Foreclosure Fraud: Tough Issues With Which to Grapple
This past week, pretty much every conversation I find myself in has something to do with the MASSIVE FRAUD that has emerged related to our nation’s housing, mortgage, credit, foreclosure and economic crises… see, it’s grown so immense in scope that I don’t even know how to refer to it anymore.
Just in case you’re one of those not yet at risk of foreclosure, and therefore don’t think that what you’re hearing about today impacts you, I can assure you that you’ll change your mind about that soon enough, because as it stands the fraud perpetrated here is going to impact everyone in this country for… oh, I don’t know… let’s be optimists about this and call it the next 50 years. I assure you that no one is getting out of this one unscathed.
My God, let’s just take a moment and look at what our bankers have done here. And, as to our nation’s regulatory agencies? Well, we plainly don’t have any, and I’m not at all sure that I mean that figuratively. I can’t help but sincerely wonder, if we literally didn’t have any regulatory agencies, how much worse could it possibly have become? I mean… I want to be fair about this… specifically which “excesses” did our regulatory agencies curb?
On numerous occasions over the last few months, all of my reading on this subject has, on several occasions, flat out left me staring at the blank wall behind my desk, unable to move… unwilling to think. The whole picture is just too much to fathom. Wall Street’s bankers have not only been allowed to destroy the world’s economy and credit markets, but they’ve been rewarded for doing so, and the bill is being sent to the working class citizens of this country, among others.
The same bankers that caused the crises have profited to a degree never before seen or even contemplated, at least not by me. In fact, had anyone, lets say a decade ago, tried to tell me that such an outcome were possible, I would not have believed it. Now, for me… anything is possible, I’m sorry to say.
At issue, of course, is the record-shattering number of mortgages on which servicers are attempting to foreclose without… well, without doing much of anything they’re supposed to do… or legally required to do, like attempting to meaningfully modify loans, or producing the proper paperwork… you know, the stuff that proves that the REMIC trusts that are attempting to foreclose actually hold the notes to the indebtedness in question.
Obviously something is more than just slightly askew in this regard, as essentially all of the major banks have attempted to skirt the issue by producing fraudulent documents, and hiring “robo-signers,” to sign their name something like 10,000 times a month on affidavits claiming that the assignment of a given mortgage to its respective trust has been lost or, for reasons I can’t comprehend, intentionally destroyed.
These banks have been “caught” doing this… caught in the act, as it were. Banks forging documents and robo-signing affidavits to be presented to the court in order to seize someone’s property… banks doing this… not used car dealers… not sales-crazed mortgage companies… banks… large, to-big-to-fail-type banks. The kind of institutions that require multiple signatures, state identification cards and even fingerprints before cashing someone’s check for $5. One might consider, the type of institutions that should be the least likely to condone forgery and fraud where documents are concerned.
So, apparently they ALL lost or intentionally destroyed the documents showing that the loans were assigned to the trusts… and they all lost or destroyed them at about the same time… and then they all independently came up with the idea to hire robo-signers to “prove” to the courts and the country that they should be allowed to foreclose on property regardless of what the paperwork says or doesn’t say. All of them… during the same period of time… unrelated financial institutions… all… lost… the… same… assignment… records… at… the… same… time, and then all decided that the obvious solution was to have someone sign affidavits 10,000 times a month without reading them and present those to the courts.
Was that last paragraph too redundant for your tastes? Yeah, well tough. I should print the last two paragraphs yet again.
Is it just me? Isn’t anyone else fighting the urge to open the window and scream: STOP IT! YOU’RE HURTING ME!?
Professor L. Randall Wray, an economics professor at one of my alma maters, UMKC, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, refers to the situation as “the biggest scandal in human history”. According to Professor Wray:
“Indeed, all previous scandals from around the globe combined cannot even touch this one in terms of scale, scope and stench. This is the mother of all frauds and it will be etched into the history books for all time.”Gee, I wonder what he means by that?
Finally, someone who can write a sentence that doesn’t audaciously equivocate, claim journalistic purity, or otherwise kiss someone’s politically correct ass. You go, Professor… good for you.
On the other side of the table, the banks and the Obama Administration continue to describe the problems banks are having with foreclosures as being trivial-little-nothing-type issues that they’ll have fixed up in a jiffy. Like as if what’s happened is that they forgot to say “Simon says,” before foreclosing… big deal.
So, to sum up the positions of the two sides to this issue, it appears that it is either “the mother of all frauds” on its way to being etched into the history books for all eternity, or it’s an unpaid parking ticket in Hungry Horse, Montana, population 934.
There are several things that bother me about the bankers’ stated position here. For one thing, both their explanations and their apparent attempted solutions to whatever the problems are, ring as hollow as any number of the heads found in Congress these days. That much should be clear to everyone. Just in case any children are reading this, and one never knows about such things, forgery and perjury are never found on the right path to follow when attempting to cover up, flagrant and immeasurable fraud and massive malfeasance, boys and girls… never… never ever.
