Has the Foreclosure Crisis Let Slip the Dogs of Anarchy?

(9AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

Gonzalo Liara has had a couple excellent articles up that makes clear the seriousness of the mortgage foreclosure crisis. The crisis potentially creates an existential crisis for the banking industry and our whole rotten economic system.

Last Friday, Bank of America announced that it was suspending all foreclosure proceedings, presumably until further notice. Other banks have already suspended foreclosures in a whole truckload of states. A nationwide moratorium on foreclosures might soon happen-which would be a big deal: Global Financial Crisis, Part II-Longer, Wider and Uncut.

Homeowners can only be foreclosed and evicted from their homes by the person or institution who actually has the loan paper-only the note-holder has legal standing to ask a court to foreclose and evict. Not the mortgage-the note, which is the actual IOU that people sign, promising to pay back the mortgage loan. Some homeowners visit sites like https://benbuysindyhouses.com/ to find ways to stop the foreclosure but with these recent events, they may not have to.

Before Mortgage Backed Securities, most mortgage loans were issued by the local Savings & Loan. So the note usually didn’t go anywhere: It stayed in the offices of the S&L down the street.

But once mortgage loan securitization happened, things got sloppy-they got sloppy by the very nature of Mortgage Backed Securities.

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But here’s the key issue: When an MBS was first created, all the mortgages were pristine-none had defaulted yet, because they were all brand new loans. Statistically, some would default and some others would be paid back in full-but which ones specifically would default? No one knew, of course. If I toss a coin 1,000 times, statistically, 500 tosses the coin will land heads-but what will the result be of, say, the 723rd toss specifically? I dunno.

Same with mortgages. With most first time buyers there is a lot they don’t know and have questions that need to be answered, for example, what is a mortgage note?

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Enter stage right, the famed MERS-the Mortgage Electronic Registration System.

MERS was the repository of these digitized mortgage notes that the banks originated from the actual mortgage loans signed by homebuyers. MERS was jointly owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (yes, those two, again, I know, I know: Like the chlamydia and the gonorrhea of the financial world-you cure ’em, but they just keep coming back).

The purpose of MERS was to help in the securitization process. Basically, MERS directed defaulting mortgages to the appropriate tranches of mortgage bonds. MERS was essentially the operating table where the digitized mortgage notes were sliced and diced and rearranged so as to create the Mortgage Backed Securities. Think of MERS as Dr. Frankenstein’s operating table, where the beast got put together.

However, legally-and this is the important part-MERS didn’t hold any mortgage note: The true owner of the mortgage notes should have been the REMIC’s {(Real-Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits, a special vehicle designed to hold the loans for tax purposes).

But the REMIC’s didn’t own the note either, because of a fluke of the ratings agencies: The REMIC’s had to be “bankruptcy remote”, in order to get the precious ratings needed to peddle Mortgage Backed Securities to insitutional investors.

So somewhere between the REMIC’s and the MERS, the chain of title was broken.

Now, what does “broken chain of title” mean? Simple: When a homebuyer signs a mortgage, the key document is the note. As I said before, it’s the actual IOU. In order for the mortgage note to be sold or transferred to someone else (and therefore turned into a Mortgage Backed Security), this document has to be physically endorsed to the next person. All of these signatures on the note are called the “chain of title”.

You can endorse the note as many times as you please-but you have to have a clear chain of title right on the actual note: I sold the note to Moe, who sold it to Larry, who sold it to Curly, and all our notarized signatures are actually, physically on the note, one after the other.

If for whatever reason, any of these signatures is skipped, then the chain of title is said to be broken. Therefore, legally, the mortgage note is no longer valid. That is, the person who took out the mortgage loan to pay for the house no longer owes the loan, because he no longer knows whom to pay.

To repeat: If the chain of title of the note is broken, then the borrower no longer owes any money on the loan.

Read that last sentence again, please. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

The broken chain of title wouldn’t have been an issue if there hadn’t been an unusual number of foreclosures. Before the housing bubble collapse, the people who defaulted on their mortgages wouldn’t have bothered to check to see that the paperwork was in order.

But as everyone knows, following the housing collapse of 2007-’10-and-counting, there’s been a boatload of foreclosures-and foreclosures on a lot of people who weren’t sloppy bums who skipped out on their mortgage payments, but smart and cautious people who got squeezed by circumstances.

These people started contesting their foreclosures and evictions, and so started looking into the chain of title issue . . . and that’s when the paperwork became important. So the chain of title became important. So the botched paperwork became a non-trivial issue.

Now, the banks had hired “foreclosure mills”-law firms that specialized in foreclosures-in order to handle the massive volume of foreclosures and evictions that occurred because of the Housing Crisis. The foreclosure mills, as one would expect, were the first to spot the broken chain of titles.

