,” Peter Eavis writes. But S.&P., which says the lawsuit is without merit, disagrees with the government’s characterization of the models. Catherine J. Mathis, an S.& P. spokeswoman, said the Justice Department had not “shown actual adjustment to the models or other changes that were not analytically justified.”

Indeed, the government faces an uphill battle in making its case that S.&P. intentionally inflated ratings. “The government will have to prove that ratings were in fact faulty, and published intentionally so as to deceive investors in the securities. In response, S.& P. could simply argue that the company was just as blinded by the financial crisis as anyone else, and that questionable e-mails are simply the work of lower-level employees who were not involved in the decision-making,” Peter J. Henning and Steven M. Davidoff write. “Even if the Justice Department can prove the agency acted to deceive investors, it still has to deal with something lawyers call reliance. In other words, did investors rely on these ratings to make their decisions?”

R.B.S APPROACHES SETTLEMENT OVER RATE-RIGGING The Royal Bank of Scotland said on Wednesday that it was in advanced discussions with authorities on both side of the Atlantic over settling accusations that it manipulated Libor. “Although the settlements remain to be agreed, R.B.S. expects they will include the payment of significant penalties as well as certain other sanctions,” the bank said.

A settlement, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, is expected to include a penalty of about 400 million pounds, or $626 million, according to several news reports. “As part of the anticipated deal, R.B.S.’s Japanese unit is expected to plead guilty to a crime in the U.S., although the Justice Department isn’t expected to charge any individuals, according to one of the people briefed on the talks,” The Wall Street Journal writes. John Hourican, the head of R.B.S.’s investment bank, is also expected to resign, the reports said.

S&P Analyst Joked of ‘Bringing Down the House’ Ahead of Collapse
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-05/s-p-analyst-joked-of-bringing-down-the-house-ahead-of-collapse.html

Case Details Internal Tension at S.&P. Amid Subprime Problems
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/case-details-internal-tension-at-s-p-amid-subprime-problems/

Justice Sues S&P, But What Purpose are Ratings Agencies Serving Anyway?
http://business.time.com/2013/02/06/justice-sues-sp-but-what-purpose-are-ratings-agencies-serving-anyway/

S&P charged with fraud in mortgage ratings
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/06/rate-f06.html

More Bailouts Coming

What’s the Next Step? Consult with Neil Garfield

CHECK OUT OUR NOVEMBER SPECIAL

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 Comment: Ignoring the obvious, Federal Agencies and the Courts are compounding the problems caused by the sham securitization scheme that covered up the largest PONZI scheme in history. And the taxpayers are paying for it. Investors are losing money and homeowners are losing money and their homes as the plain fact of defects in the origination documents are ignored, except when it comes to agencies and institutions suing each other, all alleging the same thing — the documents are unenforceable.

This isn’t just a paperwork problem, which is why I keep saying that while the UCC arguments have merit they are not dispositive of the real issues. The paperwork is bad because banks intentionally created a scheme that they never would have accepted from borrowers — using layers and ladders of corporate veils to hide the real parties in interest.

They diverted the investor money into their own piggy banks and they diverted the origination documents from the investors because they had plans for that paperwork — plans that required them to be able to “prove” they owned the loan and therefore could trade the loans, sell them, hedge them, insure them and even take Federal bailouts because of “defaults” on loans the mega banks never made nor purchased.

Now the FHA is going to need extra money to make good on guarantees on toxic documents that are not necessarily bad loans but were insured at the mortgage bond level. The banks are getting paid over and over again as they laugh all the way to their accounts in the Cayman Islands.

But it doesn’t end there. The investors were mostly managed funds for retirement including vested pension funds that in some cases have reduced the assets held by the fund so drastically that they have already declared themselves “underfunded” which is another way of saying they are insolvent. Some are insured and some are not. But either way, if pensioners and retirees are going to get the income they counted on in retirement the funds are going to need money. And there is no place to get it except from the Federal government.

The accounting for the loans excludes any information from the Master Servicer (the only party with ALL the information about the loan and the money and the documents) and specifically the third party payoffs received by the banks who at all times were, whether they like it or not, acting as agents of the investors. The money the banks made belongs to the investors — the managed retirement funds; but they are not getting it except if they sue for fraudulent representations made at the time of the sale of the bogus “mortgage-backed” bonds.

If the investors did get their share of the money that was paid by insurance, credit default swaps, other hedges and federal bailout, they would not have lost nearly as much as they did in the value of their assets and they probably would not be “underfunded.”

But this creates the politically unacceptable consequence of lowering the amount due on each obligation owed to the investor — a benefit that would inure to the benefit of homeowners who are one of the obligees on those debts.

Somehow we have arrived at the conclusion that it is better to reward the perpetrator of the crime rather than give restitution to the victims. Somehow we have arrived at the conclusion that the windfalls should continue going the way of the banks instead of the investors and borrowers.

Just looking at all the actions filed by agencies and institutions there is a clear consensus that the loans were bad from the start. They named the wrong (strawman) payee, they named the wrong mortgagee/beneficiary (strawman) and they never disclosed or referred to the real obligation to the investors as set forth in the mortgage bond which was the ONLY reason the investors advanced the money.

This is why I am pushing DENY AND DISCOVER  as the principal strategy to pursue coupled with discovery aimed not at the document trail but at the money trail where the would-be forecloser must show that the origination documents accurately recited the the true facts of the transaction and where the assignments were transferred for “value received.” When you ask for proof of payment, wire transfer instructions, wire transfer receipts, they are completely absent in assignments and in the origination they clearly show that the loan was never funded by the party “disclosed” as the lender at closing. They never show the terms of repayment as set forth in the bond. And therefore they leave the borrower and all other people or entities with a stake in the property after that transaction in a state of limbo because there is no clear path to clear title.

Too many cases are being lost in all forums because pro se litigants and lawyers and Judges are too willing to take the word of the party in the room that they MUST be the creditor — why else would they be there? It is because in most cases they are getting a free house when they were playing with investor money and they have created the losses to the investors, the homeowners and the taxpayers.

The government should claw back the money paid to the banks and claw back the profits they made using investor money to gamble with. The accounts should be settled with the investors and then allocated to the debts of each borrower to see what balance, if any, is left. The losses will largely vanish just be applying existing law and long-standing standards of accounting and bookkeeping. The resulting balance, if  any can easily be paid off by borrowers who will again have some equity in their homes because of the vast amount of over-payments received by the banks which they paid out in bonuses to their employees for their participation and silence in the PONZI scheme. As soon as the investors stopped buying the the bogus mortgage bonds the scheme collapsed — the hallmark of every illicit scheme based not on on real business but rather the appearance of of doing business.

F.H.A. Audit Said to Show Low Reserves

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON, NY Times

The Federal Housing Administration’s annual report is expected to show a sharp deterioration in the agency’s financial condition, including a shortfall in reserves, the result of escalating losses on the $1.1 trillion in mortgages that it insures, according to people with knowledge of the entity’s operations.

The F.H.A., the Department of Housing and Urban Development unit that insures home mortgages, reports on its capital reserves at the end of each fiscal year and makes projections for its financial position in the coming year. If the report, due later this week, showed that the F.H.A.’s capital reserves had fallen deep into negative territory, it would be a stark reversal from projections last year that it would show a positive economic value of $9.4 billion in 2012.

Capital reserves are kept to cover future losses. Outsiders have questioned whether the agency would some day need an infusion from Treasury if its reserves are insufficient.

Alex Wohl, a spokesman for the F.H.A., said, “We’re not going to comment on it until the actuarial report comes out on Friday.”

This year, the F.H.A. has tried to improve its financial position by raising the premiums that it levies on loans and increasing its volume significantly. But those efforts may have been negated by rising loan losses, even on mortgages that it insured long after the credit crisis took hold.

More than one in six F.H.A. loans are delinquent 30 days or more, according to Edward Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in housing. Delinquencies increased by 166,000 from June 30, 2011, to September 2012, he said, a 12 percent increase. Loans insured by the F.H.A. often allow very small down payments of 3.5 percent of the purchase price.

“There’s a fundamental problem with the F.H.A.,” Mr. Pinto said. “Its loans are too risky and that has to be addressed. It’s not the legacy book that’s creating all the problems. It’s beyond that.”

Brian Chappelle, a former F.H.A. official who is now at Potomac Partners, a mortgage consulting firm, said that he had not seen the audit report but that he had been told some of the shortfall resulted from less optimistic projections for home prices than were in last year’s audit.

“In and of itself, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to need a draw from the Treasury,” he said.

At the same time, “there is no question that F.H.A. was going to suffer,” he added. “The amazing thing is that F.H.A. stayed solvent for as long as it did.”

The F.H.A. is subject to a statutory capital requirement of 2 percent of loans, or about $22 billion on its $1.1 trillion portfolio. An economic value of negative $5 billion to $10 billion would leave the F.H.A. $27 billion to $32 billion short of this statutory requirement, Mr. Pinto said. This would be the fourth consecutive year that F.H.A. has failed to meet the requirement, he added.

Where is the Loan Receivable? Invitation to Investors Who Bought Mortgage Bonds

INVESTORS READ CAREFULLY

IF YOU BOUGHT MORTGAGE BONDS DURING THE MELTDOWN

As for the Borrower, we have the obligation, then the note supposedly evidence of the obligation, and then the mortgage which pledges the home as collateral for faithful performance as per the terms of the note.

As for the investor/lenders we also have a mortgage bond, supposedly backed by loans, in which repayment terms are vastly different from the note signed by the borrower.

This problem could have been alleviated if the investment bankers had simply placed the name of the REMIC on the note and mortgage but they had other ideas about trading with and on claims of ownership of the note, hence MERS and other intermediaries were introduced so that ownership would be obscured, thus creating unenforceable notes and mortgages as several investor suits have stated.

In accounting terms if a bank or other entity or institution provides a loan to someone, it would adjust its books and records to reflect (a) a loan receivable and (b) a reserve for bad debt against that loan receivable. The loan receivable goes into assets, and the reserve for bad debt goes on the liability side of the balance sheet.

After 6 years of this craziness I have come to the opinion that it is virtually certain that no entity, person or institution EVER had a loan receivable on their books with respect to most loans (96%) that were all subjected to false claims of securitization and assignments. What does that mean for the loan?

Assuming that the failure of any institution to properly record the loan was intentional, which it was, it undermines any claim on the documents or instruments in the fake chain of securitization and assignments. The most I have ever seen is a category in the asset section of the balance sheet called “Held for sale” which basically encompassed 96% on average of all loans on the books of originators, even if they were banks.

So what is the difference and how can this be used? What does it show? Is this something the Judge can understand? Yes, if you understand it and explain it correctly.

1. The borrower signed a note to which the lender was not a party.
2. The lender accepted a bond to which the borrower was not a party.
3. The note only suggests one obligor — the borrower and provides for use of proceeds of payments on that note.
4. The note only provides for one creditor — the payee on the note payable to the party the borrower THOUGHT was the lender, but wasn’t.
5. The note and riders provide for the method and manner of repayment.
6. The bond suggests multiple obligors and the record shows that the subservicer, master servicer, insurers, credit default swap counterparties, and diversion of payments from one tranche to another and one loan to another all cover the repayment of the interest and principal on the bond.
7. The bond has a different interest rate than the note.
8. The bond provides for cross collateralization and overcollateralization which is a fancy way of commingling multiple payments received from multiple parties and allocated them in a manner that appears to be exclusively determined by the Master Servicer.
9. The bond provides for continued payment by the subservicer of the monthly payment whether or not the original borrower makes a payment.
10. The note does not contain or even refer tot hose terms. In fact the note contradicts the bond in that the proceeds of payment made or allocated to the subject loan must be utilized in specific ways expressed in the note — ways that are far different than the ways the money is to be used when it comes to paying some lenders and not others.
11. The lender advances funds, part of which are used to fund the loan but the lender’s interests are not protected by the closing documents that the borrower signs.
12. The borrower signs the documents without receiving disclosure required by Federal and state laws as to the identity of the lender and terms of compensation, repayment etc.
13. In short, the note doesn’t match the bond. If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit, like it or not.
14. Neither the note nor the bond match the common law obligation between the borrower and the lender(s).
15. Thus three sets of repayment schedules are presented — those in the note, those in the bond, and the common law demand repayment.
16. If the note was payable to the lender, it could be secured by a mortgage. Since it was not made payable to the lender, the mortgage recorded is subject to cancellation of instrument.
17. The bond is not secured obviously because the lender was not party to the documents signed by the borrower.
18. The common law obligation appears to be the only valid obligation or debt that could be collected by providing the loan to borrower. The presumption would be that it is a demand loan but obviously unsecured by a mortgage signed by the borrower.

Thus when all is said and done and reality is introduced to most of these foreclosures, judicial, non-judicial or in bankruptcy courts or otherwise, you are left with an undocumented demand loan that is unsecured and which can be discharged in bankruptcy.

But most homeowners would be more than happy to negotiate in good faith just as the hundreds of thousands of people who applied for loan modifications believing the servicer was actually authorized when it wasn’t.

