MERS Kicked to Curb

by Jim the Realtor | Oct 13, 2010 | MERS | 11 comments

Hat tip to JimG for sending this along, from the AP:

JPMorgan Chase’s CEO says the bank has stopped using the electronic mortgage tracking system used by major financial institutions.

Lawyers have argued in court proceedings that the system is unable to accurately prove ownership of mortgages.  JPMorgan Chase & Co. and other banks have suspended some foreclosures following allegations of paperwork problems in thousands of cases.

The Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, acts as a trading house for millions of mortgages. Lawyers for homeowners say the system lacks the required paper trail to prove mortgage ownership in foreclosure proceedings.

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Bank of America and Fidelity Title came to some “arrangement” in a half-day. 

The solution has to already be in the works – scrap MERS, put a fancy name on the new and improved system, and keep foreclosing.  And dodge the lawyers!

Owner or Bando?

by Jim the Realtor | Oct 12, 2010 | MERS | 31 comments

Hat tip to jp for sending this along, excerpts from Housingwatch’s article:

The Earls, who admit to having fallen behind on their mortgage at one point due to a loss of income in Danielle’s business, say that they were working with the bank to catch up on their payments. However, she says, whenever they made a payment it was not being reflected on statements, even a $12,500 catch-up payment was not credited to the balance due. Ultimately, there was a $25,000 discrepancy between what they thought they still owed in arrears and what the bank said they owed.

The Earls originally purchased the house for $500,000 in March 2001. Due to some refinances to take out equity, they owed at least $880,000 on a no-interest mortgage loan by the time of foreclosure.

Garvin was not only the listing agent but also the acquisition and sales partner for his client, Conejo Capital Partners, the investors. He says that he purchased the home in good faith for $697,000 in January on behalf of his client, at an auction on the courthouse steps.

After gaining possession from the Earls through eviction in July, his clients spent $40,000 rehabbing the home. Carpets were replaced, appliances updated, and granite countertops added. “The living condition was disgusting,” he says. But once cleaned up, it went under contract to new buyers for $800,000.

Danielle Earl (pictured) says that she and her husband have been foster parents to 43 children over the years and they currently home-school most of their school-age children (six of whom are adopted). So she admits that the walls were probably a bit scuffed and in need of a paint job, and some of the carpet was worn. But, she says, she and her family only had a day to collect their things and have movers haul it away, so it’s not like they were leaving the home in a show-ready state. About arriving back home Saturday, she says: “It was such an emotional moment. Everyone started hugging each other and crying.”

Since possession doesn’t necessarily mean ownership, the Earls still have a battle on their hands, says Pines, who says they were denied a trial by jury to argue why they never should have been foreclosed upon — and their eviction from the 2000-built home was unwarranted.

“The bank used the usual fabricated and forged documents to foreclose,” the Earls wrote in their court petition, in which they describe signatures by bank personnel that do not match, from document to document — an indication to them that documents were not properly reviewed and were fabricated.

“We needed to get back in before the investor and the real estate broker moved in a new family,” says Pines. “I didn’t want to allow the situation to become worse, and we show up and we have to try to throw them out. Danielle and Jim would not have wanted to throw them out.”

MERS Summary/Proposals

by Jim the Realtor | Oct 10, 2010 | MERS | 12 comments

Hat tip to SS for sending along this article that reviews the MERS debacle:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/FORECLOSUREGATE-by-Ellen-Brown-101009-711.html

Here is the second half of the article:

The clever designers of these vehicles tried to have it both ways by conveying the properties to an electronic dummy conduit called MERS (an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems), which would hold them in the meantime. MERS would then assign them to the proper tranche as the defaults occurred. But the rating agencies required that the conduit be “bankruptcy remote,” which meant it could hold title to nothing; and courts have started to take notice of this defect. They are concluding that if MERS owns nothing, it can assign nothing, and the chain of title has been irretrievably broken. As foreclosure expert Neil Garfield traces these developments:

“First they said it was MERS who was the lender. That clearly didn’t work because MERS lent nothing, collected nothing and never had anything to do with the cash involved in the transaction. Then they started with the servicers who essentially met with the same problem. Then they got cute and produced either the actual note, a copy of the note or a forged note, or an assignment or a fabricated assignment from a party who at best had dubious rights to ownership of the loan to another party who had equally dubious rights, neither of whom parted with any cash to fund either the loan or the transfer of the obligation. . . . Now the pretender lenders have come up with the idea that the ‘Trust’ is the owner of the loan . . . even though it is just a nominee (just like MERS) . . . . They can’t have it both ways.”

“My answer is really simple. The lender/creditor is the one who advanced cash to the borrower. . . . The use of nominees or straw men doesn’t mean they can be considered principals in the transaction any more than your depository bank is a principal to a transaction in which you buy and pay for something with a check.”

So What’s to Be Done?

Garfield’s proposed solution is for the borrowers to track down the real lenders — the investors. He says, “if you meet your Lender (investor), you can restructure the loan yourselves and then jointly go after the pretender lenders for all the money they received and didn’t disclose as ‘agent.'”  

Karl Denninger concurs. He writes:  “Those who bought MBS from institutions that improperly securitized this paper can and should sue the securitizers to well beyond the orbit of Mars. . . . if this bankrupts one or more large banking institutions, so be it. We now have ‘resolution authority’, let’s see it used.”

The resolution authority Denninger is referring to is in the new Banking Reform Bill, which gives federal regulators the power and responsibility to break up big banks when they pose a “grave risk” to the financial system which is what we have here. CNBC’s Larry Kudlow calls it “the housing equivalent of the credit financial meltdown,” something he says could “go on forever.”

In an academic paper titled “It Isn’t Working: Time for More Radical Policies,” Prof. Randall Wray and Eric Tygmoine suggest calling a bank holiday. They write:

“We believe that most major banks are insolvent and cannot (and should not) be saved. We suggest that the best approach is something like a banking holiday for the largest banks and shadow banks in which institutions are closed for a relatively brief period. Supervisors move in to assess problems. It is essential that all big banks be examined during the ‘holiday’ to uncover claims on one another. It is highly likely that supervisors will find that several trillions of dollars of bad assets will turn out to be claims big financial institutions have on one another (that is exactly what was found when AIG was examined–which is why the government bail-out of AIG led to side payments to the big banks and shadow banks). There probably are not ‘seven degrees of separation’–by taking over and resolving the biggest 19 banks and netting claims, the collateral damage in the form of losses for other banks and shadow banks will be relatively small.”

What we need to avoid at all costs is “TARP II” another bank bailout by the taxpayers. No bank is too big to fail. The giant banks can be broken up and replaced with a network of publicly-owned banks and community banks, which could do a substantially better job of serving consumers and businesses than Wall Street is doing now.