Mike Konczal defines the key players in the foreclosure fraud mess. **This is Part 2 in a series giving a basic explanation of the current foreclosure fraud crisis. You can find Part 1 here.
The SEIU has a campaign: Where’s the Note? Demand to see your mortgage note. It’s worth checking out. But first, what is this note? And why would its existence be important to struggling homeowners, homeowners in foreclosure, and investors in mortgage backed securities?
There’s going to be a campaign to convince you that having the note correctly filed and produced isn’t that important (see, to start, this WSJ editorial from the weekend). It will argue that this is some sort of useless cover sheet for a TPS form that someone forgot to fill out. That is profoundly incorrect.
Independent of the fraud that was committed on our courts, the current crisis is important because the note is a crucial document for every party to a mortgage. But first, let’s define what a mortgage is. A mortgage consists of two documents, a note and a lien:
The note is the IOU; it’s the borrower’s promise to pay. The mortgage, or the lien, is just the enforcement right to take the property if the note goes unpaid. The note is crucial.
Why does this matter? Three reasons, reasons that even the Wall Street Journal op-ed page needs to take into account. The first is that the note is the evidence of the debt. If it isn’t properly in the trust, then there isn’t clear evidence of the debt existing.
And it can’t be a matter of “let’s go find it now!” REMIC law, which governs the securitization, is really specific here. The securitization can’t get new assets after 90 days without a tax penalty, and it can’t get defaulted assets at all without a major tax penalty. Most of these notes are way past 90 days and will be in a defaulted state.
This is because these parts of the mortgage-backed security were supposed to be passive entities. They are supposed to take in money through mortgage payments on one end and pay it out to bondholders on the other end — hence their exemption from lots…
All you need to know to follow the trail of wrongdoing.
The current wave of foreclosure fraud and the consequences for the economy are difficult to follow. As such, I’m going to write a few posts to simplify what is going on so you can follow stories as they unfold. This is very 101 level, and will include a reading list of blog posts and articles at each stage to help provide depth. (Special thanks to Yves Smith for walking me through much of this.) Let’s make three charts of the chains involved in the process. The first is what is currently going on with foreclosure fraud (click through for a larger image):
As you can see, in judicial review states like Florida the courts require that servicers, or those who administer the bonds that are full of mortgages (securitization, residential mortgage backed securities, RMBS, are all phrases they use), say that they have everything necessary in order to have standing to bring a foreclosure. They need to have the note for a mortgage, which is supposed to be in the trust — part of the mortgage backed securities — that they administer.
What is breaking down here? In Florida, a judicial review state, it was found that one person was notarizing documents far faster than anyone reasonably could have. Someone found forged documents necessary for the foreclosure process, like the note. A separate court system was set up to resolve these foreclosures faster, at the expense of allowing serious challenges to the documents. Here’s Smith on how kangaroo these courts look up close. Here’s WaPo on one individual and the nightmare of trying to challenge an invalid foreclosure. Keep him in mind when you hear about deadbeats and whatnot: the current system is designed to make it difficult for anyone to challenge their case.
Meet the robo-signer who kicked it off here at this WaPo story. I almost feel bad for this patsy; the real battle here is between junior and senior tranche holders, and this doofus could end up in jail in order to keep John Paulson rich. After reading about this guy, I’m asking our elites to take better care of their goons. (Can we get a Financial Patsy Fordism social contract movement going? If…
So how did America solve the problem of the Too Big To Fail Banks? Simple, we doubled the size of them. Now they’re too gigantic to fail.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Here’s Stephen Grocer in the WSJ with this incredible story (emphasis Daddy’s):
Citi, BofA, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo now control $7.7 trillion in assets and $3.2 trillion in deposits as of March 30. To put that in perspective: The $7.7 trillion in assets is almost double the combined assets of the next 46 biggest banksand 37% more in deposits.