But, beyond that dramatic overstatement of the painfully obvious, I hate the fact that the banks and the administration’s officials, including Shaun Donavan from HUD, seem to think it’s perfectly okay to collectively act as if they are Obi-Wan Kenobi and we’re the mindless-droid-soldiers of the Empire in that scene from the very first Star Wars movie… “There is nothing to see here. Move along.”
Ummm, okay… if you say so… there’s nothing to see here folks, so let’s all get back to watching the celebrity meteorologist edition of, “So You Think You Can’t Samba,” in 3-D.
The problem is, there are 50 state attorneys general that I would think are running for reelection and they don’t feel like pretending that the laws governing the transfer of property or foreclosure in this country have somehow been reduced to irrelevant technicalities. They obviously think that there are very serious problems here and they’ve banded together to investigate the handling of all of the foreclosures to-date in order to ensure that those that have lost their homes through foreclosure, have in fact lost them to those that own them, and that they haven’t been swindled by unscrupulous financial institutions looking to take advantage of homeowners in distress. I’d also imagine that the AGs, as a result of this investigation, would like to be able to assure their state’s residents that their state’s laws related to foreclosure are being followed going forward.
And yet, with only a week or three having passed since the banks announced that they would stop foreclosing pending the results of their individual investigations into each of their respective robo-signing departments… as if they too were surprised to hear of their very existence… last week Bank of America announced the completion of its comprehensive review of 102,000 loans and wouldn’t you know it, they’ve determined that they are all foreclosure-fine-and-dandy. Tip-top shape, one might say. Therefore, BofA says it’s ready to recommence making a mockery of the US legal system and will return to stealing homes without delay.
Perhaps to commemorate their abundant preparedness, BofA will foreclose on yet another free and clear home on which they never held the mortgage.
Wells Fargo didn’t even bother pretending this time around. They never stopped foreclosing in the first place, saying that they were confident that their ducks were lined up just perfectly. Did they have robo-signers? Why, yes… they did. But, no matter… everything’s fine at Wells, regardless. They were only robo-signing for the fun of it, not because they needed to.
So, why did they all go the robo-signer route in the first place, I wonder? If it only took a couple of weeks to determine that they were in fine shape, why go to the trouble of signing 10,000 fraudulent documents a day? Somewhere, there must be bank employees righteously pissed off because they got carpal tunnel syndrome for nothing.
Once again… “There is nothing to see here. Move along.”
Now, not being an attorney, I can’t be 100% certain of what I’m about to say, but I always thought that foreclosures were governed by state laws, not federal statutes, hence the terms recently emblazoned into our lexicon: “judicial foreclosure state,” and “non-judicial foreclosure state”. So, why the federal government, including President Obama himself, felt the need to say anything about the bank-imposed moratoriums on foreclosures is beyond me.
I mean, the last time President Obama said “boo” about the foreclosure crisis was on February 19th of 2009, when he gave that inspiring speech that introduced his fabulous Making Home Affordable program. The one that was going to help four million homeowners, offer principal reductions, three percent fixed rates for thirty years, and judges capable of cramming down the loan balances of first mortgages in bankruptcy court.
Instead we got HAMP, the one that deceived homeowners into making a year’s worth of trial payments before being unceremoniously evicted as a result of failing some secret NPV test.
Yeah… that HAMP.
I guess what happened was that some Members of the House of Representatives, realizing that they’re up for re-election in a matter of days, thought it would make a good sound bite to say something about a national ban on foreclosures. It’s a state issue, not a federal one, but what the heck, it sounds good.
So, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan actually went out on the media circuit to echo Obama’s message that a national ban on foreclosures was a bad idea because it would harm the housing market by delaying foreclosures, which is funny for two reasons: 1. Because just a few weeks ago, Secretary Geithner and his finance drones said that HAMP was a “success” because it had delayed foreclosures. And, 2. Because no one was seriously proposing a national ban on foreclosures, as the banks had voluntarily stopped foreclosing for a time, anyway.
Shaun was interviewed on PBS’s News Hour. That link has the video and the written transcript of Jim Lehrer’s interview, by the way, and is worth watching, both because you get to see Shaun’s clumsy attempts to deflect the questions being asked, and because you get to see what a weenie he really is.
Throughout the interview, he kept trying to change the subject from being “the lack of assignment paperwork and the blatant fraud being committed by the servicers,” to “the servicers not modifying loans they should be modifying,” which is also funny because the servicers’ behaviors haven’t seemed to bother the administration all that much over this past year.
I see… now, when the servicers are foreclosing illegally, they all of a sudden care that the servicers aren’t modifying loans that they should be modifying. I suppose when it comes out in the next few weeks that the banks committed securities fraud and defrauded investors around the world, they’ll be concerned about them foreclosing illegally. (I’m starting to understand how this whole thing works, which frankly, is scaring me.)
Overall, here’s how the interview went: foor assistance see http://www.rlg-pc.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment