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damn if that wouldn't free up consumer spending



Hoo boy we might have a little of that bugaboo Human Error here, as in, "Some employees might have improperly prepared the necessary documents."

Shock therapy for Wall Street: Banking giants suspend thousands of foreclosures
MERS is simply an electronic data base. On its website and in assorted court pleadings, it declares that it owns nothing. It was set up that way intentionally so that it would be "bankruptcy-remote," something required by the credit rating agencies in order to turn the mortgages passing through it into highly rated securities that could be sold to investors. MERS not only has no assets; it has no employees. The thousands of people enlisted to sign affidavits on its behalf are merely conduits. The arrangement satisfied the ratings agencies, but it has not satisfied the courts. Increasingly, judges are holding that if MERS owns nothing, it cannot foreclose, and it cannot convey title by assignment so that the trustee for the investors can foreclose. MERS breaks the chain of title so that no one has standing to foreclose. The homes are effectively owned free and clear.

That does not mean the homeowners don't owe money to someone. They do. But the claim for relief is not in "law" (by virtue of an enforceable contract or rule) but in "equity" (a remedy provided just because it is fair), and MERS is not the proper plaintiff. Every MERS case involves a securitization, which means the real parties in interest are a group of investors somewhere; and before the homeowners can be made to pay, the investors have to come forward and prove not only that they are the parties owed the money, but the actual sums they are owed. In some cases they might already have been paid; for example, by insurers on credit default swaps held by the investment pool. The investors are entitled to recover in equity only so much as they are actually out of pocket, not the full amount of the original promissory notes, since they were not parties to those notes and there is no way to re-establish the chain of title.

Or as Ellen Brown put it here:

That means hordes of victims of predatory lending could end up owning their homes free and clear—while the financial industry could end up skewered on its own sword.

Oh God. Please.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This sounds too good to be true. But I will now envision these weavers of monstrous webs of deceit to finally become entangled in the fiasco they have created out of sheer greed.

May it be so.
A. Peasant said…
i feel the same. i've had an eye on this issue, it's been banging around for a while. from the end of Ellen Brown's piece:

"While courts are not likely to let 62 million homeowners off scot free, the defect in title created by MERS could give them significant new leverage at the bargaining table."

makes it sound like much of this will rest with the courts. i guess that's where corrupt judges come in handy. however, from teh scale of the problem, i'm not sure they can wave the magic wand and fix this for the banks, which is what i think she is saying.
malcontent said…
If Grayson doesn't get a bump in votes from this clip in his race against Taliban Dan then the zombies have already reached the pupae stage of zombie transformation.

According to Wikipedia:

Pupation may last weeks, months or even years. For example it is 2 weeks in monarch butterflies. The pupa may enter dormancy or diapause until the appropriate season for the adult insect. In temperate climate pupae usually stay dormant during winter, in the tropics pupae usually do so during the dry season.
chuckyman said…
Oh the sweet smell of irony indeed. That’ll really gum up the works of the machine A.P. They blamed those who took out the bad loans for the crash rather than massive financial speculation and debt bubble.

After all that they buggered up the paperwork trail. They bundled up hundreds of loans and passed them off as AAA stock – oops nobody told MERS. It’s very similar, I think, to breaking the chain of custody for forensic evidence.
A. Peasant said…
yeah. i hesitate to get too excited but you know... this would be da bomb.
chuckyman said…
Like you A.P. I have watched stories around this develop. People here in CCTV land have had huge problems getting their property deeds when their mortgage is paid off. These loans (and the title docs) have been on a 10 year long merry go round and noone knows who holding them and where the deed are.

George Ure covered this recently. He thinks this matches the Web Bot language around the term ‘coagulation in the markets’. If so it means the ass will fall out of the system before its pre-planned date. Alternatively this could be a trigger point that has been anticipated by those that intentionally sabotaged it – interesting.
A. Peasant said…
i'm all for the ass falling out of the system.
Odin's Raven said…
The concomittant of no-one being able to prove title will surely be that de facto possession becomes the only title. When the mobsters throw these unfortunate people out of their houses,(or force them to pay rent),the new holders title will be no worse legally and more enforceable in practice. Might makes Right.
A. Peasant said…
yes, it seems like a lot of things will have to be enforced. and there are logistics to consider, and priorities, and maybe it will all get out of hand very quickly.
Anonymous said…
I see from the other piece they are bringing American justice to Germany. Can't protest those bus stations.