More importantly, those four banks control more assets today than they did in December 2007, when Deal Journal first wrote about “too big to fail.” Back then J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, BofA and Wells held $4.95 trillion in assets.
In the brokerage business, we have a term called Concentrated Position, meaning an account with a greater-than-normal percentage of assets in one or two large holdings. Accounts with concentrated positions are seen to carry more risk (obviously) and are ineligible for margin privileges in some cases. Essentially, the entire banking system has become one big concentrated position account, in worse shape than it was in before the crash (thanks to mergers and attrition, no doubt, but still).
This is an interesting solution to the systemic risk problem we were all carrying on about over the last few years. Bravo.
The Obama plan is exactly backwards in its approach to systemic risk. It will increase systemic risk.
As pointed out by one of the leaders of econophysics, Eugene Stanley (here), one of the prime results in the exploding field of network theory is that densely connected networks are chaotic and unstable compared to sparsely connected networks.
This only makes sense. If every part of a network affects every other part of a network it becomes very easy for large perturbations to propagate through the network, and rebound, and so on.
The Obama-Summers-Geithner solution to our problem of systemic risk is evidence of an intellectual obtuseness that is breathtaking.
The Fed created or permitted by neglect of its duties the systemic risk that caused this crash, and the Great Depression before it. Mish got this right.
The obvious solution given that systemic risk is a characteristic of the structure of the financial system is to change the structure of the system to reduce systemic risk. Break up investment banks and commercial banks. Eliminate financial institutions that are big enough to create systemic risk all by themselves (no more “too big to fail”). Make it impossible for the system to become densely connected by limiting leverage. The plan does increase capital requirements but not enough. And it leaves the trading of CDSs, the densely-linked network of derivatives that largely caused the supposed near melt-down of the system last fall, lightly regulated and less than transparent.
You can’t leave the TBTF institutions in place, or they will capture the regulators again. Or perhaps it’s better to say they’re not letting them go at this time.
Glass-Steagall and the other laws that the neocons undid over the past thirty years worked. They kept the system stable for sixty years.
What is the essence of the problem with our financial system – what brought us into deep crisis, what scared us most in September/October of last year, and what was the
In the desperate search for evidence that the global recession has bottomed out and the recovery has arrived, the story told by the long-term trend in unemployment levels and rates is being missed.
Early this year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) had noted that the global unemployment rate was close to 6 per cent, implying that 197 million people were unemployed, even ignoring the 39 million who had dropped out of the workforce, discouraged by persistent failure in job search.
But that aggregate figure concealed a picture that was far worse in the advanced economies where the crisis had originated and spread. There were at least 12 advanced economies where the unemployment rate was 8 per cent or more, and seve...
James Montier’s bible on behavioural finance, ‘Behavioural investing’, points out two recent discoveries by neuroscientists that have relevance to all investors:
1) We are hard-wired to think short-term, not long-term 2) We also seem to be hard-wired to confirm to the herd mentality
A particularly intriguing experiment used by Montier to illustrate these points relates to our tendency towards ‘anchoring’.
In his words, anchoring is “our tendency to grab hold of irrelevant and often subliminal inputs in the face of uncertainty.”
With yesterday's dovish duo Bullard and Dudley to set expectations, the S&P 500 rallied in anticipation of Chairman Bernanke's congressional testimony and soared to its all-time intraday high, up 1.07% during his prepared remarks. But the Q&A deflated the balloon, and the 2 PM release of the latest Fed Minutes accelerated the decline. It seems that the possibility of tapering QE in the near term is not entirely off the table. The index hit its -1.23% intraday low about 30 minutes before the final bell. It then trimmed its loss to close down 0.83%. The 10-year yield jumped 9 bps to close at 2.03%, just off the 2013 interim high of 2.07% on March 11th and 37 bps off its 2013 low set 14 sessions back.
Here is a 15-minute look at the week so far.
Not surprisingly the volume on today's 2.32% high-low intraday range was 24% above its 50-day movi...
