The Real Foreclosure Crisis: Who Owns The Mortgages
The Real Foreclosure Crisis: Who Owns The Mortgages?
October 12, 2010, The Huffington Post
For all the headlines given to foreclosure affidavits and robo-signing virtually no one has mentioned the real point, the idea that the affidavits themselves may not prove loan ownership regardless of how they were signed. For several years foreclosure defense attorneys have been telling anyone who would listen that the entire foreclosure process is flawed because you have to own a mortgage note before there can be a foreclose -- and several courts have found that the affidavits used in foreclosures do not prove ownership.
States to Probe Mortgage Mess
October 11, 2010, Wall Street Journal
A coalition of as many as 40 state attorneys general is expected Wednesday to announce an investigation into the mortgage-servicing industry, an effort some of them hope will pressure financial institutions to rewrite large numbers of troubled loans. The move comes amid recent allegations that mortgage-servicers, which include units of major banks such as Bank of America Corp., submitted fraudulent documents in thousands of foreclosure proceedings nationwide. Here’s another Wall Street Journal article.
The Journal Trails Badly on the Foreclosure Scandal
October 8, 2010, Columbia Journalism Review
So we’ve got a nationwide scandal in the still-crippled industry that caused the crisis in the first place — a scandal with potentially systemic (meaning crisis-causing) implications. And how has our leading financial newspaper covered it? Well it hasn’t, really. Not much, anyway. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t had a single page one piece on the scandal, which is now a couple of weeks old. And the paper has had just one section-front story on it: Wednesday’s good piece in Money & Investing on how mortgage-securities investors are threatened by it.
Bank Disinformation III: Obama Backs Bank Over Borrowers
October 11, 2010, Naked Capitalism
Team Obama is so predictably bank friendly that it was inconceivable that the Administration would ever decide against them on anything other than the occasional sop to maintain plausible deniability. But this morning’s news stories reveal the officialdom isn’t even bothering to keep up appearances.
Foreclosure Alarms Rang Months Ago
October 10, 2010, Washington Post
Consumer advocates and lawyers warned federal officials in recent years that the U.S. foreclosure system was designed to seize people's homes as fast as possible, often without regard to the rights of homeowners. In recent days, amid reports that major lenders have used improper procedures and fraudulent paperwork to seize properties, some Obama administration officials have acknowledged they had been aware of flaws in how the mortgage industry pursues foreclosures.