Relevance: THE FORECLOSER HAS NO RIGHT TO BE IN COURT WITHOUT THE SECURITIZATION DOCUMENTS AND RECORDS

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Neil Garfield

 Courts and lawyers are continually ignoring the obvious. By zeroing in on the NOTE, they are ignoring the documents that allow the person in possession of the note to be in court. That results in elimination of critical elements of a prima facie case in which the Defendant borrower lacks the superior knowledge and resources of the Plaintiff and its co-venturers that would show the truth about his loan ownership and balance.

Premise:

Chronologically the document trail starts with the securitization documents. Without the securitization documents there is no privity or nexus between the borrowers and the lenders. Neither one of them signed the deal that the other signed. Without the Assignment and Assumption Agreement, the Prospectus and the Pooling And Servicing Agreement, the trust does not exist, the servicer has no powers, the trustee has no powers, and there is no right of representation or agency between any of those parties as it relates to either the lender investors or the homeowner borrowers.

 

The Assignment and Assumption Agreement between the originator and the aggregator sets forth all the rules and actions preceding, during and after the loan”closing”, including the underwriting by parties other than the originator and the ownership of the loan by parties other than the originator. It is a contract to violate public policy, the Federal Truth in Lending Law prohibiting table funded loans designed to withhold disclosure, and usually state deceptive and predatory lending statutes.

 

The Assignment and Assumption Agreement was an agreement to commit illegal acts that were in fact committed and which strictly governed the conduct of the originator, the closing agent, the document processing, the delivery of documents, the due diligence, the underwriting, the approval by parties other than the originator and the risk of loss on parties other than the originator. The Assignment and Assumption Agreement is essential to the Court’s knowledge of the intent and reality of the closing, intentionally withheld from the borrower at closing. It cannot be anything other than relevant in any action sought to enforce the documents produced at a loan closing that was conducted in strict adherence to the illegal Assignment and Assumption Agreement.

 

The other closing is with the investors who were accepting a proposed transaction to lend money for the origination or acquisition of loans through a trust. Those documents and records (Prospectus, Pooling and Servicing Agreement, Distribution reports, etc) provide for the creation and governance of the trust, the appointment of a trustee and the powers of the trustee, and the appointment and the powers of the Master Servicer and subservicers. Those documents also provide for there requirements of reporting and record keeping, including the physical location and custody of actual loan documents. Without those documents, there is no power or authority for the trustee, the trust, the Master Servicer, the subservicer, the Depository, the Securities Administrator the purchase of insurance, credit default swap trading, funding the origination or acquisition of loans, or collection and enforcement of loan documents. without those documents the Court cannot know what records should be kept and thus what records need to be produced to show the status of the obligation in the books and records of the creditor — regardless of whether the loan was actually securitized or just claimed to be securitized.

 

Procedure and UCC
In Judicial States, the Plaintiff is bringing suit alleging a default by the Defendant on a promissory note and for enforcement of a mortgage. The name of the payee on the note is different from the name of the Plaintiff in the lawsuit. The name of the mortgagee is different from the the name of the Plaintiff. The suit is bought by (a) a trustee on behalf of the holders of securities that make the holders of those securities (Mortgage Bonds) in a NY Trust (b) the “servicer” on behalf of the trust or the holders or (c) a company that alleges it is a holder or a holder with rights to enforce. None of them assert they are holders in due course which means they concede that the Plaintiff did not buy the loan in good faith without knowledge of the borrowers defenses. They assert they are holder in which case they are subject to all of the borrowers defense — which procedurally means the issues concerning the initial loan and any subsequent transfers can be in issue if the preemptive facts are denied and appropriate affirmative defenses and counterclaims are filed. These defenses are waived at trial if an objection is not timely raised.

 

In Non-Judicial States, the name of the “new” beneficiary is different from the name of the payee on the promissory note and the name of the beneficiary on the Deed of Trust. The “new beneficiary” files a “Substitution of Trustee”, the Trustee sends a notice of default, notice of sale and notice of acceleration based upon “representations” from the “new beneficiary.” This process allows a stranger to the transaction to assert its position outside of a court of law that it is the new beneficiary and even allows the new beneficiary to name a company as the “new trustee” in the Notice of Substitution of Trustee. The foreclosure is initiated by the new trustee on the deed of trust on behalf of (a) a trustee on behalf of the holders of securities that make the holders of those securities (Mortgage Bonds) in a NY Trust (b) the “servicer” on behalf of the trust or the holders or (c) a company that alleges it is a holder or a holder with rights to enforce. None of them assert they are holders in due course which means they concede that the Plaintiff did not buy the loan in good faith without knowledge of the borrowers defenses. They assert they are holder in which case they are subject to all of the borrowers defense — which procedurally means the issues concerning the initial loan and any subsequent transfers can be in issue if the preemptive facts are denied and appropriate affirmative defenses and counterclaims are filed. These defenses are waived at trial if an objection is not timely raised. In these cases it is the burden of the borrower to timely file a motion for Temporary Injunction to stop the trustee’s sale of the property.

 

Argument:
By failing to assert with clarity the identity of the creditor on whose behalf they are “holding” the note and mortgage (or deed of trust) and failing to assert the presence of the actual creditor (holder in due course) the parties initiating foreclosure have (a) failed to assert the essential elements to enforce a note and mortgage and (b) have failed to establish a prima facie case in which the burden should shift to the borrowers to defend. The present practice of challenging the defenses first is improper and contrary to the requirements of due process and the rules of civil procedure. If the Plaintiff in Judicial states or beneficiary in non-judicial states is unable to sustain their burden of proof for a prima facie case, then Judgment should be entered for the alleged borrower.

 

Evidence:
Virtually all loans initiated or originated or acquired between 1996 and the present are subject to claims of securitization, which is the first reason why the securitization documents are relevant and must be introduced as evidence along with proof of compliance with those documents because they are almost all governed by New York State law governing common law trusts. Any act not permitted by the trust instrument (Pooling and Servicing Agreement) is void, which means for purposes of the case narrative, the act or event never occurred.

If the Plaintiff or beneficiary is alleging that it is a holder and not alleging it is a holder in due course then there is a 96% probability that the creditor is either a trust or a group of investors who paid money to a broker dealer in an IPO where securities were issued by the trust and the investors money should have been paid to the trust. In all events, the assertion of “holder” status instead of “Holder in Due Course” means by definition that one of two things is true: (1) there is no holder in due course or (2) there is a Holder in Due Course and the party initiating the foreclosure and collection proceedings is asserting authority to represent the holder in due course. In all events, the representation of holder rather than holder in due course is an admission that the party initiating the foreclosure proceeding is there in a representative capacity.

 

THE FORECLOSER HAS NO RIGHT TO BE IN COURT WITHOUT THE SECURITIZATION DOCUMENTS:

 

If the proceeding is brought by a named trust, then the existence of the trust, the authority of the trust, the manner in which the trust may acquire assets, and the authority of the servicer, Master servicer, trustee of the trust, depository, securities administrator and others all derive from the trust instrument. If there is a claim of securitization and the provisions of the securitization documents were not followed then in virtually all foreclosure cases the wrong parties are initiating the foreclosures — because the money of the investors went direct to the origination and purchase of loans rather than through the SPV Trust which for tax purposes was designed to be a REMIC pass through trust.

 

If the foreclosing party identifies itself as a servicer and as a holder it is admitting that it is there in a representative capacity. Their prima facie case therefore includes the documents and events in which acquired the right to represent the actual creditor. Those are only the securitization documents.

 

If the foreclosing party identifies itself as a holder but does not mention that it is a servicer, the same rules apply — the right to be there is a representative capacity must derive from some written instrument, which in virtually cases is the Pooling and Servicing Agreement.

 

Representations that the loan is a portfolio loan not subject to securitization are generally untrue. In a true portfolio loan the UCC would not apply but the rules governing a holder in due course can be used as guidance for the alleged transaction. The “lender” must show that it actually funded the loan, in good faith (in accordance with the requirements of Federal and State law governing lending) and without knowledge of the borrower’s defenses. They would be able to show their underwriting committee notes, reports and correspondence, the verification of the loan, the property value, the ability of the borrower to repay and all other national standards for underwriting and appraisals. These are only absent when there is no risk of loss on the alleged loan, because if the borrower doesn’t pay, the money was never destined to be received by the originator anyway.

 

In addition, the Prospectus offering to the investors combined with the Pooling and Servicing Agreement constitute the “indenture” describing the manner in which the investment will be returned to the investors, including interest, insurance proceeds, proceeds of credit default swaps, government and non government guarantees, etc. This specifies the duties and records that must be kept, where they must be kept and how the investors will receive distributions from the servicer. Proof of the balance shown by investors is the only relevant proof of a dealt and the principal balance due, applicable interest due, etc. The provisions of the contract between the creditors and the trust govern the amount and manner of distributions to the creditor. Thus it is only be reference to the creditors’ records that a prima facie case for default and the right to accelerate can be made. The servicer records do not include third party payments but do include servicer advances. If records of servicer advances are not shown in court, and the provision for servicer advances is in the prospectus and/or pooling and servicing agreement, then the Court is unable to know the balance and whether any default occurred as a result of the borrower ceasing to make payments to the servicer.

 

In short, it is the prospectus and pooling and servicing agreement that provide the framework for determining whether the creditors got paid as per their expectations pursuant to their contract with the Trust. It is only by reference to these documents that the distribution reports to the investors can be used as partial evidence of the existence of a default or “credit event.” Representations that the borrower did not pay the servicer are not conclusive as to the existence of a default. Only the records of the creditor, who by virtue of its relationships with multiple co-obligors, can establish that payments due were paid to the creditor. Servicer records are relevant as to whether the servicer received payments, but not relevant as to whether the creditor received those payments directly or indirectly. The servicer and creditors’ records establish servicer advance payments, which if made, nullify the creditor default. The creditors’ records establish the amount of principal or interest due after deductions from receipt of third party payments (insurance, credit default swaps, guarantees, loss sharing etc.).

