Rolling Stone Magazine reporter Matt Taibbi has a detailed story about the Florida foreclosures being tried in front of retired judges. Click here for full story – an excerpt:
After Soud’s outburst, Cooper quietly leaves the court. Once out of sight of the judge, she shows me her file. It’s not hard to find the fraud in the case.
For starters, the assignment of mortgage is autographed by a notorious robo-signer — John Kennerty, who gave a deposition this summer admitting that he signed as many as 150 documents a day for Wells Fargo. In Cooper’s case, the document with Kennerty’s signature on it places the date on which Wells Fargo obtained the mortgage as May 5th, 2010.
The trouble is, the bank bought the loan from Wachovia — a bank that went out of business in 2008. All of which is interesting, because in her file, it states that Wells Fargo sued Cooper for foreclosure on February 22nd, 2010. In other words, the bank foreclosed on Cooper three months before it obtained her mortgage from a nonexistent company.
Jim,
I spoke with a person yesterday and this person had spoken with the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. This person had complained about the short sales and the president of the Fed had said that please don’t blame the banks, it’s not their fault, it is the Fed that is doing all this so we can hold up home prices. He also said that something big will happen by Jan 12, and things will even get more difficult as far as short sails, they are trying to do everything possible to hold up real estate prices. He had also mentioned that Obama will not be reelected.
Any news on the Padres for 2011?
He had also mentioned that Obama will not be reelected.
So your friend is a member of the Psychic Friends Network then?
Look, the Republicans can’t beat somebody with nobody. And many of their choices are worse than nobody (Palin, Gingrich, Romney).
Kind of makes me glad I rent. Too bad the real crooks will never be prosecuted.
What if everyone took the solution that Dennis Miller had for the national debt and applied to their mortgage situations. Say “F U”, and stop paying. I’m sure the extra money in our pockets every month sure would stimulate the economy.
So your friend is a member of the Psychic Friends Network then?
I was guessing board of directors at Diebold, maybe.
I would love to see that mega bankruptcy machine, the asinine Trump take a shot at the office. The process is a meat grinder no matter who owes you what, and he’s overdue for the comeuppance.
Sorry, to continue OT, but what’s to say? I am shocked, shocked at banks acting illegally.
I don’t think the argument that Wells “foreclosed on Cooper three months before it obtained her mortgage from a nonexistent company” is going to stand up. Wells is just clearing the books on the loans it got stuck with when it took over Wachovia.
Wow. This article seems written more to inflame people that actually discuss the issues that went on. The author makes it sound like everybody in the mortgage business was a fraud and a cheat. There were a number of honest hard working people in that business. They were not all out to scam people. I am not denying that there was fraud, but a majority of the people would not and did not participate in it.
There was a lot more of the bad assumptions (i.e. housing prices will go up, loss frequency and severity, interest rates, etc…). I remember a meeting with a bond investor where they asked what we thought the loss profile would be. When I told them, they looked puzzled and asked why our mortgages were so worse than others because we expected twice a loss profile at least twice the others. I told them to look back over a longer time period when there was a more normal loss history. They still thought we were crazy. A lot of investors did not do any true due diligence and bought MBS and ABS because that was what everyone else did.
It would be impossible to believe this story if it weren’t for the corroboration from other sources. You couldn’t get away with this in some of the more corrupt Sub-Saharan African countries. At least there you have to make some attempt to play the game. Such outright disregard for procedure would be taken as insulting the Judge’s intelligence!
As GeneK points out, this excerpt is full of blatant and obvious falsehoods. Wachovia was bought by Wells Fargo making them one and the same.
I love Taibbi’s work but he pulled a Howard Beale on this story. He’s go to all the trouble travel to and observe the Kangaroo court in Florida and then all he can write is a piece that so shakes and shudders with rage that there is very little signal and a lot of noise.
January 12th…hmmm…so what is the Lame Duck Congress going to do? Hope its not something crazy.