Big Banks Trying To Slide By Laws
OCC REVIEW AND ACCEPTANCE OF PAYMENTS COULD WAIVE MUCH GREATER CLAIMS OF BORROWERS
“But she also revealed in some instances, they would be final. In some cases, a borrower would not be able to bring future claims against the servicer if he or she takes the payout.”
“I don’t think the American people are going to continue to endure these hardships when they realize that the banks are getting paid over and over again for the same non-existent mortgages securing the same defective promissory notes evidencing the same fraudulently induced obligations.“ Neil Garfield, livinglies.me
EDITOR’S COMMENT: Whether it is through the deal with the attorney generals, or through the modification process or now, through the OCC review process, the Banks are hell-bent on getting amnesty for their infuriating behavior. They will try to slip in language to almost anything you sign to get you to waive rights against them or to have them deemed waived, creating one more layer to penetrate when you go to court. It’s a good strategy for the Banks and a really bad idea.
No matter how you cut it, we are still dealing with a process in which the assumption is that the problem was just a “paperwork” issue. It was not. The main problem is well known to the banks involved in the securitization scam. And now they are trying to get it solved in the settlement with the attorney generals — leaving the rest of the country to deal with the Great Title Crisis in the years to come.
The main problem is the loan origination. It broke all the rules and everyone knows it. They used straw-men without disclosing even the possibility that there was a principal much less identifying the principal. They cooked the applications and gave loans out knowing and hoping they would fail so they wouldn’t have to account for how much money they stole from investors before the loan failed.
Under existing law there is a high probability that the mortgages were never perfected into liens, and so the loans are unsecured obligations that can be discharged in bankruptcy, with the homeowner keeping the property if homestead laws permit it.There is an equally high probability that the loan has already been converted into unsecured obligation by virtue of rescission that many homeowners sent to servicers and “lenders” which were routinely ignored.
What they are trying to do is to give value to figures on their balance sheets which right now are made out of smoke and mirrors. And in their process, the transfer of wealth from the middle class and now some new “poor” people has been catastrophic to the nation and the world. The truth is that they used other people’s money to fund the mortgages and pocketed a substantial portion of the money advanced by investors instead of using it to fund mortgages. They had no losses but they got insurance and federal bailouts.
Everything that is happening in the courts, in regulatory actions, and in politics and the press is essentially missing the point. They are based upon false premises. And maybe it will indeed work out for them in the end. But I don’t think the American people are going to continue to endure these hardships when they realize that the banks are getting paid over and over again for the same non-existent mortgages securing the same defective promissory notes evidencing the same fraudulently induced obligations.
“Similar cases were brought before courts in Idaho, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Utah, and other states. “It appears that every MERS mortgage,” a New York State Supreme Court judge recently told me, “is defective, a piece of crap.” The language in the judgments against MERS became increasingly denunciatory. MERS’s arguments for standing in foreclosure were described as “absurd,” forcing courts to move through “a syntactical fog into an impassable swamp.”
Don’t you just love the language? “Every MERS mortgage is a defective piece of crap.” SO TRUE! That’s a slap in the face to the bankster-apologist sycophants who populate the California courts and masquerade as judges.
FROM Livinglies weblog :
Beth Stoops Jacobson, on January 5, 2012 at 10:19 amsaid:
Use the fraudulent assignment to recover up to $9000.00 in money damages against the assignee.
If the transfer occured after May 19, 2009, and the homeowner is not been notified of the transfer it is a violation of Section 131(g) of TILA (Truth in Lending Act) (15 U.S.C. 1641) which as part of the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act was amended by Congress May 19, 2009, to include a new provision requiring the assignee of a mortgage loan to notify a consumer borrower that the loan has been transferred. Section 131(g) requires the new owner or assignee of a mortgage loan to notify the borrower in writing when the mortgage loan is sold or otherwise transferred, and this notification must include, pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 1641(g)(1), the following:
1. The assignee’s identity, address and phone number;
2. The date of transfer;
3. Contact information for an agent or party having authority to act on behalf of the assignee;
4. The location of the place where transfer of ownership of the debt is recorded; and,
5. Any other relevant information regarding the assignee
File the claim in Court requesting the $9000.00 using the Assignment as the evidence (as long as the assignment is after May 19, 2009 and you were not notified within 30 days of the date of the Assignment that your loan transferred). Use the fraudulent assignment to collect the money. Then use that money to defend the foreclosure action. We see homeowners collect this money within 60 days of filing their claim. Email us at fclosurehelp@live.com for more info.
From Livinglies weblog
This is the start of what we have been waiting for. Investors who purchased David Stern’s operation — a foreclosure mill that had been bank-rolled literally by the Banks. They actually have the necessary files, documentation and proof needed because they now own the company and they realize they were induced to buy a “criminal enterprise.”
This is what I have been talking about. Investors of all shapes and sizes are starting to awaken to the fact that the entire foreclosure process has been permeated by false statements as to the amounts due, the identity of the creditor, and the documents that “perfected” the lien, transferred the loan and were the basis for foreclosure. None of the foreclosures are real. That is a grandiose statement, but it will prove to be true.
This news is important not only because it corroborates the defenses of borrowers in tens of thousands of foreclosure cases filed by Stern. It is really important because what will emerge is a fact pattern that shows that ALL of the foreclosure mills were operating in the same way because all of them were essentially renting their law license to the Banks who were covering up the securitization scam, to wit: that the securitization that was documented was never followed, that the money trail does not conform to the documents, and that the liens were never perfected and were therefore not subject to foreclosure because they were unsecured.