For more information call 954-495-9867 or 520-405-1688.

 

 

Filed under: AMGAR, CORRUPTION, discovery, escrow agent, evidence, expert witness, Fannie MAe, foreclosure, foreclosure defenses, GTC | Honor, investment banking, Investor, MBS TRUSTEE, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, originator, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer, Title, TRUST BENEFICIARIES, trustee | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 76 Comments »

Modifications: Interest reduction, Principal reduction, Payment reduction, and Term increase

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Neil Garfield
In the financial world we don’t measure just the amount of principal. For example if I increased your mortgage principal by $100,000 and gave you 100 years to pay without interest it would be nearly equivalent to zero principal too (especially factoring in inflation). A reduction in the interest rate has an effect on the overall amount of money due from the borrower if (and this is an important if) the borrower is given 40 years to pay AND they intend to live in the house for that period of time. To the borrower the reduction in interest rate and the extension of the period in which it is due lowers the monthly payment which is all that he or she normally cares about.

Nonetheless you are generally correct. And THAT is because the average time anyone lives in a house is 5-7 years, during which an interest reduction would not equate to much of a principal reduction even with inflation factored in. Unsophisticated borrowers get caught in exactly that trap when they do a modification where the monthly payments decline. But when they want to refinance or sell the home they find themselves in a new bind — having to come to the table with cash to sell their home because the mortgage is upside down.

So the question that must be answered is what are the intentions of the homeowner. The only heuristic guide (rule of thumb) that seems to hold true is that if the house has been in the family for generations, it is indeed likely that they will continue to own the property. In that event calculations of interest and inflation, present value etc. make a big difference. But for most people, the only thing that cures their position of being upside down (ignoring the fact that they probably don’t owe the full amount demanded anyway) is by a direct principal reduction.

THAT is the reason why I push so hard on getting credit for receipt of insurance and other loss sharing arrangements, including FDIC, servicer advances etc. Get credit for those and you have a principal CORRECTION (i.e., you get to the truth) instead of a principal REDUCTION, which presumes the old balance was actually due. It isn’t due and it is probable that there is nothing due on the debt, in addition to the fact that it is not secured by the property because the mortgage and note do NOT describe any actual transaction that took place between the parties to the note and the mortgage.

Filed under: AMGAR, CORRUPTION, discovery, evidence, expert witness, foreclosure, foreclosure mill, GARFIELD KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, inflation, interest rates, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Motions, Servicer | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 24 Comments »

MGIC Paid Off 2,400 Loans last month! Why Does the Borrower Still Need to Pay the Same Creditor?

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Neil Garfield

Among the many insurance companies that paid off loans or assets based on loans, MGIC. Off 2400 loans a month of January alone, which appears to be virtually all residential mortgages. Press the reason that nobody is paying any attention to this is that normally the insurer acquires the claim through a legal process called subrogation. In the world of securitization the insurer waives subrogation. So we are left with a payment to a creditor. The creditor is identified as the lender for purposes of the insurance. There is no doubt in any venue that once a settlement is accepted by a creditor or claimant the case is over.

But in mortgage foreclosures in appears as though even the most basic and common sense knowledge is ignored. The creditor receives full payment and then allows an agent to foreclose on the property even though the account receivable not longer exists. The same failure of logic exists with respect to servicer advances where the creditor has been receiving payments regardless of whether the borrower has been making payments or not. For reasons beyond my comprehension courts have thus far mostly accepted the premise that it doesn’t make any difference how much money the creditor has received on this debt, as long as the borrower hasn’t paid the amount stated as due in the promissory note (even if the promissory note has been paid in full by third-party).

To top things off, GKW (my law firm — 850-765-1236) is handling a case where insurance paid off a loan upon the death of the owner. BOA filed the appropriate satisfaction of Mortgage. But then in the giant roulette we know as LPS they still had the loan active and a servicer convinced the decedent’s family to enter into a modification of the loan without telling them that the loan had been paid off. Eventually, after years of “modification” payments on a loan that did not exist, the servicer has filed a judicial foreclosure in Florida! And after being informed we have the recorded satisfaction they had yet another entity file a document that was signed by still another entity and they recorded it in the county records — stating that the BOA satisfaction was a mistake!

Do I still need need to convince anyone that they need a forensic report and expert declaration? Call 520-405-1688. And for the lawyers, my firm also provides litigation support and coaching for this litigation across the country.

Dan Edstrom sent me the following:

Neil,

You said in your seminar there are  on your3 ways to discharge an obligation.  Payment, Waiver of Payment or Magic.  Spend to much for the holidays?  Would you believe in magic …

Quote

There were 9,365 new notices of delinquency in January, 385 more than the number received for December, but a significant improvement over the 11,098 new notices received in January 2013. Meanwhile, 7,745 loans returned to performing status during the month, while MGIC paid the claim on another 2,393 loans.The company denied or rescinded coverage on another 204 loans. This moved the inventory to 102,351 from 103,328 at the start of the month.