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Doing a lot of data mining as we watch this market go parabolic.
The S&P 500 is 13.4% over the 200 day moving average. 10%+ is considered overbought, and 12% is very rare.
The current Relative Strength Index (RSI) on the S&P 500 is 75. Over 70 is generally overbought (below 30 oversold). To put in perspective in 1999 the S&P touched 70ish a few times but never hit 75. The NASDAQ in 1999 – early 2000 hit mid 70s a few days in July 99 and Mar 00. Then in the parabolic move in November and December 1999 (NASDAQ gained over 1000 pts!) it sat between 70 and mid 80s for most of two months; of course t...
Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) released its fiscal third-quarter earnings after the closing bell on Tuesday.
The company reported revenues which were in-line with expectations and a profit which beat analysts' estimates. In late trade, shares were up a little less than one percent to $58.31.
The company reported net income of $822 million or $2.71 per share, compared to $734 million or $2.42 per share, in the year ago period.
On an adjusted basis, net income rose to $901 million or $2.97 per share, versus $763 million or $2.52 per share, in last year's third-quarter. This came in ahead of Wall S...
SKS - Saks, Inc. – High-end retailer, Saks, Inc., popped up on our ‘hot by options volume’ market scanner this morning on heavier than usual trading traffic in upside calls. Shares in Saks are up 10% on Tuesday morning at a new 52-week high of $13.54 after the company posted first-quarter earnings in line with analyst expectations on higher-than-expected quarterly revenue. Shares in Saks are up more than 30% since this time last year. Bullish positions initiated in SKS options ahead of the earnings release yester...
So, what did the market want today? Nothing it appears. It traded on weak volume and had very little movement. This morning the market hated commodities especially silver, but by days end, the market liked silver, gold and even oil but not the dollar. Why?
Last week the economic reports were tough, with bad misses on more than one occasion. But the market tended to ignore the bad news, probably because money continues to pour into equities from money market funds, long term fixed income, and many struggling foreign economies. On Thursday, investors finally caved to even more bad news from Initial Jobless Claims and weak Housing Starts. Then on Friday, when Michigan Sentiment and Leading Indicators posted large positive surprises, the money came pouring back to generate qui...
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By Craigzooka
I am going to share with you how I manage my IRA and the power of reducing your cost basis. My goal each year is a 20% return in my IRA. Sometimes I make it and sometimes I don't, but I believe that all of my success is due to reducing my cost basis. To illustrate the power of reducing your cost basis here are some trades we did last year. These trades are taken from an educational portfolio we ran in a paper-trading account for a little more than a year.
We bought RIG on 5/15/2012 for $44.13, sold it on 1/18/2013 for $46 but booked a profit of $1,154.
We bought MT on 1/4/2012 for $19.24, sold it on 12/21/2012 for $15 but booked a profit of $454.
We bought CHK on 1/27/2012 for $21.93, sold it on 10/19/2012 for $18 b...
Stock market posts another record setting week, but the big news came after Friday’s close.
Courtesy of NASA
The stock market put on another record setting show with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSEARCA:DIA) closing at a record high 15,118 and the S&P 500 (NYSEARCA:SPY) closing at 1633.70, another all time closing high.
For the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSEARCA:DIA) gained 1%, the S&P 500 (NYSEARCA:SPY) climbed 1.2%, the Nasdaq Composite (NYSEARCA:...
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Well, well, well....it is good to know that there are others in the scientific arena who believed that YMI Bioscience's data (cough - Gilead) is a better drug than Incyte's Jakafi. Now, the definitive data are still unknown, but there was enough evidence from a Phase 2 trial to take a small risk for a huge reward. So, let's forget about Apple (AAPL), and do nothing but biotechs from now until Congress passes universal health care coverage for prescriptions....and drive the prices down so that research and development is no longer feasible to conduct in the US. Even Seattle Genetics (SGEN) has been on a tear as of late...
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(