Early in 2010, the back-office processing operations of Mr. Stern’s law firm were converted into a publicly traded company called DJSP Enterprises. Mr. Stern pocketed nearly $60 million from that transaction, public filings show.
Behind that big-money deal was a curious cast of characters, including some with previous run-ins with regulators. Other parties included a small Wall Street investment bank headed by a former presidential candidate, the retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, and a little-known private equity firm based in New York.
Even before the DJSP windfall, Mr. Stern enjoyed a lifestyle that featured grand mansions, flashy sports cars and a yacht called Misunderstood. But the days of easy money are over for Mr. Stern, his law firm and DJSP investors.
As the Florida attorney general’s office continues to investigate whether Mr. Stern’s law firm falsified documents in order to speed up foreclosures, the firm has lost its biggest clients, including Citibank and Fannie Mae. Many of DJSP’s executives have left the company, and it has laid off about 80 percent of its 1,200 employees.
Why the Banks Had To Lie :
The investors who purchased David Stern’s foreclosure mill have taken the extraordinary step of announcing publicly that they had been duped into buying a “criminal enterprise.” Obviously they didn’t want to get caught up in the dragnet of prosecutors looking for convictions. Nobody would spend $60 million like these investors did and then announce to the world that not only was it worthless, it was worse than worthless. It turns out that once they owned it they discovered that the entire enterprise was based upon criminal and other illegal or improper acts. It will soon be obvious that virtually all the foreclosure mills operated identically to Stern because they were owned and operated by the same people.
Those criminal acts were all about pushing foreclosures through the system. The end result of foreclosure is that somebody gets the house upon entry of a “credit bid” which is to say that they don’t pay cash, they just submit a “bid” based upon the fact that the property was the collateral for money that was due them. Since Stern was not taking the homes, and it is obvious that others were taking the homes, the question is why did they need to go through all those gyrations and subject themselves to prison time if the mortgages were legitimate?
I think the question answers itself. No Bank would require, allow or promote practices that were criminal acts in order to foreclose on an otherwise legitimate mortgage, note and obligation. The only reason why criminal acts were required was that the mortgages and foreclosures were a sham. At this point, with all the publicity about robo-signing, surrogate signing, forgeries, fabrications, back-dating etc., and the Banks’ protestations that these are the result of paperwork problems that emerged as a consequence of the volume of foreclosures, the Banks have had more than adequate time and opportunity to prove their case — that the mortgages were legitimate and the foreclosures were proper, subject only to resolving some minor paperwork errors.
That they have not done so corroborates the point I made 4 years ago. In most cases, at the time the mortgage documents were signed at “closing” the originator showing on the note and mortgage was not owed one cent — because they never made the loan. The originator was a paid straw-man. Somebody else made the loan but the paperwork does not even hint at that fact. That means the paperwork refers to a transaction with the originator that never occurred. The intermediaries who created this scheme made tons of money without reporting or accounting to either the investors or the borrowers. So it looks like the loan is still outstanding and due when in fact it has been paid several times over. Foreclosures only represented another payment in addition to the other multiple payments of the loan.
The actual source of the loan, as I have stated for years, was a group of institutional investors who were induced into buying bogus mortgage bonds thus creating a pool of money. The investment bankers took a huge bite out of that pool before they started funding mortgages. They did it contrary to the expectations and understanding of the investors and the ratings agencies. It was like buying a new car: as soon as you drive off the lot you lose a substantial amount of equity because now it is a used car. In this case, the Banks drove the money off a cliff and the investors were lucky to receive a few cents on the dollar they invested.
The fact that the mortgage documents refer to a transaction that never took place should be interpreted as a fatal defect in the documents as well as violating deceptive lending laws on the Federal (TILA) level and state level. That defect means or should be interpreted to mean that there is no lien on any of those homes and it can’t be corrected without getting a signature from the homeowner or a court order clearing title. The Banks know as much as I do about all this. In fact they know more than I do and they know exactly how to clear title.
They couldn’t go back to the homeowner because the homeowner now knew what was unknown at closing — that the deal was toxic and stupid and couldn’t work. The Court would enter the order the Banks required if they proved that the requirements of law had been met in establishing a mortgage loan. They can’t. So they are left with (a) an unsecured PAID loan to an unknown creditor and (b) liability for fraud. And they can’t fix it.
So they started foreclosing and in order to do so they needed to finesse the borrowers and the Court system with documents that looked right but were pure fabrication. Millions of these foreclosures took place and the Judges who rubber-stamped them never bothered to look at whether the paperwork actually made sense. Now, like to or not, all those foreclosures need to be reviewed for fatal errors. And homeowners, getting wise to the fact that they might still legally own homes they were kicked out of years ago, are visiting lawyers to see what can be done to recover the property. My guess, is that the tide has turned. That means homes are going to be returned to homeowners. In turn that means the value attributed to the mortgage backed securities have also been false and that requires a significant write-down of non-existent assets.
The write-down of assets on the balance sheets of the Banks (which after all are not really banks) will diminish their capital to a point well under the reserve requirements by any standards whether FED, Basil or otherwise. The only real question left is whether we will act as a nation of laws or of men. If we are a nation of laws the fraudulent transfer of wealth from the populace to the banks will be reversed and the economy will start humming again. If we are a nation of men, then we must recognize that a coup d’etat has occurred and we no longer have the government or the society we thought we had.
Go to livinglies weblog for more