If you sweep away all the debris, the investors/lenders are NOT at risk for being fraudulent lenders but are the victims of securities fraud. And the borrowers are victims of deceptive lending practices, fraud and a host of other causes of action against virtually everyone except the actual lender. All of this is true only if you accept the premises described above which I consider to be unavoidable.

Thus the obvious answer is for a clearinghouse arrangement to be established by which the borrowers could communicate with investor lenders, unless the investors simply want to stick with their claims against the investment bank for selling them trash described as bonds.

I submit that the borrowers would enter into a true, non-defective mortgage directly with the investors to mitigate the investors loss and that the amount borrowers are willing to offer as the loan balance exceeds the value of the property and far exceeds the value of the proceeds on foreclosure.

I offer the services of my various technology platforms to be the intermediary through which the investors’ claims are collated into distinct groups which may or may not match up with the REMICs that were described in the prospectus because those REMICs were never funded.

Having done that we can provide investors with proof of how their money was misused and at the same time mitigate their losses.

This platform would match borrowers to groups of investors who would set forth the guidelines for accepting modification, given the current market conditions and the fact that the obligation is not secured.

Several managed funds have expressed some interest in this idea. I need to hear from more of you. If any managed fund or other investor in mortgage bonds would like to discuss this further, please call our customer service number 520-405-1688 and you will either receive an immediate call back or a  telephone appointment for a teleconference will be set up for you and/or your colleagues. We are looking for groups of fund managers because I don’t want to have 300 conversations when I could have just 5-6.

Commercial Property Securitized? Problems Look Like Same Games as Residential

In the last 3 months I have been assisting in the defense of some commercial property cases — strip malls, small hotels, warehouses, etc. And while the consensus has been that securitization of commercial mortgage backed securities has been relatively straightforward, it appears that at the very least there are exceptions to that rule and perhaps we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

The one thing that all the cases I have been working have in common is the presence of substantial equity in the property far above the principal balance claimed by the “lender” who, like the residential “lender” was not the lender at all. But the odd thing about these is that if you go to any lecture, book, or article on commercial foreclosures, the main thrust of the material is a workout presumably based on missed payments — even without the equity or any argument over whether payments were indeed missed.

But the cases coming to me have another thing in common — the unwillingness and runaround they get from the “lender” in working out the loan. This usually forces the case into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and thereafter the “fun” starts — differing accounting reports, documents appearing out of nowhere, and in general the same false, tired arguments from opposing counsel as we have heard in the residential cases. The fact that there is substantial equity has caused some bankruptcy judges to question the absence of a workout and why the case had to be brought to bankruptcy court.

Doing our securitization and title research we find that the players are frequently Deutsch Bank, Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns lurking somewhere in the background. And it doesn’t take long before the “lender” admits that the loan was funded by a securitization “trust.”

In one case that I might take, the “issue”is the payment of default interest when there does not appear to be any default even in conventional terms. So why would a lender, WANT a loan to be declared in default when there is plenty of equity, plenty of profit to pay the payments due and there is a long record of payments that were made on time?

In residential loans we know the reason is that the players in the securitization chain all claimed stakes in the loans and then traded the loans or bought insurance, credit default swaps or received federal bailouts because the loan was put in a pool where there genuine defaults in promised payments. They received a chunk of money from investors who thought they knew what they were buying, how the money would be used and that the loan would be subject to normal underwriting standards. None of that happened.

Instead, the players went “to the track” with the money placing bets on the loan pools and often collected multiples of principal that was in default, meaning that the “default” loans were completely paid off and that left money to cover loans that were not in default — at least not yet. By offering the investors one interest rate under terms of repayment that differed from the the terms agreed by the borrower and signed on the note, a yield spread premium was created. The higher the interest rate charged to the borrower compared with the interest rate promised to the investor, the less the players had to fund to complete the loan transaction.

So my suspicion, enhanced by the unwillingness of the players and their attorneys to provide real data on real money transactions involving the loan or the pool claiming ownership of the pool suggests to me that the loan was not assigned into the pool within the 90 day cutoff provided in the PSA, which is merely a recital of the rules under the REMIC statute in the Internal Revenue Code.

It also suggests to me that partially because there were loans like this in the pool, the declaration of a write-down of the pool, triggering payments of insurance and proceeds from credit default swaps was a false declaration. AND the money received from insurance and credit default swaps — all purchased with money originated from the investors, was neither credited against the balance due on the mortgage bond, nor to the borrower’s account, whose loan balance would be correspondingly reduced by a reduction in the account payable to the investor-lender.

So my suspicion is that the lawyers for these commercial properties are missing a possibility. The “lender” may need to kick the can down the road so that they can avoid being caught in the lie that the value of the loan pool was severely compromised, or worse, that they might owe the money back to the insurers and counterparties in the credit default swaps.

If that is correct then the REAL problem is not the missed payments that are alleged, or even the applicable default interest, but rather the money it will cost to give back to AIG, AMBAC, Deutsch etc. for receipt of funds that either were never deserved or are in any event owed back to those parties were duped into buying the loan pool multiple times under the guise of insurance contracts and credit default swaps.

The stonewalling of these players can only be attributed to some business (money) reason. And the only money reason I can think of is that they have received money for which they have not accounted on properties that were (a) not in default in any sense of the word and (b) fully collateralized by substantial equity.

If that is the case, it might be easier to get to the truth of the matter than in residential loan cases because commercial property owners tend to be able to pay for an adequate defense and they can’t be intimidated as easily as a homeowner. If I’m right, going after the money in discovery and showing the trail it followed and all the side deals that were made might be very productive in these commercial cases, and in fact, might lead to valuable information in residential loan “defaults.”

Then there is the intimidation factor which is the standard play in residential foreclosures. In the case of commercial properties there is frequently a personal guarantee which is separate and apart from the default of the business operated on the commercial property. But this might just backfire on the “lender” because just as they are bringing in co-obligors into the picture, the door is then opened for inquiry into other mitigating payments from insurance and CDS co-obligors.

Pure logic tells me that something is wrong here, since I have been on both side of commercial property foreclosures — representing the bank and representing the owner. Something has changed here from just a few years ago when none of these cases would ever have seen a courtroom nor would it have been in the minds of either the owner or the lender. In short, I smell a rat.

Unravelling UBS Derivative Bond Trading and Hedges Provide Details on Securitization Scam

“”Mr. Adoboli had ceased to act as a professional investment banker and had begun to approach his work as a naked gambler,” Ms. Wass said.”

Editor’s Comment: Just so there is no mistake about it, my opinion is that securitization never occurred and that all the paperwork was a cover-up for a complex PONZI scheme that ended like all all PONZI schemes —- when the money from new investments dries up, the scheme is over. I hold these truths to be self-evident and easily proven without speculation.

The failure of government to prosecute comes from two sources (a) conflicts of interests because of the revolving door for people who work at banks and then at regulators or vica versa and (b) because honest policy makers, unsophisticated in the ways of Wall Street truly believe that the collapse of bank of America, Chase, Citi, Wells et al would lead to a run on the banks and an end to our financial system and social network.

Bill Maher said it all last night when he “quipped” that our faith and belief in the almighty dollar exceeds any evidence of faith, belief or morality tied to a relationship with God. As long as that is true, prison populations will rise, drug lords to rise to greater wealth and power, and military-industrial complex (a warning from President Dwight Eisenhower) will control much of our spending and foreign policy. Today we add the threat of banks gone wild and the details of their sordid deals provide a road map for just how the supposed “securitization” of residential mortgages became real in the minds of millions and how it worked like a charm to cover up a common theft that rose so high that the consequences are still being felt as the theft continues right under the noses of regulators, law enforcement and law makers.

Behold the case of “Kweku M. Adoboli, a former UBS trader in London who faces four counts of fraud and false accounting in connection with a $2.3 billion loss at the Swiss bank.” Here in his own words and those who are prosecuting him, is the methods he used, the results he “achieved” and the plausible deniability that works so well on Wall Street to avoid criminal prosecution of the highest executives while they throw their soldiers under the bus.

This is a case that few people will notice unless they see articles like this one and it starts them thinking about how we got to this point where the entire housing market, consumer market and financial market is cornered by the decisions of common thieves who achieved power in ways no better than Scarface.

The man they are throwing under the bus (as opposed to leveraging him to get to higher and higher kingpins the way they do with drug lords) “doctored documents, invented profits and fabricated clients to cover up his rogue activities. Sasha Wass, the lead prosecutor, told a jury that Mr. Adoboli was motivated by greed and ego as he looked to increase his salary and status at the bank.”

One background comment here. Back when I was on Wall Street, the self-governing mechanism that worked most of the time was the fact that the firms were only allowed to be partnerships with no limitation on personal liability. When we allowed them to go public it was like opening the lion cage, because they could take whatever risks they wanted with the money of shareholders, clients or investors and pocket huge bonuses vastly exceeding the size of their prior partnership. Instead of partners at risk, we have management unhinged. It worked out for the people who rose to the top and many middle management folks who had never seen such salaries and bonuses in the history of Wall Street — all while median national income was flat, the economy was growing increasingly dependent on debt to create the appearance of commerce that would be counted in GDP measurements, and living expenses imposed on the middle class skyrocketed.

Fabrication of trades, documents and false accounting are and always have been a staple method of business. Wall Street institutionalized fraud as a custom and practice of the industry long before the mortgage meltdown, even preceding the dawn of the 20th century. What is different here is that for the last 30-40 years Wall Street has been dipping directly into the pockets of consumers and breaking laws that are already on the books, rules and regulations that have been in place since the Great depression that was also caused by Wall Street speculation, and generally treating consumers as trading pawns or garbage that could be viewed as collateral damage while Wall Street performed its function — to make money.

But Wall Street was not allowed into existence to MAKE money, it was allowed into existence to create liquidity which is another way of creating money not for themselves, which would be counterfeiting, but for others who are innovating, expanding and growing. With no effective referee on the playing field, the players went wild making up rules and even pretending they had played when they were out to lunch with the referees.

Wall Street began creating money for itself in 1983 with the full blessing of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government. Instead of using it as an engine for national growth, they used to to create growth of salaries and bonuses for the people who worked there, thus siphoning out of the economy what should have been piped in — liquidity, money, investment and loans into a strong economy.

Follow the bread crumbs and you will arrive at the front door of every mega bank and discover that securitization was completely falsified, covered up and sold in a way that even today has an aura of legitimacy. It is taken as true (an assumption that is totally wrong) that Wall Street firms sliced and diced the loans and sold them to investors through investment pools variously referred to as pools, REMICs, Special Purpose Vehicles, Trusts and other names.

Not one of these “pools” ever had a bank account, an asset or a penny. They were all fictitious entities with whom Wall Street made fictitious trades, as a cover-up for taking much of the money from pension funds and making ti the money of the Wall Street firms through trading profits (selling bad loans — funded from investor money from outside the securitization chain —- to the investors at a profit), thus creating the endless stories about trading profits and losses that never were real. It was simple theft: out of the money advanced by investors, Wall Street put much of it in their own very deep pockets.

They covered it up with fictitious or bad loans whose funding required much less money than the funding on a real loan using standard underwriting procedures based upon the premise of repayment. Here the premise was nonpayment and Wall Street made sure that was what happened — even if the loans were current.

“Mr. Adoboli took pains to evade internal controls. According to prosecutors, the former UBS trader, who focused on a plain-vanilla version of derivatives trading, falsified trades valued from $5 million to $20 million. Mr. Adoboli even created separate accounts, which he called his umbrella, to hide the profits and losses of his unauthorized activities. In 2009, the so-called umbrella held $30 million, according to the prosecution.”

In the real world of business people whoa re CEO of a large organization or said to have known or should have known” about bad or illegal practices. In the world of finance such statements are never made, and instead of sitting in prison, people like Jamie Dimon sits on the board of the New York Federal Reserve board.

If you liked the crash of 2007-2009 you are going to love what happens next. The ONLY hope we have is your use of voting power and putting practical understandable policies into place by electing those who are not bought off by the banks.

September 14, 2012, 3:59 pm <!– — Updated: 6:59 pm –>

Ex-UBS Trader Is Accused of Gambling in a Big Loss

By MARK SCOTT

LONDON – Fictitious trading and brazen gambling by a single individual could have brought down the Swiss financial giant UBS, a British prosecutor said on Friday at the trial of a former bank employee accused of causing a multibillion-dollar trading loss.

That thesis is at the heart of the case against Kweku M. Adoboli, a former UBS trader in London who faces four counts of fraud and false accounting in connection with a $2.3 billion loss at the Swiss bank. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In their opening statement, prosecutors portrayed Mr. Adoboli as a freewheeling trader who doctored documents, invented profits and fabricated clients to cover up his rogue activities. Sasha Wass, the lead prosecutor, told a jury that Mr. Adoboli was motivated by greed and ego as he looked to increase his salary and status at the bank.

At one point, the former UBS trader had $12 billion on the line, according to prosecutors. Those activities, they claimed, threatened the bank’s health.