Well, hell, whaddaya know-turns out that these foreclosure mills might have faked and falsified documentation, so as to fraudulently repair the chain-of-title issue, thereby “proving” that the banks had judicial standing to foreclose on a delinquent mortgage. These foreclosure mills might have even forged the loan note itself-

wait, why am I hedging? The foreclosure mills actually, deliberately and categorically faked and falsified documents, in order to expedite these foreclosures and evictions. Yves Smith at naked capitalism, who has been all over this story, put up a price list for this “service” from a company called DocXyes, a price list for forged documents. Talk about your one-stop shopping!

So in other words, a massive fraud was carried out, with the inevitable innocent bystander getting caught up in this fraud: The guy who got foreclosed and evicted from his home in Florida, even though he didn’t actually have a mortgage, and in fact owned his house free-and-clear. The family that was foreclosed and evicted, even though they had a perfect mortgage payment record. Et cetera, depressing et cetera.

Now, the reason this all came to light is not because enough people were getting screwed that the banks or the government or someone with power saw what was going on, and decided to put a stop to it-that would have been nice, to see a shining knight in armor, riding on a white horse.

But that’s not how America works nowadays.

No, alarm bells started going off when the title insurance companies started to refuse to insure the title.

In every sale, a title insurance company insures that the title is free-and-clear: That the prospective buyer is in fact buying a properly vetted house, with its title issues all in order. Title insurance companies stopped providing their service because-of course-they didn’t want to expose themselves to the risk that the chain-of-title had been broken, and that the bank had illegally foreclosed on the previous owner.

That’s when things started gettin’ innerestin’: That’s when the Attorneys General of various states started snooping around and making noises (elections are coming up, after all).

The fact that Ally Financial (formerly GMAC), JP Morgan Chase, and now Bank of America have suspended foreclosures signals that this is a serious problem-obviously. Banks that size, with that much exposure to foreclosed properties, don’t suspend foreclosures just because they’re good corporate citizens who want to do the right thing, with all the paperwork in strict order-they’re halting their foreclosures for a reason.

The move by the United States Congress last week, to sneak by the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act? That was all the banking lobby-they wanted to shove down that law, so that their foreclosure mills’ forged and fraudulent documents would not be scrutinized by out-of-state judges. (The spineless cowards in the Senate carried out their Master’s will by a voice vote-so that there’d be no registry of who had voted for it, and therefore no accountability, the corrupt pricks.)

And President Obama’s pocket veto of the measure? He had to veto it-if he’d signed it, there would have been political hell to pay, plus it would have been challenged almost immediately, and likely overturned as un-Constitutional in short order. (The jug-eared milquetoast didn’t even have the gumption to veto it-he pocket vetoed it.)

As soon as the White House announced the pocket veto-the very next day!-Bank of America halted all foreclosures, nationwide.

Why do you think that happened? Because the banks are screwed-again. By the same fucking thing as the last time-the fucking Mortgage Backed Securities!

The reason the banks are fucked again is, if they’ve been foreclosing on people they didn’t have the legal right to foreclose on, then those people have the right to get their houses back. And the people who bought those foreclosed houses from the bank might not actually own the houses they paid for.

And it won’t matter if a particular case-or even most cases-were on the up-and-up: It won’t matter if most of the foreclosures and evictions were truly because the homeowner failed to pay his mortgage. The fraud committed by the foreclosure mills casts enough doubt that now, all foreclosures come into question. Not only that, all mortgages come into question.

People still haven’t figured out what this all means-but I’ll tell you: If enough mortgage-paying homeowners realize that they may be able to get out of their mortgage loan and keep their house, scott-free? Shit, that’s basically a license to halt payments right the fuck now. That’s basically a license to tell the banks to fuck off.

What are the banks gonna do-try to foreclose and then evict you? Show me the paper, motherfucker, will be all you need to say.

This is a major, major crisis. This makes Lehman’s bankruptcy look like a spring rain, compared to this hurricane. And if this isn’t handled right-and handled right quick, in the next couple of weeks on the outside-this crisis could also spell the end of the mortgage business altogether. Of banking altogether. Hell, of civil society. What do you think happens in a country when the citizens realize they don’t need to pay their debts?

This crisis puts everything into question. It is clear that our economic system has become a decrepit house of cards, that to be brought down requires only a good kick. Imagine if people realized that they could give the blood-sucking parasites who destroyed their economy, shattered their dreams of retirement, ruined all prospects of a middle-class lifestyle a good black eye by simply not paying them money anymore? I think this is a movement that both left and right could unite behind. If this information were to go viral, it could well deliver a mortal blow to the Wall Street criminals. I conclude with the thoughts of Mr. Liara.

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing-what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

Fuckit.

When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.

TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry-the upright citizenry-throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.