In December, 7,259 loans cured and it paid 2,445 claims.

Typically, delinquencies are up in January because of holiday-related spending with those bills coming due.

MGIC wrote $1.7 billion of primary new insurance during the month, compared with $2.2 billion in both December and January 2013.

It would be interesting to know who pays for the coverage and if the homeowner was notified and claim was filed (and paid/denied/rescinded/etc.).  Also, why were the claims denied or coverage rescinded on the other loans?  Was the loan bad, was a defective claim filed, or was a bad faith claim filed?  What government entity (if any) has regulatory authority over MGIC, Radian and others?  What can a homeowner do to find out if insurance coverage exists, whether a claim has been filed and what the status of the filed claim is?

Thanks,

Office: 916.207.6706
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice. This is for educational and informational purposes only. Take no action on this information without consulting an attorney in your jurisdiction. If our information conflicts with your attorneys information, disregard our information. it’s’s and the right what

 

Filed under: CASES, CDO, CORRUPTION, evidence, expert witness, Fannie MAe, foreclosure, foreclosure defenses, foreclosure mill, GARFIELD KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, investment banking, Investor, MBS TRUSTEE, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Motions, Neil Garfield Show, originator, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer, STATUTES, TRUST BENEFICIARIES | Tagged: , , | 133 Comments »

Arizona Appeals Court Reverses Direction: Dismissal of Borrower’s Claims Reversed

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Neil Garfield

JOIN US TONIGHT AT 6PM Eastern time on The Neil Garfield Show. We will discuss this decision and other important developments affecting consumers, borrowers and banks.

Congratulations to Attorney Barbara J. Forde!!

HIGHLIGHTS: Steinberger v Hon. McVey/OneWest

Discharge of Debt — money that OneWest received from FDIC to pay off loss on loan discharges the debt. If it is true that the FDIC has already reimbursed OneWest for all or part of [the borrower’s] default, OneWest may not be entitled to recover that amount from [the borrower}. This corroborates what we have been writing in this blog regarding third-party payments and the existence of co-obligors. To the extent that third party payments have been received by the creditor this court is saying that nobody can collect those same payments (on the same debt) from the borrower.

Unconscionability: Procedural and Substantive: Unfair surprise and fairness, respectively, are the main elements. This opinion raises the possibility of bringing claims that might have been barred by the TILA Statute of Limitations. Pleading requirements are strict. But if you read the decision you can tell that there is room for borrowers to oppose enforcement of contracts that produced sticker shock and other unfair surprises.

Quiet title: This Court concluded that you can’t quiet title based upon the weakness of someone else’s claim. You must allege your right to title and that the parties served have no claim.

Negligence Per Se: Opening a whole new area for litigation this Court concluded that negligence and negligence per se, were valid causes of action for damages and other relief in connection with the handling of modification and other requests.

Negligent Performance of an Undertaking:  This court concluded that the borrower has a cause of action is the lender or the lenders agents or representatives Lord her into defaulting on her loan with the prospect of a loan modification and then negligently administered her application for the modification, causing her to fall so far behind on her payments that it was no longer possible to reinstate her original loan. Borrower must allege that she never obtained a loan modification and that the bank’s conduct ultimately led to the foreclosure on her home.

Good Samaritan Doctrine:  Lender may be held liable under the Good Samaritan Doctrine when a lender or its agent or representative induces a borrower to default on his or her loan by promising a loan modification if he or she defaults. If the borrower in reliance on the promise to modify the loan subsequently defaults on the loan and the lender fails to process the loan modification or due to the lender or agent or representative’s negligence the borrower is not granted a loan modification and the lender subsequently forecloses on the borrower’s property. Note: this is in Arizona decision and is subject to review by the Arizona Supreme Court. It is not dispositive as to all actions in Arizona and can only be used as persuasive authority in other states or federal court.

 Cause of action to avoid a trustee’s sale: The Hogan decision was considered governing but as we pointed out when the decision was made, the Arizona Supreme Court went out of its way to say that  the borrower never alleged that the trustee lacked the authority to conduct a trustee sale and therefore its decision did not address this issue. This court points that out and upheld the borrowers cause of action to avoid a trustee sale based upon the claim that the trustee did not have the authority to conduct a sale of the property. The reasoning behind this decision may well apply in judicial states as well.

 This decision needs to be analyzed carefully. I have only just received it. In the coming days I will provide additional analysis.

Filed under: CORRUPTION, evidence, expert witness, Fannie MAe, foreclosure, foreclosure defenses, GARFIELD KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, investment banking, Investor, MBS TRUSTEE, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer, STATUTES, TRUST BENEFICIARIES, trustee | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 47 Comments »

More Lawsuits, Still No Real Progress and No Coverage by Media

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Neil Garfield

Jon Stewart committed his entire show to the mortgage crisis last Wednesday night. Go watch it. It wasn’t funny although they added some comedic aspects. The bottom line is the question “why aren’t these people in jail?” And the media was scorched with the fact that despite a constant culture of continuing corruption and absurd “transactions” in which paper goes back and forth, and calling that economic activity with”profit,” and stories of the human tragedy of Foreclosures all based on what are now obviously fraudulent schemes, the media is silent. The number of stories on the illegal Foreclosures, the charges of FRAUD by everyone involved from lenders (investors) to insurers to guarantors to borrowers, the verdicts and judgments decided against the banks, and the analysis that the assets of the banks are fictional, the total is ZERO.