“The scale of Mr. Adoboli’s gambling was so large and unchecked, he could quite easily have approached and even exceeded the limits of the bank’s resources,” Ms. Wass said in the Southwark Crown Court. “He was a gamble or two away from destroying Switzerland’s largest bank for his own benefit.”

Prosecutors previewed their case before a packed courtroom in central London. During the nearly five hours of opening statements, Mr. Adoboli, in a gray suit and purple tie, sat quietly, surrounded by lawyers, while several of his friends listened in the courtroom.

If convicted, Mr. Adoboli could face up to 10 years in prison.

The case has been a black eye for UBS. After discovering the trading loss, Oswald J. Grübel, who had been hired to lead a turnaround at the bank, stepped down as chief executive. The co-chiefs of global equities, the division where the loss occurred, also subsequently left UBS.

On Friday, prosecutors claimed Mr. Adoboli took pains to evade internal controls. According to prosecutors, the former UBS trader, who focused on a plain-vanilla version of derivatives trading, falsified trades valued from $5 million to $20 million. Mr. Adoboli even created separate accounts, which he called his umbrella, to hide the profits and losses of his unauthorized activities. In 2009, the so-called umbrella held $30 million, according to the prosecution.

At first, the tactics paid off. The former trader had earned a combined $90 million profit for both UBS and its clients by May 2011, prosecutors said. Mr. Adoboli’s salary rose tenfold, to £350,000 ($569,000) from 2006 to 2010, according to the prosecution.

Despite the early gains, Mr. Adoboli’s trades started to go bad in the summer of 2011 as the world’s financial markets grappled with the European debt crisis.

By June, the former trader had exceeded his trading limit by $1 billion after creating a series of fictitious trades, the prosecution said. His investments had risen to $5 billion as of August, and Mr. Adoboli posted a $1.8 billion loss on the activity, which he also hid through false accounting, Ms. Wass contended.

The unauthorized trades left the Swiss bank at risk. In an internal investigation, UBS found that the reported risk of Mr. Adoboli’s activity totaled $1.5 million by mid-September 2011, according to prosecutors. In reality, the financial risk stood at $8.1 billion.

“Mr. Adoboli had ceased to act as a professional investment banker and had begun to approach his work as a naked gambler,” Ms. Wass said.

Last August, risk managers at UBS began to ask questions about his positions. William Steward, an accountant at the firm, challenged Mr. Adoboli several times about discrepancies in his trades, Ms. Wass said.
After the bank raised further concerns, Mr. Adoboli walked out of UBS last Sept. 14 and wrote an e-mail to Mr. Steward that the prosecution referred to as a “bombshell e-mail.” In the note, Mr. Adoboli said his recent trades had not been hedged, leaving the bank exposed to potential multibillion-dollar losses. Ms. Wass said that in the e-mail, the former UBS trader initially said he had acted alone, though he later claimed that some of his colleagues were aware of his actions.

“Although I had a couple of opportunities to unwind the long trade for a negligible loss, I did not move quickly enough,” Mr. Adoboli wrote to UBS executives. “I take full responsibility for my actions.”

After senior managers received the e-mail, they demanded Mr. Adoboli return to the London office to explain his actions.

In a series of meetings that lasted until the early morning of last Sept. 15, UBS executives peppered Mr. Adoboli with questions about his trades. During the discussions, the former trader admitted that he had first falsified records in 2008 after making a $400,000 trading loss, according to the prosecution. Mr. Adoboli said that he had concealed the losses in the hopes of recovering the money through future trades.

“The bank cannot be faulted for trusting him,” Ms. Wass said. “They respected him, and he abused their trust to cheat them for his own eventual gain.”

State Treasurers Finally Get Message: Sue the Banks

Editor’s Note: State Treasurers and Finance Directors are realizing that their own jobs are on the line when the voters go to the polls. While avoiding the third rail of wrongful and illegal foreclosures, the trading in illegal and fraudulent instruments, states can no longer avoid the reaction from those who marshal the the state’s financial resources. LIBOR has been manipulated for what appears to be at least 15 years and perhaps longer. It was easy to do considering the “trust” that Banks talk about all the time and which enable them to get the upper hand in foreclosure litigation where they are getting the benefit of the doubt.

The fall out from this is that you finally have experienced personnel sifting through data that makes other state officials go to sleep. They are discovering losses caused by the manipulation of LIBOR, the most prominent benchmark index for lending rates in the world. The deeper they dig, the closer they will get to another inconvenient truth. Whether they broadcast the results or not, they will be moving perilously close to the stonewall that currently protects the freedom of bankers in creating the largest Ponzi scheme in human history, which, by the way, is still going on.

Securitization as it has been described  to both investors, regulators and legislatures was (like LIBOR) a big fat lie. The result could well upset thousands of government liens as well as having deprived the governments of revenue to which they were entitled. Just as in the LIBOR scandal all the outward appearances of propriety were visible, the dark ugly truth is simply that bankers were stealing the money from pension funds, putting into their own pockets, and using a little to fund mortgages. When they did the fund the mortgages, they completely ignored the securitization “structure” that had been described in the prospectus and pooling and servicing agreement.

These descriptions were used to get fund managers for pension funds to buy bogus, worthless mortgage bonds and together the bonds and descriptions were used to get ratings of the securities, insurance and trading profits from the bonds, the loans, credit default swaps and other exotic vehicles.

There is no need to unravel securitization because it never happened. The investor money was controlled by the investment banks, not by “trustees” of common law trusts whose assets were loans. The banks played the role of commercial banks in funding the loans and directed that the lender be a party other than the lending source — so people started making stuff up and tracking it in the make-believe world of MERS title transfer system. The reason Wall Street needed the note and mortgage to avoid making the real source of lending was because they were stealing the money, trading with the money for their own accounts, instead of for the pension funds.

Like any embezzler starting a Ponzi scheme, Wall Street “borrowed” the money from the investors in “mortgage bonds.” There were no mortgage bonds, there were no pools, there were no loan receivable accounts, and thus no valid note that was evidence of the obligation that was owed to the pension funds (unknown to the borrower). With no valid note, the security relied upon by the pension funds also never existed. A perfected lien could not be established without the payee on the note funding the loan. It never happened.

When all is said and done, the pension funds have claims against the bankers, AND they are the only creditors who can and should expect payment from the borrowers — but without a note or mortgage or deed of trust. And the pension funds’ agents who received money from trading, insurance, credit default swaps and other sources present a new problem to the pension fund investors in mortgage-backed securities. The receipt of those funds by their agents although never turned over to the creditors, is due the creditor. Thus the bond principal is reduced.

With the bond principal reduced, the creditor’s account receivable is correspondingly reduced because the pension fund is only entitled to be repaid once. Hence my prior statements that the entire loan receivable account, if it even exists, must be examined starting with the origination of the loan through the present. The reductions at the creditor level in the TOTAL account receivable inure to the benefit of the borrowers whose principal has been paid by co-obligors that the borrower never knew existed and may well have never wanted to partner with. But those payments were paid and received.

Allowing those same intermediary banks to foreclose “borrowing” the name of some non-existent trust with a non existent bank account is where the windfall, the free house rears is head — not as has been presupposed to the borrower homeowner who still owes the money to someone.

If that balance is forgiven the homeowner has received a benefit — a taxable benefit that could be recouped in the existing income tax structure with installment payments with an even stronger lien than the mortgage lien that never was perfected. State and Federal Treasuries would be replenished, the middle class  on the road to recovery, and consumer confidence was break through the roof with at least some of their wealth restored. This is not a free ride for homeowner borrowers. The free ride is for the bankers who pay nothing in off-shore tax havens on the proceeds of loans they neither funded nor purchased except with money stolen from pension fund managers.

The devil is in the details. The current Libor investigation can reveal not only illegal trading that resulted in losses to state treasuries but also losses to both the state treasuries and the homeowners whose loans were set, even at fixed rate, based upon Libor. This “game” is far from over.

The only way the bankers can avoid jail is the time-honored way of continuing the Ponzi scheme until you can’t. That is what is happening and that is exactly what is close to being revealed. And those revelations might end up replacing at least some substantial return of the wealth stolen from pension funds, homeowners, state treasuries and other agencies for fees, fines, interest and penalties. When we get to the point where the realization becomes generally accepted that the documents were all lies, fabricated out of thin air and the recorded, then we start getting into concrete areas where criminal laws apply.

Banks Face Suits as States Weigh Libor Losses

By NATHANIEL POPPER, NY Times

The scandal over global interest rates has state officials like Janet Cowell of North Carolina working intensely behind the scenes to build a case for suing the nation’s largest banks.

Ms. Cowell, the state’s elected treasurer, and several of her staff members have spent the summer combing through the state’s investments trying to determine how much the state may have lost because of suspected manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which is used as a benchmark for trillions of dollars of financial contracts around the world.

“We think this could be as big as the mortgage crisis settlement, that this could be a really high impact situation and that we should be aggressive on this,” Ms. Cowell said, referring to the $25 billion settlement that the nation’s biggest banks entered with state attorneys general.

The activity provides a glimpse at how widely the Libor scandal has spread through the financial world, and how much damage may still be in store for the banks accused of manipulating Libor. Her work also suggests just how difficult it is, and how long it may take, to get to the bottom of the losses.

The attorneys general in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut have all been examining how much their states may have lost as a result of a lowered Libor. A spokeswoman for Connecticut’s attorney general, George C. Jepsen, said that the state’s work with New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, “has broadened significantly over the last few weeks and we are now coordinating with a much larger group of attorneys general.”

Even before the British bank Barclays admitted in June that its employees had tried to manipulate Libor, there were a number of lawsuits filed by cities and municipal agencies seeking damages from large banks for manipulating Libor. But while those cases were filed by private sector lawyers, the public officials are looking at bringing more wide-ranging lawsuits on behalf of the states. The Justice Department has coordinated with the states and is leading its own investigation.

The government officials are hoping that their cases will be bolstered by new settlements between regulators and individual banks that are suspected of participating in the manipulation. Most of the more than one dozen banks involved in setting Libor have said in official filings that they are in discussions with regulators about their involvement in the Libor process.

Libor is supposed to represent how much banks are paying for short-term loans from other banks. It is determined by the British Bankers Association after a daily poll of the world’s largest banks. It then serves as a benchmark for rates paid by consumers and businesses on everything from mortgages to derivatives to student loans.

Barclays said in its settlement that it and other banks pushed Libor down artificially during the financial crisis to appear more healthy. Barclays also admitted that its traders tried to manipulate Libor at other points in order to sweeten particular financial deals. Barclays paid $450 million to settle the charges.

The financial products used by states and local governments are especially vulnerable to an artificially lowered rate.

Ms. Cowell, a 44-year-old Democrat and former business consultant who is running for another four-year term, was aware of the potential implications of the Libor case for North Carolina almost as soon as the Barclays settlement was announced on June 27. The next Monday, at her weekly staff meeting, she asked her office’s lawyers and investment officers to begin looking into it.

The inquiry has focused primarily on two areas of the state’s finances.

One was the state’s public pension plans, which in North Carolina are overseen by the treasurer. A state money manager began identifying bonds held by the state pension fund and money market fund investments that derived their value from Libor.

In July, lawyers from the treasurer’s office took part in a conference call on the topic with pension funds in other states. Ms. Cowell and members of her staff have found a few investments held by the $76 billion pension fund that were tied to Libor, but they have now determined that the losses were most likely “pretty small.”

The other, more significant area where Ms. Cowell began looking for losses was in a kind of financial contract that many states use, known as an interest rate swap. States use swaps when they want to issue a bond at a floating interest rate but protect themselves from future swings in rates. In a standard swap, a state makes a regular payment to its bank and gets a payment back that is determined by the level of Libor. If Libor was lower, the payments will be, too.

North Carolina had two major swaps at the time the benchmark was suspected of being rigged. Together, the two swaps were tied to $1.3 billion of bonds that were issued in 2002 and 2005. The banks on the other side of these contracts included Bank of America, of Charlotte, N.C., and JPMorgan Chase & Company based in New York, both of which are involved in setting Libor.

The challenge facing North Carolina and other states is that there is no agreement yet on how much the banks actually manipulated Libor, and for how long. The lawsuits that have already been filed have estimated that the banks held Libor down by at least 30 basis points, or 0.30 percent, for three years. By one method of calculation, that could have meant losses for North Carolina of around $10 million on their swaps.

Ms. Cowell said she assumed that as more banks settled with regulators, those numbers would become clearer. In the meantime, the treasurer’s office is working out formulas for losses that they can plug numbers into if and when new settlements are made public. At that point, Ms. Cowell also plans to share her work with other municipal agencies in North Carolina that held about 40 swaps during the period in question.

“This is an unprecedented level of analysis, and an unprecedented wide spectrum of financial impact,” Ms. Cowell said.

