If so, based on a study of one year's worth of recordings in a single county, most of the assignments of mortgages are invalid. "Most" here means 75% were facially invalid and 9% were questionable. Nearly half of the invalid ones were fraudulent. Which means that it is not clear who owns your mortgage, who is entitled to be paid and who may foreclose on it if you don't pay.
Note that this study was done in 2010, which is well after the mortgage mess began to come to light. The banks haven't fixed anything.
Even if your mortgage was paid off and a "Satisfaction of Mortgage" recorded, there might be cause to question if the Sat was valid. The wheels are going to come off the housing market if the title insurance underwriters start to refuse to insure those Sats.
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Think there's an issue for the aristocrats? I'm thinking those properties will never be in doubt.
It's difficult to imagine this fuckup was deliberate, because I'm not sure how a single bank could stand to benefit from dissolving the paper trail of a mortgage. It could, of course, obliterate the financial futures of millions of Americans, which may be the end they're really seeking.
But I'm not sure if our future is really that dark.
It's a problem for them, as well. A lot of those Masters of the Universe borrow money for their eight-figure horse farms and penthouses on Central Park West.
This came about because the banks didn't want to pay title charges every time they assigned a mortgage, so they created MERS to hold the mortgages and then just assigned the notes into the CDOs. Problem is that without properly assigning the mortgages as well, the notes are unsecured. And if an entity has the mortgage and no note, they have no right to foreclose.
I'm sure somebody involved foresaw these consequences. The banks just didn't listen.
Someone probably did see the downside. But they probably make 60k/yr as a clerk and so no one was going to listen to them. That it should have been obvious to pretty much anyone in the lending industry the fact that it was ignored tells me that they don't give a shit. They moved the paper and then insured the mess. In their minds that absolves them of any liability, which is their benchmark. How much they can make and what is the exposure. The only benchmarks they think about.
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