My question is why the displacement of more than 15 million people in a single scheme is not the main question in American discourse, media and politics — especially since the banks have admitted by conduct or expressly their wrongdoing? We already know it was a total fraudulent scheme. The banks are settling their ill gotten gains for pennies on the dollar while the victims absorb most of the loss. We already know that the requirements of Federal law were routinely ignored in disclosing the real terms and lenders to borrowers. And if they had made the disclosure, the deals would not have occurred, because if they were disclosed neither the lenders (investors) nor the borrowers (homeowners) would have done the deal.

One particular story was singled out by Jon Stewart to provide an example of what Gretchen Morgenson called “just another day on Wall Street” was the recent transaction between Blackrock and Corere. Blackrock loaned Corere $100 million. Blackrock purchased a credit default swap worth $15 million if there was any default for any reason. Blackrock made a deal with Corere for Corere to default. So Corere defaulted. Blackrock collected the $15 million on the credit default swap PLUS the full repayment from Corere of $100 million, plus interest. Somehow this is considered legal. I call it FRAUD.

When applied to the mortgage market you can easily see how the agent banks (investment banks or broker dealers) made a fortune by creating deals that failed on paper when in fact the loan was already covered in multiple ways. Only in the mortgage situation the lenders got screwed out of repayment and the borrowers got screwed on their deal by either losing their home or getting a deal where they would be underwater for the rest of their lives. As I have been detailing over the last week, I have a currently pending case in which the “successor” trustee with a new aggressive law firm is pursuing foreclosure and collection of rents on loans that they know have been paid, they admit have been paid, but they say it doesn’t matter. Using this theory, if the payment doesn’t come from the named Payor on the note to the now unnamed payee on exhibit note, anyone can collect multiple times on a single debt. This is crazy.

The bastion of our security — judiciary — is succumbing to expediency over truth and justice. Instead of applying the requirements of law and procedure strictly against the same entities that are repeatedly cited for FRAUD AND NON COMPLIANCE by government and lawsuits from investors, insurers and guarantors, the judiciary is ignoring the requirements or applying liberal standards to allow the foreclosure to proceed. What Judges don’t understand yet is that they can clear their docket more quickly if they demand proof of payment by the party seeking foreclosure and proof of authority to represent the real creditors, who must be identified.

If the party pursuing foreclosure has no skin in the game and doesn’t represent anyone who does, the foreclosure fails jurisdictionally. If we apply any other standard, then the courts are opening the door for uninjured people to sue for a slip and fall that happened to someone else.

These Foreclosures would disappear entirely if judges applied the law with or without a proper presentation by defense counsel. In the old days, Judges carefully reviewed the basic documents. If they found a gap, they refused to apply the most extreme remedy of foreclosure until the the creditor could comply. That is all I ask. Instead most lawyers are told to stop arguing because the Judge is uncomfortable with what he is hearing and most lawyers do not have the guts to say to the judge that the purpose of having a lawyer is to “argue” cases. Is the Judge throwing out the right to be heard altogether? That violation of undue process is something that should be taken to task.

At the end of the day, it will be accepted fact that the mortgages were fraudulent unenforceable devices that never should have been recorded, much less used for foreclosure or collection of rents, the note is a fraudulent unenforceable paper designed to mislead the borrower, the lenders, the insurers, the government guarantors, credit default counterparties, and the courts as to the lender’s identity, and the debt was always between the investors who received no documentation for their investment that was real, and the homeowners who were duped into signing papers that made them unwitting participants in a fraudulent scheme.

In the end the intermediary agent banks got paid but the lenders only get their money if they sue the investment banker because the lenders were denied the right to appear on closing paperwork as the lender or on assignments. In other words, the parties who loaned the money got pennies on the dollar. The Banks got paid multiple times on the same debt by selling it multiple times, insuring it multiple times and getting it guaranteed multiple times, and then foreclosing as if they were the lender.

My final question is this: “if we know the mortgage mess was a fraudulent scheme, why are we allowing its continuation in the courts?”

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DOJ plans more MBS fraud cases in New Year

The Department of Justice intends to bring cases against several financial institutions next year for what it says is mortgage-bond fraud, Attorney General Eric Holder told Reuters yesterday.
While Holder said that the DOJ would use JPMorgan’s $13B agreement as a template, he didn’t provide details about which banks are in his crosshairs.
Firms that have acknowledged that they are under investigation include Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C) and Goldman Sachs (GS).

Read more at Seeking Alpha:
http://seekingalpha.com/currents/post/1447021?source=ipadportfolioapp_email

Sent from the Seeking Alpha Portfolio app. Get the app.