The inquiry could provide a political bump for Ms. Cowell, who is seeking another term as anti-Wall Street sentiment is running high. A graduate of the Wharton School of Business, she served on the Raleigh, N.C., City Council and then the state Senate before taking office in 2008. She cites among her accomplishments the state’s maintaining its status as one of eight with a AAA rating from the major credit rating agencies.

North Carolina’s attorney general will make the final determination on whether the state will join existing lawsuits, proceed with its own case or take no action at all. The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

But the office has been involved in many of the discussions with the treasurer’s staff, people involved in the meetings said.

 

Weidner: Notes Are Not Negotiable Instruments

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Editor’s Notes:  

Matt Weidner appears to have mastered the truth about securitization and how to apply it in foreclosure defense cases. The article below is really for lawyers, paralegals and very sophisticated pro se litigants. His point about being careful about how you present this is very well taken. This is for lawyers to do and lawyers should read this and get with the program. Securitization turned about to be virtually all SHAM transactions with the real financial transaction hidden away from the view of the borrower, the courts and even securitization analysts. The operative rule here is that the existence of a financial transaction does not mean that strangers to that transactions can claim any rights. 

These loans were nearly always funded by other parties who had made promises to investors whose money was used to fund the mortgages. The very existence of co-obligors and payments by them defeats the arguments of the banks and servicers. I’d like to see ONE investor come into court and say that yes, they would ratify the inclusion of a defaulted loan into their pool years after the cutoff date which negates their tax benefits. There is o reasonable basis for an investor to do or say that. That leaves the loan undocumented, unsecured and subject to offset for predatory and wrongful lending practices.

The wrong way of approaching this is any way in which you are going into court to disclaim the obligation when everyone knows you received the money or the benefit of the money. The obligation exists. And the only way to discharge that debt is through payment, waiver (or bankruptcy) or forgiveness. Anything that smells like “I don’t owe this money anymore” is going to be rejected in most cases. But an attack on the lien and the reality of the true creditor is a different story. That needs to be presented as simply as possible and I think I good way to start is to deny the loan, obligation, note, mortgage etc on the basis of an absence of any financial transaction between the borrower and the party named on the documents upon which the foreclosers rely. Any discovery at all will reveal that the money never came from the payee on the note or mortgagee or beneficiary on the mortgage or deed of trust. 

by Matt Weidner:

Let’s start with real basic stuff here.  Sometimes law is complex, nuanced,difficult.  Other times it’s black and white…you just read the words, look at the facts and the answer is unavoidable.  Such is the case with the simmering dispute over the fact that the notes that are part of nearly every residential foreclosure case are not negotiable instruments.  Oh sure, too many courts won’t take the time to consider the argument and…just yesterday I heard an appellate court argument where the judges just kept repeating the mantra, “this is a negotiable instrument” without ever doing any analysis at all and without any finding of that “fact” from the trial court.  The attorney needed to stop the appellate judge right there and say, “No Your Honor, it’s Not A Negotiable Instrument”.

Just last week, in a trial court, here’s exactly the way it went down.  Now, keep in mind, this argument in court was supplemented by a long and detailed memo similar to the one attached here.  The best part it was in front of one of Florida’s most respected and brilliant judges.  He’s been on the bench longer than I’ve been alive, he knows more law in the tip of his finger than most lawyers get in their whole bodies in an entire lifetime, he’s presided over tens of thousands of foreclosure cases. It was a beautiful thing to see an argument before a dedicated jurist whose seen and heard it all before that really made him sit up, dig in to those decades of judicial wisdom and then do the heavy lifting. That’s one of the beautiful things about this job….despite decades of work and hundreds of years of law, out of nowhere something new and exciting can still get the intellect and wisdom fired up and shooting like a cannon. Here’s how it goes down:

Your honor, I’ve highlighted and present for you the statutory definition of a “negotiable instrument”.  Because it’s a statutory definition, it’s black and white. We cannot alter or weave or color it with shades of gray….here’s what it is:

673.1041 Negotiable instrument.—
(1) Except as provided in subsections (3), (4), and (11), the term “negotiable instrument” means
an unconditional promise or order to pay a fixed amount of money, with or without interest or other
charges described in the promise or order, if it:
(a) Is payable to bearer or to order at the time it is issued or first comes into possession of a
holder;
(b) Is payable on demand or at a definite time; and
(c) Does not state any other undertaking or instruction by the person promising or ordering
payment to do any act in addition to the payment of money.

FL Article 3

Now, we’re all stuck with exactly that definition. Before we examine the note in this case, let’s first think about what a negotiable instrument is….a check made payable to a person for $100. An IOU for $100.  Bills of lading with a total included.  It’s all real simple.

So now that we’re fixed about what a negotiable instrument is, let’s examine what it ain’t.  What ain’t a negotiable instrument, as defined by Florida law is the standard Fannie/Freddie Promissory note and the following paragraphs are the primary reasons why.  Read each one carefully and ask, “Are these sentences conditions or undertakings other than the promise to repay money?” (Of course they are)

4.         BORROWER’S RIGHT TO PREPAY

I have the right to make payments of Principal at any time before they are due.  A payment of Principal only is known as a “Prepayment.”  When I make a Prepayment, I will tell the Note Holder in writing that I am doing so.  I may not designate a payment as a Prepayment if I have not made all the monthly payments due under the Note.

I may make a full Prepayment or partial Prepayments without paying a Prepayment charge.  The Note Holder will use my Prepayments to reduce the amount of Principal that I owe under this Note.  However, the Note Holder may apply my Prepayment to the accrued and unpaid interest on the Prepayment amount, before applying my Prepayment to reduce the Principal amount of the Note.  If I make a partial Prepayment, there will be no changes in the due date or in the amount of my monthly payment unless the Note Holder agrees in writing to those changes.

5.         LOAN CHARGES

If a law, which applies to this loan and which sets maximum loan charges, is finally interpreted so that the interest or other loan charges collected or to be collected in connection with this loan exceed the permitted limits, then:  (a) any such loan charge shall be reduced by the amount necessary to reduce the charge to the permitted limit; and (b) any sums already collected from me which exceeded permitted limits will be refunded to me.  The Note Holder may choose to make this refund by reducing the Principal I owe under this Note or by making a direct payment to me.  If a refund reduces Principal, the reduction will be treated as a partial Prepayment.

10.  UNIFORM SECURED NOTE

This Note is a uniform instrument with limited variations in some jurisdictions.  In addition to the protections given to the Note Holder under this Note, a Mortgage, Deed of Trust, or Security Deed (the “Security Instrument”), dated the same date as this Note, protects the Note Holder from possible losses which might result if I do not keep the promises which I make in this Note.  That Security Instrument describes how and under what conditions I may be required to make immediate payment in full of all amounts I owe under this Note.  Some of those conditions are described as follows:

If all or any part of the Property or any Interest in the Property is sold or transferred (or if Borrower is not a natural person and a beneficial interest in Borrower is sold or transferred) without Lender’s prior written consent, Lender may require immediate payment in full of all sums secured by this Security Instrument. However, this option shall not be exercised by Lender if such exercise is prohibited by Applicable Law.

If Lender exercises this option, Lender shall give Borrower notice of acceleration.  The notice shall provide a period of not less than 30 days from the date the notice is given in accordance with Section 15 within which Borrower must pay all sums secured by this Security Instrument.  If Borrower fails to pay these sums prior to the expiration of this period, Lender may invoke any remedies permitted by this Security Instrument without further notice or demand on Borrower.

3210-FloridaFRNote-Freddie_UI

So, the deal is, if we were sitting in a law school classroom, there’s not a chance in the world but that every student in the room and the professor would agree and understand that the document being examined side by side is not covered by the definition provided.  The problem is we get into courtrooms and we get infected by considerations that are beyond and above the operative law.  Judgment gets clouded by preconceived notions and prejudices against our neighbors and favoritism for the criminal banking institutions that caused all this mess. Even to this day, years into this, years into all the fraud and the lies and the deceit, it’s like we’re still hypnotized by the banks and their black magic and voodoo.

Now, if you really want to take it a step deeper, Margery Golant makes a very credible argument that in doing this analysis we cannot just look at the note alone, but that we must also examine the mortgage that follows with it.  They truly are two integrated documents and you can see from her highlights that so many of the provisions in the mortgage have nothing to do with security and everything to do with conditions on the payment of money….these provisions are just jammed into the mortgage and kept out of the note to try and prop up this artifice of negotiability.  Read her highlights with this analysis in mind:

Fannie Florida Mortgage with Golant Highlights

Further supported by this case Sims v New Falls

Now, understand the industry never intended these notes and mortgages to transfer via endorsement.  The industry set this whole system up so that the notes and mortgage would transfer via Article 9 of the UCC.  It’s just so plain and simple.  They never set it up or intended that million dollar notes and mortgages would transfer via forged endorsements, undated squiggles and rubber stamps or floating allonges.  Of course not…that’s just crazy.  The entire system was created such that notes and mortgages and all the servicing agreements and rights and liabilities would transfer via far more formalized Assignments, with names and dates and notary stamps and witnesses.  The Article 9 transfer regime had nothing to do with protecting consumers, but everything to do with protecting the players in the industry from the scams, the lies, the cons that they all like to play on one another. (Hello, LIBOR anyone?)

But when the shifty con artists that set this whole securitization card game up, they were so focused on how much money they were making, they never considered what would happen when the whole house of cards blew down.  When it blew down, they threw their Article 9 intentions out the window and adopted the whole Article 3 negotiable instrument delusion.  Isn’t it an absurd argument when they cannot answer the question, “if assignments don’t matter, why do you still bother to do them?”  It’s because they do matter….assignments were and remain the foundation of their transfers.  The problem is Assignments, what with their pesky dates and legible names and notaries and all reveal the lies and the fraud and the con that developed once the system came crashing down and they all started stealing from one another. (With the explicit approval of our state and federal government to do so….too big to jail you know.)

Anywhoo, there’s still some faint glimmer of hope as long as we still have good judges out there that are willing to think these things through and do the heavy lifting, we might be able to rescue our nation’s judicial system and in fact our nation as a whole from this deep, dark black pit that we’ve all descended down.

I urge everyone to be very careful with these arguments.  I’m a very big supporter of pro se people and consumers being integrated into their courtrooms and being fully engaged in the public spaces they own. I’ve also seen some very good pro se people go into courtrooms and do some very beautiful things.  In some ways it’s like a “From the mouths of babes” experience.  Language and arguments stripped away from all their lawyerly pretense can have a magic effect on a judge’s ear and thoughtfully and well-prepared arguments are often received with great enthusiasm from our circuit courts….particularly those judges that recognize the roots of our civilian circuit justice system.  The danger is that ill-prepared and poorly presented arguments will taint the ears and poison the minds of judges that might otherwise accept with an open mind…..keep that in mind.  Max Gardner is the Obi One Kenobe of all this and there’s just something about the way he lays it out so clear and clean and simple that has it all make sense.  I really encourage everyone to get all his material and invest in the week long bootcamp before you go trying any of this out…..MAX GARDNER BOOTCAMP

And now my briefs:

Motion-to-Dismiss

Initial-Brief

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DELAY Is the Name of the Game

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Editor’s Notes:  

It comes as no surprise that BofA, now the unproud owner of Countrywide, would repeatedly appeal a judgment in which a moral man tried to avoid moral hazard at Countrywide and was fired for it. Corporations do that all the time to gain the advantage of achieving a smaller settlement or to dissuade others from doing the same thing. I feel appalled that this guy in Gretchen’s story is still waiting for his compensation and that if BofA has its way, he will be deprived of it altogether. BofA of coruse says that when they acquired CW there just wasn’t a job left for him. Bullcrap:

“But a juror in the case rejected this argument. “There was no doubt in my mind that the guys at Countrywide had not only done something wrong legally and ethically, but they weren’t very bright about it,” said that juror, Sam Usher, a former human resources executive at General Motors who spoke recently about the officials who testified. “If somebody in an organization is a whistle-blower, then you not only treat him with respect, you also make sure that whatever he was concerned about gets taken care of. These folks went in the other direction.” (e.s., see full article below and link).

“These folks went in the other direction” is an understatement. And while most of the media is stepping back from foreclosure stories except for reporting the numbers, this story brings back the raw, mean, lawless intent of Countrywide and other leaders of the securitization scam. Let me first remind you that for the most part, the “securitization” never occurred. Any loan declared to be part of a pool that was “securitized” or otherwise transferred into the pool is a damn lie. Very few people understand how that even COULD be true, much less believe that it is an accurate statement. But it is true. There was no securitization in most cases.

If a loan was securitized it would have been underwritten by a bona fide lender and then sold to an aggregator, and from there sold to a REMIC “trust” or special purpose vehicle. Certificates of ownership of the loan together with a promise to pay the owner of the loan a sum of money with interest would have been issued to qualified investors like pension funds and other institutional investors upon which our society depends for social services and a safety net (which in the case of pension funds is largely funded by the workers themselves). Of course the investors would have paid the investment banker for those loans including a small fee for brokering the transaction. And everyone lives happily ever after because Tinker Bell certified the transactions.

