Been reading just a very little bit about the current "foreclosure debacle" in which it appears that the banks were rather slapdash with the paperwork being filed.  But that is about all I know.

Far as I have been able to read, I have not been hearing about any number of people saying "Hey I was current on my payments and those buttheads foreclosed on me".  Have any of y'all been hearing any of that?

I am wondering if whatever paperwork problems that exist, in the end, really made much difference in how many houses were gonna get foreclosed.

I was reading a few articles in the past day or so where people are saying that by having the foreclosure moratorium, there will be a huge "bubble" of foreclosure sales maybe 3 months from now as these properties eventually get put on the market in some sort of "dam burst".

Anybody here got any scoop on this issue? ???

Far as I have been able to read, I have not been hearing about any number of people saying "Hey I was current on my payments and those buttheads foreclosed on me".  Have any of y'all been hearing any of that?


In a word, yes and yes.

MERS replaced the existing system of accounting for property ownership.  This is an organization that apparently has zero employees, but thousands of officers who never show up for board meetings.  Wait, WTF?  Everyone's a board-level officer, but they're only getting paid by the hour like retail grunts?  Yup, that's how it works.  It's fraud.

"Q How many assistant secretaries have you appointed pursuant to the April 9, 1998 resolution; how many assistant secretaries of MERS have you appointed?
A I don’t know that number.
Q Approximately?
A I wouldn’t even begin to be able to tell you right now.
Q Is it in the thousands?
A Yes.
Q Have you been doing this all around the country in every state in the country?
A Yes.
Q And all these officers I understand are unpaid officers of MERS?
A Yes.
Q And there’s no live person who is an employee of MERS that they report to, is that correct, who is an employee?
((Objection))
A There are no employees of MERS."

  -  A tip of the iceberg from a MERS deposition.

What mortgagegate means is that it doesn't matter whether you're making your house payments or not.  If you're not, you have a decent chance of getting the house for free by simply demanding that the bank show you the note - which they don't have.  (Really!)  If you are making your payments, you have a similarly-decent chance of getting your house foreclosed upon, simply because you can't prove that you're paying the right people.  (Really!)

Even the people who applied legitimately for the assistance are getting screwed, becuase their approvals were done only to inflate the number of people in the programmes, only to be dropped when there was no more political benefit to be had by keeping them on the rolls.

Might be too late to save JPM, which would be poetic justice - given that in 2008, JPM was the bank selected to eat the carcass of WaMu, where WM was one of the more egregious of the mortgage fraudsters during the original real estate bubble that got us into this mess.

The entire title insurance industry is basically worthless at this point, as are any banks that rely upon them.  The wheels are coming off, and if you hold a mortgage, you'd probably do well to follow Yves Smith's blog on the subject, as she's been mostly on top of the day-to-day developments in this scandal.

It'll take a few months for it to play out.  My bet is that it gets papered over with populist promises until the election, and then is promptly papered over with gazillions of dollars of disguised (because the people won't stand for it if they're made in public) bailouts after the election.  It's either that, or we wake up one day to find the JPM and WFC trading in the pennies, CDOs being called, and we're back to the 2008 "end of the world" scenarios.  It's that bad.  (It never stopped being that bad.  If you've been waiting for another shoe to drop since 2008, this is probably it.)

If you don't believe the market is taking it seriously (and you read this post by October 20th, 2010 or so), look at a 5-day chart of BAC,  C, JPM, nor  WFC.  (Clicky and change the symbol in the URL)  See those big drops in the price, and spikes in the volume?  That's what rats leaving a sinking ship look like, especially when you see it against the rest of the market (as represented by the S&P 500) basically flat.

By way of disclosure, I don't have positions in those bank stocks.  I'm damn tempted to go short in them, except for the fact that I think the government will bail 'em out, because the alternative - letting them fail and blowing up the entire system with them - is even worse.  The people who know how this is going to play out, and at what prices, are set for life.  Wish I was one of 'em.

Oh, and this got picked up this weekend by a newsletter with around a million and a half subscribers.

Occasionally-naughty (but justified) language, but required reading.  Probably the best explanation of the root cause of Foreclosuregate - and the implications for the banks - that I've read.

The housing market doesn't work here.  The financial market doesn't work here.  We don't manufacture anything.  Our farms have been forcibly collectivized...Oh my God, call Alex Jones!  We've become Stalinist Soviet Union.  Instead of Lenin, we have Reagan!

Look, the only people who still say Reaganomics works get paid to say so.

8)

Look, the only people who still say Reaganomics works get paid to say so.
8)


If only.  The estate ain't paid me yet :)

If only.  The estate ain't paid me yet :)


Well, you're a smart fellow.  Buy the domain "reaganomicsworks.com" and blog about the wonders of supply side economics.  Invite your friends from the Heritage Foundation and soon enough, you'll be a millionaire!
:)

Well, you're a smart fellow.  Buy the domain "reaganomicsworks.com" and blog about the wonders of supply side economics.  Invite your friends from the Heritage Foundation and soon enough, you'll be a millionaire! :)


For every thread, there exists at least one xckd:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rule_34.png

For every thread, there exists at least one xckd:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rule_34.png


Homoerotic spelling bees reminds me of a flyer I saw for "The Adult Spelling Bee." 

Of course, I got the wrong idea!  What's the fun in getting the right idea?
:P