Filed under: CASES, CDO, CORRUPTION, evidence, expert witness, Fannie MAe, foreclosure, foreclosure mill, GARFIELD KELLEY AND WHITE, investment banking, Investor, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Motions, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer, STATUTES, TRUST BENEFICIARIES, trustee | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 112 Comments »

Insurance and Hedge Proceeds Applied to Loan Balances

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Neil Garfield

One of the more controversial statements I have made is that certain types of payments from third party sources should be applied, pro rata, against loan balances. Some have stated that the collateral source rule bars using third party payments as offset to the debt. But that rule is used in tort cases and contract cases are different. There are certain types of payments, like guarantees from Fannie and Freddie that might not be susceptible to use as offset because they are caused by the default of the debtor and because they are not paid until the foreclosure is complete.

But the insurance, credit default swaps and other hedge products that caused the banks to receive payment are a different story. Those are not paid because of a default by any particular borrower but rather are caused by a unilateral declaration of a “credit event” declared by the Master Servicer and are paid to the holder of the mortgage bonds. The mortgage bonds are issued by a trust based upon the advance of money by investors who wish to pool their money into an asset pool and receive income with what was thought to be a minimum of risk.

Since the broker-dealers (investment banks) were acting as agents for the trust and the bond holders, any money received by them should have first been allocated to the trust, then pro rata to the bond holders. Whether or not this money was actually forwarded to the bond holders is irrelevant if the investment banks were the agents of the investment vehicle and thus owed a duty to the investors to whom they sold the mortgage bonds.

Logic dictates that if the money was paid to the banks as “holders” of the bond (because they were issued in street name as nominee securities) that the balance owed by the trust to the investors was correspondingly reduced — reflecting the devaluation of the bonds declared by the master servicer based upon such criteria as the lack of liquidity of the bonds that had been trading freely on a weekly basis, or because of the severe drop in real estate prices down to their actual values, or because of other factors.

It should be noted that the declaration of the banks is unilateral and in their sole discretion and not subject to challenge by anyone because the declaration creates an irrefutable presumption that the content of the declaration is true. Thus the insurance company must pay, the credit default swap counterparty must pay and other hedge partners must pay as a result of an act by the bank, not the investor nor the borrower.

All the loans contained in the asset pool subject to the declared credit event are affected. And since the reason for the declaration has little relationship to defaults, and plenty of other more important reasons, the amount owed to investors is reduced by the receipt of the payments by their agent, the bank. That means the account receivable of the lender is reduced, regardless of which bank account the money happens to be deposited.

If the account receivable is reduced before, during or after a delinquency of the borrower (assuming the loan is actually in existence) then the borrowers’ balances should be reduced, pro rata for each loan in the asset pool that was the subject of the declaration of a credit event. It is therefore my opinion that the homeowner could and probably should file an affirmative defense for offset for the pro rata share of insurance, credit default swaps etc.

There is one more source that should be considered for offset. Several investors have made claims against the banks claiming that their money was misused and that the terms of the loan were not followed including, bad underwriting and unenforceable documents created at closing. Many of them have already settled those claims and received payment, thus reducing their account receivable from the trust (and by pure logic reducing, dollar for dollar the account payable from the trust). Since the sole source of payment on the bond is the payment of the mortgages, it follows that by utilizing the most simple of accounting standards, the balance owed by the homeowner would be correspondingly be reduced, pro rata, dollar for dollar.

The fact that the underwriting was bad, the loans were not viable or enforceable and based upon inflated appraisals and lies about the income of the borrower, is not something caused by the borrower. The fact that the money was paid to all of the investors in that particular asset pool means that each investor should get a share equal to the amount of money they invested compared to all the money that was invested in that pool.

As to figuring out how much of the offset goes to the borrower’s account payable, it should be calculated in the same way. The amount of the borrower’s debt should be compared with the total amount of loans in the asset pool. This percentage should be applied against all third party payments that did not arise out of the default by the borrowers. In fact, it should be applied against all borrowers whose loans were claimed by that asset pool, whether they were in default or not. This would be grounds for a claim by people who are “current” in their payments for a credit or refund of the amount received from insurance, credit default swaps, or payments by the banks in settlement of investors’ claims of fraud.

This approach should be brought up very early in litigation so that there is plenty of time to pursue the discovery required to determine the amount received and the proper calculation of pro rata shares. If you do it at trial, the best you can hope for is that the judge will take notice of the fact that the foreclosing party only brought part of the documents relating to the loan instead of all of them, which should be the subject of a subpoena for the designated witness of the bank to bring with her or him all of the documents relating to the subject loan or any instrument deriving its value in whole or in part from the subject loan’s existence.

Thus at trial you can have a two pronged attack, getting them coming and going. The first is of course the fact that the originator did not fund the loan and that the break between the money trail (actual transactions) and the paper trail (fictitious transactions) occurred at the closing table. In most cases that is true, but it can be replaced or buttressed by the fact that the same argument holds true for acquired loans that were previously originated. The endorsement of the note or assignment of mortgage is a fictitious instrument if there was no sale of the loan. The important thing is to talk about the money first and then use that to show that the documents are fabricated relating to no real transaction.