So if the loan was securitized, then both the document trail and the money trail would show that the loan was properly owned and funded by the “lender,”, the lender assigned the loan in exchange for payment from the aggregator and the aggregator assigned the loan in exchange for payment into the pool (REMIC, trust, or whatever you want to call it). The problem for the banks is that none of that happened in most cases. And their solution to that problem, instead of acting like trustworthy banks, is to delay and fabricate and forge and intimidate. (PRACTICE NOTE: THESE ARE THE DOCUMENTS AND PROOF OF PAYMENT YOU WANT IN DISCOVERY)

The real story is that the loan was not underwritten by a bona fide lender whose role involved any risk of loss on the loan. In fact, in most cases there was no financial transaction between the lender named on the note and mortgage and the borrower. The financial transaction actually occurred between the borrower and an undifferentiated commingled group of investors who THOUGHT they were buying into REMICs but whose money was used for anything BUT the REMICs. Their money was in an account far from the securitization chain described above controlled by an investment bank who was taking “trading profits” and fees out of the money as though it was their own private piggy bank.

The “assignment” (sometimes erroneously referred to as an allonge or endorsement) was offered and accepted between the named lender (who was not the real lender) and the mortgage aggregator WITHOUT PAYMENT. The assignment says “for value received” but the value was received by the borrower and the investment bank and so there was no payment by the aggregator for an assignment from a “lender” that wasn’t the lender anyway and who never had one penny in the deal, nor any legal right to declare that they were the owner of the loan.

The “aggregator” was a fictitious entity meant to deceive any inquiring eyes. My eyes were inquiring and for a long while I believed in the existence of the aggregator — but then I was late on getting the real scoop on Santa and tooth fairy too. But it misdirects the attention of the audience like any illusionist. Meanwhile various “affiliates of the investment bank are busy creating “exotic instruments” that make believe that the bank owns the loan and thus has the power to sell it, when in fact we all know that the investors own the note but even they don’t quite understand how they own the note — a fact complicated by the fact that the “aggregator” was a fiction and the money came from a Superfund escrow account in which ALL the money from ALL the investors was commingled and the moment of funding of each loan was a different moment in the SuperFund account because money was coming and going and so were investors. This is what enabled the banks to (a) sell something they didn’t own (they called it selling forward, but it wasn’t selling forward, it was fraud) (b) sell it over and over again, by calling the “exotic instrument” something else, changing a few pieces of information about the loan data and presto!, Bear Stearns had “leveraged” the loan 42 times.

Translation: They sold something they didn’t have 42 times. And the risk of loss was that if someone in the chain of sales ever demanded delivery, they needed to go out and buy the loans which they figured was a sure thing because in all probability the loans were not worth the paper they were written on and in the open market, they could be purchased for pennies while Bear Stearns et al was selling the loans 42 times over at 100 cents on the dollar.

The last “assignment” for “value received” into the “pool” also had similar problems. First, the aggregator was a fictitious entity, second there was no value paid, and third they had already sold the loan 42 times. Add to that the assignment simply never took place to either the aggregator or the pool unless there was litigation and you have a real mess on your hands, which is where distraction and delay and illusion and raw intimidation come into play — all present in the case of one Michael Winston, a former executive at Countrywide Financial.

The repeated sales of the loans, the repeated collection of insurance for losses that never occurred, and repeated collection of proceeds of credit default swaps (a/k/a sales with a different name) means quite simply that the loan was paid in full from the start and that there is no balance due and probably never was any balance due and even if there was a balance due it was never due to the people who are now foreclosing. So why are they foreclosing? Because if they get to complete a foreclosure it completes the illusion that the investors were owed the money from the borrower instead of the bank that stole their money in the first place. So they pursue foreclosures while their PR machines grind out the illusion of modifications and mediation and short-sales. Nobody is getting good title or a title policy worth the paper it is written upon, but who cares?

He Felled a Giant, but He Can’t Collect

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

“TAKING on corporate Goliaths for their wrongdoing should not be so daunting.”

That’s the view of Michael Winston, a former executive at Countrywide Financial, the subprime lending machine that was swallowed up by Bank of America in 2008. Mr. Winston won a wrongful-dismissal and retaliation case against the company in February 2011, but is still waiting to receive his $3.8 million award. Bank of America is fighting back and has appealed the jury verdict twice.

After hearing a month of testimony from a parade of top Countrywide officials, including the company’s founder, Angelo Mozilo, a California state jury sided with Mr. Winston. An executive with decades of expertise in management strategy, he contended that he was pushed out for, among other things, refusing to follow questionable orders from his superiors.

But for the last year and a quarter, Mr. Winston, 61, has been in legal limbo. Bank of America lost one appeal in the court that heard the case and has filed another that is pending in state appellate court.

Mr. Winston, meanwhile, has been unable to find work that is commensurate with his experience. “The devastation caused by Countrywide to me, my family, my team, the work force, customers, shareholders, taxpayers and citizens around the world is incalculable,” he said.

Before joining Countrywide, Mr. Winston held high-powered strategy posts at Motorola, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed. He was global head of worldwide leadership and organizational strategy at Merrill Lynch in New York but resigned from that post in 2003 to care for his parents, who were terminally ill.

At Countrywide, he said, one of his problems was his refusal in fall 2006 to misrepresent the company’s corporate governance practices to analysts at Moody’s Investors Service. The ratings agency had expressed concerns about succession planning at Countrywide and other governance issues that the company hoped to allay.

Mr. Winston says a Countrywide executive asked him to write a report outlining Countrywide’s extensive succession planning for use by Moody’s. He refused, noting that he had no knowledge of any such plan. The company began to diminish his duties and department shortly thereafter. He was dismissed after Bank of America took over Countrywide.

Of course, it is not unusual for big corporate defendants to appeal jury awards. Bank of America argues in its court filings that the jury erred because Mr. Winston’s battles with his Countrywide superiors had nothing to do with his dismissal. Bank officials testified that he was let go because there was no job for him at the acquiring company.

“We believe that the jury’s finding of liability on the single claim of wrongful termination in retaliation is not supported by any evidence, let alone ‘substantial evidence’ as is required by law,” a Bank of America spokesman said.

In court filings, the bank also said that the jury appeared to be “swayed by emotion and prejudice, focusing on unsubstantiated and unsupported statements by plaintiff and his counsel slandering Countrywide and its executives.”

But a juror in the case rejected this argument. “There was no doubt in my mind that the guys at Countrywide had not only done something wrong legally and ethically, but they weren’t very bright about it,” said that juror, Sam Usher, a former human resources executive at General Motors who spoke recently about the officials who testified. “If somebody in an organization is a whistle-blower, then you not only treat him with respect, you also make sure that whatever he was concerned about gets taken care of. These folks went in the other direction.”

The credibility of all testimony in the case was central to jurors’ deliberations, Mr. Usher said. Instructions to the jury went into great detail on this point, advising them that they were “the sole and exclusive judges of the believability of the witnesses and the weight to be given the testimony of each witness.” The instructions added: “A witness, who is willfully false in one material part of his or her testimony, is to be distrusted in others.”

Mr. Usher said that those who testified against Mr. Winston “didn’t have a lot of credibility.”

That’s putting it mildly, said Charles T. Mathews, a former prosecutor in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office who represented Mr. Winston. He said he was so disturbed by what he characterized as persistent perjury by various Countrywide officials that he forwarded annotated copies of court transcripts to Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles district attorney, for possible investigation.

“We won a multimillion-dollar verdict against Countrywide, but it sticks in my guts that they lied through their teeth and continue to escape accountability,” Mr. Mathews wrote to Mr. Cooley, urging him to investigate.

Whether perjury or not, the testimony ran into withering challenges.

Countrywide’s top human resources executive testified that Mr. Winston was a problematic employee and not a team player. But a performance evaluation she had written shortly before the company started to reduce his duties was produced in the case. It said Mr. Winston had “done well to build relationships with key members of senior management and continues to do so.”

The evaluation went on: “Michael strives to be a team player,” and “is absolutely focused on process improvement in his areas and has been working tirelessly to do so since he’s been on board.”

Mr. Mathews also contends that Mr. Mozilo, in a rare courtroom appearance, misrepresented his views of Mr. Winston. First, Mr. Mozilo testified that he did not know Mr. Winston, even though testimony and documents showed that he had attended presentations with him, personally given Mr. Winston a pair of Countrywide cuff links and told another employee that Mr. Winston’s leadership programs were “exactly what Countrywide needs.”

Mr. Mozilo’s testimony that he was unimpressed with Mr. Winston and his work was also refuted by another Countrywide executive who said that Mr. Mozilo was enthusiastic enough about Mr. Winston’s programs to suggest that he present them to the company’s board.

Asked about Mr. Mozilo’s testimony, David Siegel, a lawyer who represents him, said in an e-mail that there was no merit to the accusation that Mr. Mozilo was not truthful.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cooley’s office confirmed last week that it had received the court transcripts and said that one of its prosecutors was reviewing them. She declined to comment further.

“God forbid our system continues to ignore these people and their acts,” Mr. Mathews said in an interview last week. “I am optimistic but the price of justice can be different depending on what your wallet says.”

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The Lies They’re Telling US to Make Us Stupid (Again)

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The Banks and servicers are doubling down on fooling the American public with planted articles, paid pundits and specious (empty, lying ) studies that skew data. Their goal is to lull the easily lulled American voter into another stupor where, unlike Europe, we fail to act against the Banks and more importantly fail to act to the benefit of our country and its citizens.

The other object is to get the foreign investors to keep pouring into the country and buying property and creating the appearance of a recovery. Except that once the foreign buying slows down, which it will, we will again be stuck with a glut of empty houses, probably in need of major repairs or demolition, and an absence of any substantial number of people who can buy or even rent real estate.

The biggest lie that deserves its very own headline is that “evidence suggests that anti-foreclosure laws may backfire” sending the nation into a slump. Of course no such evidence exists. What they are saying is that the Banks and servicers are starting to get nervous about how cases are turning, especially on the appellate level, so they are turning their mighty attention to the state legislatures. And they want people to support legislators who would otherwise vote for laws that eliminate fake foreclosures into lawmakers voting for amnesty for banks and servicers for the sake of the real estate market and the national economy. Lobbyists and campaign money bag men are getting the attention of many legislators in just this way.

The lies are getting louder and more frequent. Soon they will be at the level of a dull roar as publicity companies and lobbyists and campaign donators whisper or shout into the ear of anyone close enough to hear or see the message. The message is “don’t stop foreclosures now, our plan is only half way done.”

Every time a foreclosure is completed two things happen: a family loses a home and an investor pension funds who might be funding the same family is taking a loss. Neither one should be happening since the original debt or obligation giving rise to the supposed mortgage or deed of trust lien has been paid several times over.

The investment pool is getting these “bad” mortgages thrown over the fence into their pool despite the fact that they have very specific agreements stating that no such mortgages will be allowed into the pool. But that’s OK because the creditor — the REMIC or Trust — has probably been paid or settled and doesn’t even exist any more.

The Banks and servicers MUST HAVE THEIR FORECLOSURES or else they face a torrent of potential problem arising from the fact that they are in effect still trading on mortgages and obligations that are dead, extinguished, gone.

Here are some of the lies from today’s headlines:

1. Housing activity Improves

2. Pent-up housing demand in families who moved in together after foreclosure.

3. Phoenix Prices hit 41 month high

4. Cantor Fitzgerald (bond trader): “real estate’s got life!”

5. Foreigners competing to buy property in US states — California, Arizona, Florida and Texas.

6. (Only) Detroit has a problem – article goes on to state that the rest of the real estate market is in recovery.

7. “Prices rising”

8. Owning beats renting

9. Mumbai Real Estate market Red Hot

10. Pent-up demand hits market as foreigners seek safe haven for their money.

Each article has about one or two grains of truth  and the rest is worse than pure spin. It consists of lying and misleading the American public into thinking the crisis is over. But nothing is going to remove the corruption of our title system unless the legislatures pass measures that reset title assurance like Florida did in the Murphy Act. The fact remains that unless buyers have really big money, they are probably going to be in the second crop of little people who get crushed by Wall Street.

The facts are that median income in the U.S. is getting to be stubbornly accepted at unacceptable levels, a fact that simple arithmetic will show that prices cannot rise, renters will not be able to afford their rent and the properties are going to end up back again in the control of the banks and servicers , despite the fact that when they sold the property, the banks and servicers had no valid, legal right to title or possession. They  had obtained the appearance or illusion of ownership by lying to Judges, borrowers, investors and legislatures.

The truth is that the real estate market is unsound, the economy is unsound and anyone who buys property without getting a judge to quiet title is buying a lawsuit that could arise and result in restoration of the title and possession to the “former” homeowner. Title insurance as it is now written must be carefully re-written through negotiations that practically nobody even thinks about, let alone the lawyers that sometimes get involved in these transactions. Bottom line: Don’t believe the media and don’t even believe the title company. Be careful in your selection of an attorney who really knows the risk of loss and knows how to negotiate the right remedy for the defects in title caused by MERS and securitization

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The Documents Fannie and Freddie Never Received

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Editor’s Comment:

Go to the link below which will take you to the article posted on StopForeclosureFraud where  you will see a list of documents (just like the Pooling and Servicing Agreements that everyone ignored) that should have been received by Freddie, Fannie, Ginnie, FHA et al.  Since we now know that the securitization chain of documents was nonexistent until the dealers were called upon to fabricate them for cases in litigation, we know that the absolute minimum requirements for Fannie and Freddie approval were absent. 