Not much new here, in Gainesville, Florida one guy went psycho and shot 7, killed two before committing suicide.
Noor al Haqiqa said…
Do these victims have any recourse against this fraudulent scheme? I mean, a man pays CASH for his home and it is repossessed? A couple with a perfect record lose their home over a $75 error?

DO these people fight? Or did they comply and obey?

Resist and resist then resist again. The longer we make them wait, the harder we make them work, the better our chances that their filth will collapse upon them. Or so I pray.

Lord, those MILLIONS of people living in tent cities because of this? Don't bring us a scape goat, bring us every goddamn buzztard involved. Then put them all in a walled and barred factory where they can wear stripes and make lingerie for Victoria's Secret.

Oh, and learn the hard way not to drop the soap.
chuckyman said…
Spot on Odin. By default the nation will have been emancipated – if they have the spirit to hold it.

Over in here in bonny Scotland communities fought for many years against the bailiffs. Paid lackeys of the money masters who would descend on a poor family and force entry to take away all their belongings. They were successful in ending that practice.

Can neighbours not do the same in the US? Does every struggling household need to suffer their own personal Alamo alone when their time comes?

I can’t remember exactly the quote from Solzhenitsyn who described the round ups by the Jewish Cheka in Russia. His greatest regret was that no one helped. He truly believed that if the people in the apartment blocks interfered and came to the assistance of those being rounded up – sending some of the Cheka thugs to the morgue that many more would have been saved in the long run. Thugs like to go home safe at night also.

Excellent thought Noor – it’s worth keeping in mind (grin).
Anonymous said…
This is a paraphrase of it, Chuck.-

" A quarter of the population of the city (Leningrad/St.Petersburg) was arrested and liquidated by Yagoda during this two-year period.

And Solzhenitsyn laments that the citizens of St. Petersburg cowered behind their doors when the black vans pulled up at their apartment houses night after night to arrest their neighbors. If only the decent Russians had fought back, Solzhenitsyn says, if only they had ambushed some of these secret police thugs in the hallways of their apartments with knives and pickaxes and hammers, if only they had spiked the tires of the police vans while the thugs were in the apartments dragging out their victims, they could easily have overwhelmed Yagoda's forces and forced an end to the mass arrests. But they didn't fight back, and the arrests and liquidations continued. And so, Solzhenitsyn concludes, because of their cowardice and their selfishness the Russians deserved what the communists did to them.
chuckyman said…
Many thanks James. I'll need to keep a copy of that.
A. Peasant said…
all good thoughts. i don't know if people will defend each other. i hope they will. so much depends on perceiving the enemy correctly, and of course that is the whole goal of divide and conquer -- to prevent people from understanding who is the source of their problems, and to break trust down in society.
veritas6464 said…
Hey Campo,...Here's the thing, most of these sub-prime mortages were written with variable interest rates; well, under Common Law (the ju.S.A uses similiar real estate laws and laws of contract to rothschalia and the ju-K - to wit:

contract 1) n. an agreement with specific[!] terms between two or more persons or entities in which there is a promise to do something in return for a valuable benefit known as consideration.

There can be NO contract between two parties where there is a variable component. 'SPECIFIC' - There is no specification in the term ‘variable’, my colleagues and I are aiding many families here in Rothschalia to fight their Creditors based on the Westminster System of Common Law regarding The Law of Contract!

The greedy yids didn’t do their homework properly because; I bet they expected us to be embroiled already in a WW3 style war against Iran by now - FUCK'EM! Drizzled in a piquant sauce of Noahyde lors. I hate yids!

Heh heh heh...talk about disobedience, fancy using the Law against the Yiddish wigs?! Haaaargggh! Coooooeee! Peace mannn...

vErItAs, nyuk nyuk nyuk...

hit me twice i’m oirish!
chuckyman said…
I see the banks are now into a little ‘breaking and entering’ of occupied houses. It would be unfortunate if the occupier defended themselves.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/06/banks-foreclosure-break-in_n_752613.html

Nice one V. Whip them with their own chains.
A. Peasant said…
these banks, just give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves.

yes V & C, that's going to have to be the way it goes down i think, that they get tangled up in their own sticky web. they're all for sticking it to people with the fine print. well in their zeal they may have done some over-reaching and i just really hope so.