Then you also have the argument of offset which hopefully by then you will have set up by discovery.

Practice Note: Many lawyers are accepting fee retainers far below the level that would support properly litigating these cases. Now that the marketplace has matured, lawyers should reconsider their pricing and their prosecution of the defenses, affirmative defenses and counterclaims. Even clients who announce a goal of just staying as long as possible without paying rent or mortgage are probably saying that because they think they owe more money than is actually the case.

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, evidence, Fannie MAe, foreclosure, investment banking, Investor, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Motions, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments »

BOA Seeks to Seal Damaging Testimony from Urban Lending

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Neil Garfield

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

WHY ARE THE BANKS FIGHTING TO GET AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE FROM EACH “FAILED” LOAN?

A drama is playing out in the state of Massachusetts. Bank of America is pretending to be the lender or the authorized servicer or both. But it outsourced the task of dealing with borrowers seeking modification. The company that was used is Urban Lending Solutions (ULS).  A deposition was taken from a knowledgeable source from within ULS.  The attorney  taking the deposition was merely looking for evidence of a script prepared by Bank of America that ULS employees were to follow. Not only was the script uncovered but considerable other evidence suggested institutional policies at Bank of America that were in direct conflict with the requirements of law, and in direct violation of the settlements with the Department of Justice and the banking regulators.

The transcript of the deposition was sealed at the request of Bank of America, which the borrower did not interpose any objection. Now there are a lot of people who want to see that deposition and who want to take the deposition of the same witness and other witnesses at ULS who might reveal the real intent of Bank of America. The question which is sought to be answered is why the mega banks are fighting so hard to take less money in a foreclosure sale then they would get in a modification or even a short sale. The policy is obvious. Borrowers are lured into a hole that gets deeper and deeper so that foreclosure seems inevitable and indefensible. Even after a successful trial modification the banks are turning down the permanent modification, as though they had the power to do so.

Now a number of attorneys are preparing motions to the trial court in Massachusetts to unseal the transcript of the ULS employee. Bank of America is opposing these efforts on the grounds of “confidentiality” which from my perspective makes absolutely no sense. Why would Bank of America share confidential information or trade secrets with a vendor whose only purpose was to interfere with the modification process? My opinion is that the only information that Bank of America wishes to keep secret is that the instructions they gave to ULS clearly show that Bank of America was not interested in anything other than achieving a foreclosure sale in as many cases as possible.

In nearly all cases the modification of the loan more than doubles the prospect of proceeds from the loan and in some cases approaches 100%. Thus the full-court press from the megabanks to go to foreclosure is a mystery that will be solved. My sources from inside the industry together with my own analysis indicates that the reason is very simple. The banks took in money from investors, insurers, counterparties in credit default swaps, the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury and other parties based on the representation of the banks that (A) the banks owned the mortgage bonds and therefore on the loans and (B) there was a loss resulting from widespread defaults on mortgages. Under the terms of the various contracts within the false chain of securitization and the Master servicer had sole discretion as to whether or not the value of the mortgage bonds and the asset pools had declined and had sole discretion as to the amount of the loss caused by the defaults. Both representations were false — the Banks did not own the bonds or the loans and the loss was not even close to what was represented to insurers and other third parties.

As a general rule of thumb, the banks computed value of the collateral at around 25% and therefore received payment to compensate the banks for a 75% loss. They received the payment several times over and then sold the mortgage bonds to the Federal Reserve for 100% of the face value of the bonds. It can be fairly estimated that they received no less than 250% of the principal amount due on each of the loans contained within the asset pool that had issued each mortgage bond. While they had to create the appearance of objectivity by showing a number of the loans as performing, they intentionally overestimated the number of loans that were in default or were in the process of going into default.

Let us not forget that while nobody was looking the Federal Reserve has been “purchasing” the worthless mortgage bonds at the rate of $85 billion per month for a long time and doesn’t appear to have any intention of stopping that flow of money to banks that have already received more than 100% of the principal due on the notes. And lest you be confused, the money the banks received should have gone to the investors and should never have been kept by the banks. The purchases by the Federal Reserve at 100% of face value despite a market value of zero is merely a way for the Federal Reserve to keep the mega banks floating on an illusion.

Since the banks received 250% of the principal amount due on the loan, an actual recovery from the borrower of 100% (for example) on the loan would leave the banks with a liability to all of the third parties that paid the banks. The refund liability would obviously be 150% of the principal amount due on the loan and the banks would be required to turn over the hundred percent recovery from the borrower to the investors adding to their liability. THIS IS WHY I SAY CALL THEIR BLUFF AND OFFER THEM ALL THE MONEY DEMANDED ON CONDITION THAT THEY PROVE OWNERSHIP AND PROVE THE LOSS IS ACTUALLY THE LOSS OF THE BANK AND NOT OF THE INVESTORS.