This means, contrary to the assertions of 99% of the securitization “auditors”, and contrary to the appearance of a loan on a Fannie or Freddie website, that the loan was never delivered to those agencies nor any of the documents required.  Just as the REMICs never received the loans, Freddie never received the loans.  And since Freddie never received the loans it became the master trustee of “trusts” that never received the loans and were therefore empty.

All this means is that we have to go back to the first day of the alleged transaction.  Investor lenders, operating through dealers, (investment banks) were advancing money for the “purchase” of residential mortgage loans.   The money was advanced to the closing agent who paid off the party claiming to be the prior mortgagee, giving the balance to the seller of the property or to the borrower (if the transaction was supposedly a refinance).  The nightmare for the banks is that if we go back to that first day the parties named as “lender”, “beneficiary”, “mortgagee” are the only parties of record with an apparent recorded interest in the property.  Their problem is that contrary to conventional foreclosure practice, those entities (many of which do not exist anymore) never funded nor even handled the money as a conduit for the loan.  Thus the note and mortgage are fatally defective and cannot be enforced. 

This would mean that the loan never made it into any pool.  That would mean that all of the deals made by the dealers (investment banks) based on the existence of that loan would fall apart leaving them with an enormous liability since they had sold the same deal dozens of times.  And that is the sole reason why the bailout, insurance, credit default swaps, guarantees and other credit enhancements were so large.  The banks used their ability to control the people with their hands on the levers of power within our government to pay for the malfeasance of the banks that have wrecked our economy and our society.

As Iceland has already proven and Europe is in the process of proving, the only answer is to take the stolen money back from the banks, put it back into the private sector, and put it back into government budgets. 

Freddie Mac Designated Counsel/Trustee For Foreclosures and Bankruptcies 2012

Documents That Must Be Received By Counsel/Trustee Within 2 Business Days of Referral

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How To Tell The Judge “NO” and MAYBE Not Have Him/Her Get Pissed Off

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Did you take a loan?  Did you sign that note?

Editor’s Comment:  The question from the bench is always the same and either  pro se litigant or the attorney is too skittish to take a stand. The question is something like “Did you take a loan?” And the answer could be “Judge I have taken lots of loans,  but I never took any money from these people or any of the their predecessors. I deny the loan, I deny the debt, I deny the default. I deny the note, I deny the mortgage. I deny their right to collection or enforcement of the note or mortgage because I never did any business with them.” If they want to plead and prove otherwise, let them. [This of course ONLY applies to loans that are subject to claims of securitization, which we all know now were routinely ignored by the investment banker just as the assignments into the non-existent pools were routinely ignored, just as the attempt to get a foreclosure judge to rule that an investor without knowing anything about these proceedings is about to get stuck with a bad loan in which there is no value, improperly originated, and never properly assigned or delivered years after the 90 day cutoff period expired.]

The other questions is “Is that your signature on the note? Is that your signature on the mortgage (or Deed of Trust)?” And your answer could be “I don’t know which documents have my actual signature or which ones have been Photoshopped. Therefore I deny and demand they prove that this was my signature on that document. I do know that if they procured my signature on any document it was by trickery, deceit and fraud.” If they want to plead and prove otherwise, let them. But all you are going to see is paper. You will never see a financial transaction between me and them or any of their affiliates or predecessors because no such transaction ever took place.

If the Judge or anyone else asks you anymore questions, and frankly if you are bold enough, if you are asked any questions, your answer could be, “Judge, this is not an evidentiary hearing. If an allegation is being made against me I have a right to know who is making the allegation and what they are accusing me of doing.  Then you have a right to your answers once I have examined the books of records of all servicers — not just the ones that they want to show you, and all depositories wherein documents were supposedly stored. You will not find any record of any kind in which I entered into a financial transaction, loan or otherwise, with these people or any of their predecessors.

CONTRIBUTION: Many payments were made to the creditor that advanced you money. You must remember that they did not advance you money through the securitization chain but instead advanced you money directly from an escrow account, a Superfund, that commingled the money of all investors without regard to REMICS, trusts or any of those niceties and the people to whom the note was made payable and for which the mortgage secured an interest in your property never consummated any financial transaction with you. If they made a payment to the creditors (investors in parternship with each other at the time of the funding) THEN the money received by the agents of the those investors should have been credited against the money owed to those creditors. And part of that allocation should have been applied against the balance due on your loan, meaning your loan balance, unsecured, would be correspondingly reduced or eliminated. End of mortgage, no matter how you approach it. The obligation that originally gave rise to the supposedly secured debt has been satisfied either in part or more likely entirely. 

That leaves a new debt replacing the old debt, which is undocumented and unsecured — and a creditor with an action for contribution because they were obviously a co-obligor. If they say they are not the co-obligor then they are saying the PSA doesn’t apply. If the PSA doesn’t apply then they are not the authorized the servicer or whoever they are pretending to be because there was not actual securitization process.

I’ve been writing about this for years specifically in relation to payments by the servicer and assignments to the servicer or to the REMIC which would in fact extinguish the old debt and originate a new obligation that was neither memorialized by a promissory note from the borrower (because it had been extinguished) nor of course a mortgage or Deed of Trust that secured the extinguished note.

The new obligation may arise between the original borrower and the Assignee or between the original borrower and the payee (where the servicer continued to make payments) but only if the contributor could establish that portion of the claim to which they were entitled.  In other words, an assignment of the entire obligation to a co-obligor would extinguish the entire obligation.  The partial payment by a co-obligor would extinguish the old obligation only to the extent of the payment.  

The problem with getting traction on this is obvious.  It is a frontal assault on the obligation itself leaving the original creditor (if there ever was one) without a claim or with a partial claim, in the event of a partial payment giving rise to an action for contribution. This is only a problem though to the extent that you are asking the court to extinguish an existing obligation between you and the actual creditor — and the only way you can know that is by getting full and complete discovery from the Master Servicer and the Creditor. It’s only a problem if it looks like you are trying to  get out of the debt altogether instead of just attacking the the fact that the new debt could not possibly be recorded.

Complicating issues include establishment of a party as a co-obligor and perhaps even more so, the fact that the promissory note does not actually describe the financial transaction, as we have discussed.  Since the originator of the note did not actually consummate a financial transaction with the borrower, the note is either void or voidable for lack of consideration.  

Further complications arise when the borrower makes payment on the note thus “ratifying” the terms expressed in the note.  But this only occurs because the borrower was the only one at the closing table who did not know the payee, lender and beneficiary were all naked nominees who neither control nor their finances involved in the financial transaction between the borrower and the actual source of funds. 

If the would-be forecloser wants to rely on the PSA then they must accept the WHOLE PSA, which means that a loan in default does not qualify to be assigned, even if in proper form and the trustee or manager of the “pool” has no authority to accept it.  If the Judge in foreclosure court says the trustee or manager MUST accept it then he is adjudicating the rights of investors who explicitly agreed to advance money for performing loans that would be put in a  pool within 90 days to satisfy the requirements of the Internal Revenue Code and the provisions of the PSA which merely recite the REMIC provisions of the IRC.  They can’t have it both ways. They can’t say that those provisions don’t apply to the assignment and say that the OTHER PSA provisions giving them the right to service the loans and manage the portfolio also apply.

The fact that the borrower made a payment to a servicer under directions from a representative within the false securitization scheme should not give rise to an obligation to continue such payments; this is because the obligation arose with the actual financial transaction that was consummated between the borrower and the source of funds.  The source of funds was a stranger to the documentation that the borrower signed.  Since the actual handling of the money involved an escrow Superfund (or at least it appears that this is the case) we do not know if the “lender” is or could be identified from the larger group of investors whose money was intermingled and combined into a single escrow account.

The problem with the relationship of loans in “the pool” is that there doesn’t appear to have been a pool in which such a relationship could exist.  The co-mingling of funds in the accounts held by the investment banker might make all of the investors general partners in a common law general partnership.  We have found NO EVIDENCE OF SEPARATE ACCOUNTS for the individual REMICS. And the investment banker, sub-servicer and  Master servicer are fighting us tooth and nail in discovery requests to get that information. IF they had a legitimate claim, they would have produced it as exhibits to their own pleading. Instead they are trying to hide those facts and including the flow of funds starting from before the actual origination of the loan. Too many cases, we see Ginny or Fannie report ownership of a loan that has not even closed in the false sense , much less in the true sense where the borrower and lender are properly disclosed and the terms of repayment are known by both sides of the transaction.

However, this wouldn’t be the first time that we were correct and the judge did not follow the law.  It is for that reason that I have largely abandoned the argument about contribution and I have now started writing about the fact that if the assignment of the note was in fact an assignment of the obligation, the assignment was merely one element out of three required for a valid contract (offer, acceptance, consideration).   And while many people have now picked up on the fact that the trustee of the pool did not have the right to accept a loan which has been declared in default years after the cut off period expired, I have been going a little further suggesting that the state and federal judges are making decisions adverse to the investors by forcing them to accept a loan that they obviously wanted to avoid, and the acceptance of which would violate the terms under which they loaned the money.  

This is a tricky area to navigate because on the one hand you’re saying that the loan never made it into the pool but on the other you’re saying maybe it did get into the pool but if the only vehicle by which it made entry into the pool was a judicial order declaring in effect that the loan became part of the pool and therefore the entity representing the pool had a right to foreclosure, that order would constitute a judicial determination of the rights of investors who did not receive any notice of the proceeding nor any opportunity to be represented or heard before such an order could be entered.  These are difficult waters to navigate.  

Considerable thought should be given as to which strategy will be used.  There is an old adage that basically says you have approximately 30 seconds to get the judge’s attention (at most) and perhaps 5 minutes to make your point (at most).  Thus if you’re going to proceed along any of the tracks stated or discussed in this email you must be prepared to be limited to a ruling on that track alone.  If you have 20 other tracks that you think have validity, then make sure they are in the record by way of pleadings, affidavits and a memorandum of law before the hearing in which you raise one of the above defenses.  It is a good idea to bring up defenses for which the other side is unprepared and which the judge has not yet heard.  It diminishes the appearance of making a decision that will affect 5 million other mortgages.  Ultimately though the decision is between you and your lawyer.

This article was prompted by a very reasoned argument presented by CA Attorney Dan Hanacek:

Even In the Event the Court Finds the “Assignment” Valid, the Assigning of the Note to a Co-Obligor Makes it Functus Officio

“It has long been established in California that the assignment of a joint and several debt to one of the co-obligors extinguishes that debt.” (Gordon v. Wansey (1862) 21 Cal. 77, 79.) “The assignment amounts to payment and consequently the evidence of that debt, i.e., the note or judgment, becomes functus officio (of no further effect)”-and precludes any further action on the note itself. Any action would not be on the note itself, but rather one for contribution. (Id.; Quality Wash Group V, Ltd. V. Hallak (1996) 50 Cal.App.4th 1687, 1700; Civ. Code §1432.) In the instant case, even if the alleged assignment is seen to be valid, then a co-obligor was assigned the note and the debt has been extinguished.

Note: the trustee of the securitized trust is a co-obligor.

Note: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae are co-obligors.

Note: the servicer is almost always a co-obligor.

Questions for Neil:

Have they extinguished this debt by endorsing it and/or assigning it to the transaction parties?

Does this only apply in CA?  I cannot believe that this would be the case.

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Zillow Raises Estimate Again: 16 Million Homes Underwater

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Editor’s Comment:

This is why I am re-starting my seminar tours. The information out there is disinformation and in this case sellers don’t realize how badly they have been screwed until they are walking toward the closing table. The “underwater” phenomenon represents a vast market inventory shadow that is not being counted by anyone — which is why my estimates of market activity and prices are so much lower than what you hear from everyone else. So far I have been right every year.

Zillow is at least making an effort. It is sharpening the definition of “underwater.” We have been saying for years that the number of homes “underwater” is both rising and vastly underestimated. The reason I knew was that just by putting pencil to paper and using all the factors that measure the amount of money one might get as proceeds from the sale of a home, the average PROCEEDS from the sale of residential property was substantially below the average VALUES that were being used. Zillow has now entered the world of reality by adding all the relevant mortgages and not just the last one allocated to that property.

Once upon a time when you sold a house you received a check for the proceeds of the sale. It was always lower than what you expected because of expenses and charges that you incurred and after you deducted the expenses that didn’t appear on the HUD 1 Settlement Statement (money that you spent preparing the house for sale).

Now the situation is different. Instead of getting a check, many if not most homeowners must bring a check if they want to sell their home. Most homeowners, in other words, must pay money out of their pocket if they want to sell their home. In some cases, the bank will allow a short-sale where they will accept a payoff less than the amount they say is owed, but even then, the hapless homeowner will still be unable to recover his down payment, all the money he put into the house in furnishings and improvements, and all the principal payments made on a house that was intentionally overvalued, using inflated appraisals that would  leave the homeowner screwed.  

When they start looking at “Seller’s Proceeds” from the standpoint of a real HUD 1 settlement sttements, the figure will be even lower than the current Zillow estimate. The disconnect between “prices”, “home values” and “proceeds” has never been greater. The question of whether or not a home is underwater is determined by proceeds of sale — without regard to price or value. Being underwater means to answer a question: “How much money will the seller need to spend in order to sell the property with free and clear title.”

Forgetting the whole issue of title corruption caused by the use of MERS which further affects prices, values and proceeds, the amount of money required from the seller in order to sell his/her home is nothing short of sticker shock and the fact remains that a majority of the people affected do not know what has happened to their wealth. They do not understand the extent to which they suffered damage by Wall Street schemes. And of course they don’t know that there is something they can do about it — like any rational businessman instead of the deadbeat bottom-feeders  portrayed by bank mythology.

Once all factors (other than MERS) are taken into consideration, the Zillow numbers will change again to more than 20 million homes and will probably reach 25 million homes that are really underwater, most of which are hopeless because values and prices will never get enough lift, even with inflation, to make up the difference between what they must pay as sellers to get out of the deal and what they can get from buyers who are willing to buy the home. Add the MERS’ factors in, now that title questions we raised 4 years ago are being considered, and it is possible that many homes cannot ever be sold at any price. Where the levels of “securitization” are limited to only 1, then perhaps it is possible to sell the property but not without spending more money to clear title. 

Nearly 16M Homes Are Now Underwater

by THE KCM CREW

Zillow just reported that their data shows nearly 16 million homes in this country are now in a negative equity position where the house is worth less than the mortgages on the home. This number is dramatically higher than the approximate 11 million reported by other entities. Why the huge difference? Zillow professes to take into consideration ALL loans on the property not just the most recent loan (purchase or refinance).

The key findings in the study:

▪       Nearly one-third (31.4 percent) of U.S. homeowners with mortgages – or 15.7 million – were underwater on their mortgage.

▪       A slower pace of foreclosures after the robo-signing issues of 2010 contributed to slower progress in working down negative equity. Foreclosures cause homes to come out of negative equity when a bank or third party takes ownership.

▪       Nine in 10 homeowners continue to make their mortgage and home loan payments on time, with just 10.1 percent of underwater homeowners more than 90 days delinquent.

▪       Nearly 40 percent of underwater homeowners, or 12.4 percent of all homeowners with a mortgage, owe between 1 and 20 percent more than their home is worth.

▪       An additional 21 percent of underwater homeowners, or 6.6 percent of all homeowners with a mortgage, owe between 21 and 40 percent more than their home is worth.

▪       About 2.4 million, or 4.7 percent of all homeowners with mortgages owe more than double what their home is worth.

How can negative equity impact the housing market? In the report, Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries explains:

“Not only does negative equity tie many to their homes, by making homeowners unable to move when they may want to, but if economic growth slows and unemployment rises, more homeowners will be unable to make timely mortgage payments, increasing delinquency rates and eventually foreclosures.”

Case Shiller: House Prices fall to new post-bubble lows in March NSA

by CalculatedRisk

S&P/Case-Shiller released the monthly Home Price Indices for March (a 3 month average of January, February and March).

This release includes prices for 20 individual cities, two composite indices (for 10 cities and 20 cities) and the National index.

Note: Case-Shiller reports NSA, I use the SA data.

From S&P: Pace of Decline in Home Prices Moderates as the First Quarter of 2012 Ends, According to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices

Data through March 2012, released today by S&P Indices for its S&P/CaseShiller Home Price Indices … showed that all three headline composites ended the first quarter of 2012 at new post-crisis lows. The national composite fell by 2.0% in the first quarter of 2012 and was down 1.9% versus the first quarter of 2011. The 10- and 20-City Composites posted respective annual returns of -2.8% and -2.6% in March 2012. Month-over-month, their changes were minimal; average home prices in the 10-City Composite fell by 0.1% compared to February and the 20-City remained basically unchanged in March over February. However, with these latest data, all three composites still posted their lowest levels since the housing crisis began in mid-2006.
…
“While there has been improvement in some regions, housing prices have not turned,” says David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Indices. “This month’s report saw all three composites and five cities hit new lows. However, with last month’s report nine cities hit new lows. Further, about half as many cities, seven, experienced falling prices this month compared to 16 last time.”

Click on graph for larger image.

The first graph shows the nominal seasonally adjusted Composite 10 and Composite 20 indices (the Composite 20 was started in January 2000).

The Composite 10 index is off 34.1% from the peak, and up 0.2% in March (SA). The Composite 10 is at a new post bubble low Not Seasonally Adjusted.

The Composite 20 index is off 33.8% from the peak, and up 0.2% (SA) from March. The Composite 20 is also at a new post-bubble low NSA.

The second graph shows the Year over year change in both indices.

The Composite 10 SA is down 2.8% compared to March 2011.

The Composite 20 SA is down 2.6% compared to March 2011. This was a smaller year-over-year decline for both indexes than in February.

The third graph shows the price declines from the peak for each city included in S&P/Case-Shiller indices.

Prices increased (SA) in 15 of the 20 Case-Shiller cities in March seasonally adjusted (12 cities increased NSA). Prices in Las Vegas are off 61.5% from the peak, and prices in Dallas only off 6.7% from the peak.

The NSA indexes are at new post-bubble lows – and the NSA indexes will continue to decline in March (this report was for the three months ending in February). I’ll have more on prices later

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.

Arizona Supreme Court Hogan Case Holds that Note is Not required to Start Foreclosure

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“the trustee owes the trustor a fiduciary duty, and may be held liable for conducting a trustee’s sale when the trustor is not in default. See Patton v. First Fed. Sav. & Loan Ass’n of Phoenix, 118 Ariz. 473, 476, 578 P.2d 152, 155 (1978).” Hogan Court

Editor’s Comment: Here is another example of lawyers arguing out of a lack of understanding of the securitization process and trying to compress an elephant into a rabbit hole. They lost, unsurprisingly.

If you loaned money to someone, you want the money repaid. You DON’T want to be told that because you don’t have the note you can never enforce the loan repayment. You CAN start enforcement and you must prove why you don’t have the note in a credible way so that the court has footprints leading right up to the point that you don’t have the note. But the point is that you can start without the note. 

The Supreme Court apparently understood this very well and they didn’t address the real issue because nobody brought it up. The issue before them was whether someone without the note could initiate the foreclosure process. Nobody mentioned whether the same party could submit a credit bid at the auction which is what I have been pounding upon for months on end now.

Apparently, right or wrong, the feeling of the courts is that there is a very light burden on the right to initiate a foreclosure whether it is judicial or non-judicial. It is very close to the burden of the party moving to lift stay in a bankruptcy procedure. Practically any colorable right gives the party enough to get the stay — because the theory goes — whether it is a lift stay or starting the ball rolling on a foreclosure there is plenty the borrower can do to  oppose the enforcement procedure. I don’t agree with either standard or burden of proof in the case of securitized mortgages but it is about time we got real about what gets traction in the courtroom and what doesn’t.

In the Hogan case the Court makes a pretty big deal out of the fact that Hogan didn’t allege that WAMU and Deutsch were not entitled to enforce the note. From the court’s perspective, they were saying to the AG and the borrowers, “look, you are admitting the debt and admitting this is the creditor, what do you want from us, a free pass?”

This is why you need real people with real knowledge and real reports that back up and give credibility to deny the debt, deny the default, deny that WAMU and/or Deutsch are creditors, plead payment and force WAMU and Deutsch to come forward with pleadings and proof. Instead WAMU and Deutsch skated by AGAIN because nobody followed the money. They followed the document trail which led them down that rabbit hole I was referencing above.

In order to deny everything without be frivolous, you need to have concrete reasons why you think the debt does not exist, the debt does not exist between the borrower and these pretender lenders, the debt was paid in full, and deny that the loan was NOT secured (i.e. that the mortgage lien was NOT perfected when filed).

For anyone to do that without feeling foolish you must UNDERSTAND how the securitization model AS PRACTICED turned the entire lending model on its head. Then everything makes sense, which is why I wrote the second volume which you can get by pressing the appropriate links shown above. But it isn’t just the book that will get you there. You need to give rise to material, relevant issues of fact that are in dispute. For that you need a credible report from a credible expert with real credentials and real experience and training.

I follow the money. In fact the new book has a section called “Show Me the Money”. To “believe” is taken from an ancient  language that means “to be willing”. I want you to believe that the debt that the “enforcers” doesn’t exist and never did. I want you to believe that the declarations contained in the note, mortgage (deed of trust), substitution of trustee etc. are all lies. But you can’t believe that unless you are willing to consider the the idea it might be true. That I might be right.

At every “Securitized” closing table there were two deals taking place — one perfectly real and the other perfectly unreal, fake and totally obfuscated. The deal everyone is litigating is the second one,  starting with the documents at closing and moving up the chain of securitization. Do you really think that some court is going to declare that everyone gets a free house because some i wasn’t dotted or t crossed on the back of the wrong piece of paper when you admit the debt, the default and the amount due?

It is the first deal that is real because THAT is the one with the money exchanging hands. The declarations contained in the note, mortgage and other documents all refer to money exchanging hands between the named payee and secured party on one side and the borrower on the other. The deal in those documents never happened. The REAL DEAL was that money from investor lenders was poured down a pipe through which the loans were funded. The parties at the closing table with the borrower had nothing to do with funding; acquiring, transferring the receivable, the obligation, note or the mortgage or deed of trust.

Every time you chase them down the rabbit hole of the document trail you miss the point. The REAL DEAL had no documents and couldn’t possibly be secured. And if you read the wording from the Hogan decision below you can see how even they would have considered the matter differently if the simple allegation been made that the borrower denied that WAMU and Deutsch had any right to enforce the note either as principals or as agents. They were not the creditor. But Hogan and its ilk are not over — yet.

There is still a matter to be determined as to whether the party who initiated the foreclosure is in fact a creditor under the statute and can therefore submit a credit bid in lieu of cash. THAT is where the rubber meets the road — where the cash is supposed to exchange hands. And THAT is where nearly all the foreclosures across the country fail. The failure of consideration means the sale did not take place. If the borrower was there or someone for him was there and bid a token amount of money it could be argued in many states that the other bid being ineligible as a credit bid, the only winning bidder is the one who offered cash.

————————————————————

Hogan argues that a deed of trust, like a mortgage, “may be enforced only by, or in behalf of, a person who is entitled to enforce the obligation the mortgage secures.” Restatement (Third) of Prop.: Mortgages § 5.4(c) (1997); see Hill v. Favour, 52 Ariz. 561, 568-69, 84 P.2d 575, 578 (1938).

-6-
We agree. (e.s.) But Hogan has not alleged that WaMu and Deutsche Bank are not entitled to enforce the underlying note; rather, he alleges that they have the burden of demonstrating their rights before a non-judicial foreclosure may proceed. Nothing in the non-judicial foreclosure statutes, however, imposes such an obligation. See Mansour v. Cal-Western Reconveyance Corp., 618 F. Supp. 2d 1178, 1181 (D. Ariz. 2009) (citing A.R.S. § 33-807 and observing that “Arizona’s [non-]judicial foreclosure statutes . . . do not require presentation of the original note before commencing foreclosure proceedings”); In re Weisband, 427 B.R. 13, 22 (Bankr. D. Ariz. 2010) (stating that non-judicial foreclosures may be conducted under Arizona’s deed of trust statutes without presentation of the original note).

———————AND SPEAKING OF  DEUTSCH BANK: READ THIS AS GRIST FOR THE ABOVE ANALYSIS——-

Disavowal by-DEUTSCHE-BANK-NATIONAL-TRUST-COMPANY-AS-TRUSTEE-NOTICE-TO-CERTIFICATE-HOLDERSForeclosure-Practice-Notice-10-25[1]

Pandemic Lying Admission: Deutsch Bank Up and Down the Fake Securitization Chain

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Editor’s Comment:

One problem with securitization in practice even under the academic model is the effect on potential enforcement of the obligation, even assuming that the “lender” is properly identified in the closing documents with the buyer of the loan product and the closing papers of the buyer of the mortgage bonds (and we’ll assume that the mortgage bonds are real and valid, as well as having been issued by a fully funded REMIC in which loans were properly assigned and transferred —- an assumption, as we have seen that is not true in the real world). Take this quote from the glossary at the back of this book and which in turn was taken from established authoritative sources used by bankers, securities firms and accountants:

cross guarantees and credit default swaps, synthetic collateralized asset obligations and other exotic equity and debt instruments, each of which promises the holder an incomplete interest in the original security instrument and the revenue flow starting with the alleged borrower and ending with various parties who receive said revenue, including but not limited to parties who are obligated to make payments for shortfalls of revenues.

Real Property Lawyers spot the problem immediately.

First question is when do these cross guarantees, CDS, Insurance, and other exotic instruments arise. If they are in existence at the time of the closing with the borrower homeowner then the note and mortgage are not properly drafted as to terms of repayment nor identity of the lender/creditor. This renders the note either unenforceable or requiring the admission of parole evidence in any action to either enforce against the borrower or enforce the cross obligations of the new cross creditors who supposedly are receiving not just rights to the receivable but to the actual note and the actual mortgage.

Hence even a truthful statement that the “Trustee” beings this foreclosure on behalf of the “trust” as creditor (assuming a Trust existed by law and that the Trustee, and beneficiaries and terms were clear) would be insufficient if any of these “credit enhancements” and other synthetic or exotic vehicles were in place. The Trustee on the Deed of Sale would be required to get an accounting from each of the entities that are parties or counterparties whose interest is effected by the foreclosure and who would be entitled to part of the receivable generated either by the foreclosure itself or the payment by counterparties who “bet wrong” on the mortgage pool.

The second question is whether some or any or all of these instruments came into existence or were actualized by a required transaction AFTER the closing with the homeowner borrower. It would seem that while the original note and mortgage (or Deed of Trust) might not be affected directly by these instruments, the enforcement mechanism would still be subject to the same issues as raised above when they were fully actualized and in existence at the time of the closing with the homeowner borrower.

Deutsch Bank was a central player in most of the securitized mortgages in a variety of ways including the exotic instruments referred to above. If there was any doubt about whether there existed pandemic lying and cheating, it was removed when the U.S. Attorney Civil Frauds Unit obtained admissions and a judgment for Deutsch to pay over $200 million resulting from intentional misrepresentations contained in various documents used with numerous entities and people up and down the fictitious securitization chain. Similar claims are brought against Citi (which settled so far for $215 million in February, 2012) Flagstar Bank FSB (which settled so far for $133 million in February 2012, and Allied Home Mortgage Corp, which is still pending. Even the most casual reader can see that the entire securitization model was distorted by fraud from one end (the investor lender) to the other (the homeowner borrower) and back again (the parties and counterparties in insurance, bailouts, credit default swaps, cross guarantees that violated the terms of every promissory note etc.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Recovers $202.3 Million From Deutsche Bank And Mortgageit In Civil Fraud Case Alleging Reckless Mortgage Lending Practices And False Certifications To HUD

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                  Thursday May 10, 2012

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Stuart F. Delery, the Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Helen Kanovsky, General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”), and David A. Montoya, Inspector General of HUD, announced today that the United States has settled a civil fraud lawsuit against DEUTSCHE BANK AG, DB STRUCTURED PRODUCTS, INC., DEUTSCHE BANK SECURITIES, INC. (collectively “DEUTSCHE BANK” or the “DEUTSCHE BANK defendants”) and MORTGAGEIT, INC. (“MORTGAGEIT”). The Government’s lawsuit, filed May 3, 2011, sought damages and civil penalties under the False Claims Act for repeated false certifications to HUD in connection with the residential mortgage origination practices of MORTGAGEIT, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DEUTSCHE BANK AG since 2007. The suit alleges approximately a decade of misconduct in connection with MORTGAGEIT’s participation in the Federal Housing Administration’s (“FHA’s”) Direct Endorsement Lender Program (“DEL program”), which delegates authority to participating private lenders to endorse mortgages for FHA insurance. Among other things, the suit accused the defendants of having submitted false certifications to HUD, including false certifications that MORTGAGEIT was originating mortgages in compliance with HUD rules when in fact it was not. In the settlement announced today, MORTGAGEIT and DEUTSCHE BANK admitted, acknowledged, and accepted responsibility for certain conduct alleged in the Complaint, including that, contrary to the representations in MORTGAGEIT’s annual certifications, MORTGAGEIT did not conform to all applicable HUD-FHA regulations. MORTGAGEIT also admitted that it submitted certifications to HUD stating that certain loans were eligible for FHA mortgage insurance when in fact they were not; that FHA insured certain loans endorsed by MORTGAGEIT that were not eligible for FHA mortgage insurance; and that HUD consequently incurred losses when some of those MORTGAGEIT loans defaulted. The defendants also agreed to pay $202.3 million to the United States to resolve the Government’s claims for damages and penalties under the False Claims Act. The settlement was approved today by United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stated: “MORTGAGEIT and DEUTSCHE BANK treated FHA insurance as free Government money to backstop lending practices that did not follow the rules. Participation in the Direct Endorsement Lender program comes with requirements that are not mere technicalities to be circumvented through subterfuge as these defendants did repeatedly over the course of a decade. Their failure to meet these requirements caused substantial losses to the Government – losses that could have and should have been avoided. In addition to their admissions of responsibility, Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT have agreed to pay damages in an amount that will significantly compensate HUD for the losses it incurred as a result of the defendants’ actions.”

Acting Assistant Attorney General Stuart F. Delery stated: “This is an important settlement for the United States, both in terms of obtaining substantial reimbursement for the FHA insurance fund for wrongfully incurred claims, and in obtaining the defendants’ acceptance of their role in the losses they caused to the taxpayers.”

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Making sure that victims of federal crimes are treated with compassion, fairness and respect.

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HUD General Counsel Helen Kanovsky stated: “This case demonstrates that HUD has the ability to identify fraud patterns and work with our partners at the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney’s Offices to pursue appropriate remedies. HUD would like to commend the work of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in achieving this settlement, which is a substantial recovery for the FHA mortgage insurance fund. We look forward to continuing our joint efforts with the Department of Justice and the SDNY to combat mortgage fraud. The mortgage industry should take notice that we will not sit silently by if we detect abuses in our programs.”

HUD Inspector General David A. Montoya stated: “We expect every Direct Endorsement Lender to adhere to the highest level of integrity and accountability. When the combined efforts and attention of the Department of Justice, HUD, and HUD OIG are focused upon those who fail to exercise such integrity in connection with HUD programs, the end result will be both unpleasant and costly to the offending party.”

The following allegations are based on the Complaint and Amended Complaint (the “Complaint”) filed in Manhattan federal court by the Government in this case:

Between 1999 and 2009, MORTGAGEIT was a participant in the DEL program, a federal program administered by the FHA. As a Direct Endorsement Lender, MORTGAGEIT had the authority to originate, underwrite, and endorse mortgages for FHA insurance. If a Direct Endorsement Lender approves a mortgage loan for FHA insurance and the loan later defaults, the holder of the loan may submit an insurance claim to HUD for the costs associated with the defaulted loan, which HUD must then pay. Under the DEL program, neither the FHA nor HUD reviews a loan before it is endorsed for FHA insurance. Direct Endorsement Lenders are therefore required to follow program rules designed to ensure that they are properly underwriting and endorsing mortgages for FHA insurance and maintaining a quality control program that can prevent and correct any deficiencies in their underwriting. These requirements include maintaining a quality control program, pursuant to which the lender must fully review all loans that go into default within the first six payments, known as “early payment defaults.” Early payment defaults may be signs of problems in the underwriting process, and by reviewing early payment defaults, Direct Endorsement Lenders are able to monitor those problems, correct them, and report them to HUD. MORTGAGEIT failed to comply with these basic requirements.

As the Complaint further alleges, MORTGAGEIT was also required to execute certifications for every mortgage loan that it endorsed for FHA insurance. Since 1999, MORTGAGEIT has endorsed more than 39,000 mortgages for FHA insurance, and FHA paid insurance claims on more than 3,200 mortgages, totaling more than $368 million, for mortgages endorsed for FHA insurance by MORTGAGEIT, including more than $58 million resulting from loans that defaulted after DEUTSCHE BANK AG acquired MORTGAGEIT in 2007.

As alleged in the Complaint, a portion of those losses was caused by the false statements that the defendants made to HUD to obtain FHA insurance on individual loans. Although MORTGAGEIT had certified that each of these loans was eligible for FHA insurance, it repeatedly submitted certifications that were knowingly or recklessly false. MORTGAGEIT failed to perform basic due diligence and repeatedly endorsed mortgage loans that were not eligible for FHA insurance.

The Complaint also alleges that MORTGAGEIT separately certified to HUD, on an annual basis, that it was in compliance with the rules governing its eligibility in the DEL program, including that it conduct a full review of all early payment defaults, as early payment defaults are indicators of mortgage fraud. Contrary to its certifications to HUD, MORTGAGEIT failed to implement a compliant quality control program, and failed to review all early payment defaults as required. In addition, the Complaint alleges that, after DEUTSCHE BANK acquired MORTGAGEIT in January 2007, DEUTSCHE BANK managed the quality control functions of the Direct Endorsement Lender business, and had its employees sign and submit MORTGAGEIT’s Direct Endorsement Lender annual certifications to HUD. Furthermore, by the end of 2007, MORTGAGEIT was not reviewing any early payment defaults on closed FHA-insured loans. Between 1999 and 2009, the FHA paid more than $92 million in FHA insurance claims for loans that defaulted within the first six payments.

***

Pursuant to the settlement, MORTGAGEIT and the DEUTSCHE BANK defendants will pay the United States $202.3 million within 30 days of the settlement.

As part of the settlement, the defendants admitted, acknowledged, and accepted responsibility for certain misconduct. Specifically,

MORTGAGEIT admitted, acknowledged, and accepted responsibility for the following:

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MORTGAGEIT failed to conform fully to HUD-FHA rules requiring Direct Endorsement Lenders to maintain a compliant quality control program;

MORTGAGEIT failed to conduct a full review of all early payment defaults on loans endorsed for FHA insurance;

Contrary to the representations in MORTGAGEIT’s annual certifications, MORTGAGEIT did not conform to all applicable HUD-FHA regulations;

MORTGAGEIT endorsed for FHA mortgage insurance certain loans that did not meet all underwriting requirements contained in HUD’s handbooks and mortgagee letters, and therefore were not eligible for FHA mortgage insurance under the DEL program; and;

MORTGAGEIT submitted to HUD-FHA certifications stating that certain loans were eligible for FHA mortgage insurance when in fact they were not; FHA insured certain loans endorsed by MORTGAGEIT that were not eligible for FHA mortgage insurance; and HUD consequently incurred losses when some of those MORTGAGEIT loans defaulted.

The DEUTSCHE BANK defendants admitted, acknowledged, and accepted responsibility for the fact that after MORTGAGEIT became a wholly-owned, indirect subsidiary of DB Structured Products, Inc and Deutsche Bank AG in January 2007:

The DEUTSCHE BANK defendants were in a position to know that the operations of MORTGAGEIT did not conform fully to all of HUD-FHA’s regulations, policies, and handbooks;

One or more of the annual certifications was signed by an individual who was also an officer of certain of the DEUTSCHE BANK defendants; and;

Contrary to the representations in MORTGAGEIT’s annual certifications, MORTGAGEIT did not conform to all applicable HUD-FHA regulations.

***

The case is being handled by the Office’s Civil Frauds Unit. Mr. Bharara established the Civil Frauds Unit in March 2010 to bring renewed focus and additional resources to combating financial fraud, including mortgage fraud.

To date, the Office’s Civil Frauds Unit has brought four civil fraud lawsuits against major lenders under the False Claims Act alleging reckless residential mortgage lending.

Three of the four cases have settled, and today’s settlement represents the third, and largest, settlement. On February 15, 2012, the Government settled its civil fraud lawsuit against CITIMORTGAGE, INC. for $158.3 million. On February 24, 2012, the Government settled its civil fraud suit against FLAGSTAR BANK, F.S.B. for $132.8 million. The Government’s lawsuit against ALLIED HOME MORTGAGE CORP. and two of its officers remains pending. With today’s settlement, the Government has achieved settlements totaling $493.4 million in the last three months. In each settlement, the defendants have admitted and accepted responsibility for certain conduct alleged in the Government’s Complaint.

The Office’s Civil Frauds Unit is handling all three cases as part of its continuing investigation of reckless lending practices.

The Civil Frauds Unit works in coordination with President Barack Obama’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, on which Mr. Bharara serves as a Co-Chair of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Working Group. President Obama established the interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to wage an aggressive, coordinated, and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. The task force includes representatives from a broad range of federal agencies, regulatory authorities, inspectors general, and state and local law enforcement who, working together, bring to bear a powerful array of criminal and civil enforcement resources. The task force is working to improve efforts across the federal executive branch, and with state and local partners, to investigate and prosecute significant financial crimes, ensure just and effective punishment for those who perpetrate financial crimes, combat discrimination in the lending and financial markets, and recover proceeds for victims of financial crimes.

Mr. Bharara thanked HUD and HUD-OIG for their extraordinary assistance in this case. He also expressed his appreciation for the support of the Commercial Litigation Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Division in Washington, D.C.

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Assistant U.S. Attorneys Lara K. Eshkenazi, Pierre G. Armand, and Christopher B. Harwood are in charge of the case.