But if the case goes through a foreclosure sale, the banks can take a comfortable position that the number of defaults and the depth of the loss was as great as they represented when they took payment from insurers and other third parties. The liability of 250% is completely eliminated. Thus while it might appear to be in the bank’s interest to take a 60% recovery from the borrower instead of a 25% recovery from a foreclosure sale, the liability that would be created each time alone was modified or settled would dwarf the apparent savings to the pretender lender or actual creditor.

The net result is that on a $100,000 loan, the investor takes an extra $35,000 loss over and above what would normally apply in a workout and the bank avoids $250,000 in liabilities to third parties who paid based upon false representations of losses.

The mere fact that they went to great lengths to seal the transcript indicates how vulnerable they feel.

PRACTICE MEMO TO FORECLOSURE DEFENSE LAWYERS

As a condition precedent I would suggest that in all cases where we feel the deposition transcript would be helpful I think it would create more credibility if you issued a subpoena duces tecum directed at Urban to produce the witness whose deposition was sealed in the existing case and to bring those records that were requested or demanded at that deposition. One of the questions that needs to be answered is whether the witness witness is still working for Urban, whether the witness has “disappeared”, and whether his testimony has changed — thus we would need the other deposition to test credibility and perhaps get exhibits that BANA either didn’t object to, which means they waived confidentiality. If they do not move to quash the subpoena then they might also be arguably waiving the confidentiality objection.
If they do object, you have two bites of the apple — if they move to quash they must state the grounds other than than it will damage their chances in litigation. The trial court would then hear the objections and of course each if the cases that could benefit from unsealing the deposition results in a hearing, then several judges would hear the same objection. The likelihood is that the objection would attempt to bootstrap the order sealing the deposition as reason enough to quash the subpoena. That in turn puts pressure on the Massachusetts judge to release the transcript.
The more Motions filed the better. So I would suggest that we reach out through media to get as many people as possible with separate motions saying that sealing the deposition is causing a disruption in due process. Since Urban reached out on behalf of BANA — an allegation that should be made in opposition test the motion to quash the subpoena in each case — exactly what confidential information needs to be protected? Has the Massachusetts court heard a motion in liming preventing the use of the deposition at trial? If not, then the objection is waived since the Plaintiff will clearly use the deposition at trial, if there is one.
The other issue is that BOA can’t simply allege confidentiality rather than strategy in litigation. They must state with particularity what could be possibly confidential. There is no attorney-client privilege, there is no attorney work product privilege.  At first Bank of America disclaimed any knowledge or relationship with ULS.  When it became obvious that the relationship existed and that ULS was using Bank of America letterhead to communicate with borrowers they finally admitted that the relationship existed and then went one step further by alleging confidentiality and trade secrets so that the contract and instructions between Bank of America and ULS would never see the light of day., For a company that BOA disclaimed any knowledge but who used BOA stationery they were clearly an agent of BANA. What exactly could Urban have other than information about modification and foreclosure? I would also notice or subpoena BANA to produce the person who signed the contract with Urban and to bring the contract with him or her. Who received instructions from BOA? Where are those instructions? Were they produced at the sealed deposition.
 If the Massachusetts court does not unseal the transcript, doesn’t this give BOA an opportunity for a do-over where they fabricate documents that are different from those produced in the sealed deposition?
What were the instructions to Urban? What was the goal of the relationship between BOA and URban? Where are the scripts now that we’re produced in the sealed deposition?
Were the instructions to Urban the same as the instructions to all vendors assisting in the foreclosure process? Why did BOA even need Urban if it had proof of payment, proof of loss,  proof of ownership of the loan? We want to know what scripts were used by Urban and whether the same scripts were distributed to other vendors whose behavior could be plausibly denied. Discovery is a process by which the party seeking it must only show that it might lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. THE POINT MUST BE MADE THAT THE DEFENSE FOR WHICH WE ARE LOOKING FOR SUPPORT AND CORROBORATION IS THAT THE DELIBERATE POLICY AND PRACTICE OF BOA WAS TO MOVE PEOPLE INTO DEFAULT BY TELLING THEM TO STOP MAKING PAYMENTS. WE WANT TO SHOW THAT THEIR GOAL WAS FORECLOSURE NOT MODIFICATION CONTRARY TO THE REQUIREMENTS UNDER HAMP AND HARP AND THAT RATHER THAN PROCESS MODIFICATION OR SETTLEMENTS THE POLICY WAS TO DERAIL AS MANY AS POSSIBLE TO GET THE FORECLOSURE EVEN IF IT MEANT THAT THE INVESTORS WOULD GET LESS MONEY? Why?
The instruction was to use the promise or carrot of modification to trick the homeowner into (a) acknowledging BOA as the right party (b) stop making payments causing an apparent default and causing an escrow shortage (c) thus assuring the foreclosure sale despite the fact that BOA never acquired and (d) thus assuring that claims against them from investors (see dozens of law suits against BOA) and from insurers and counter parties on credit default swaps and payments from co-obligors based on the “default” that BOA fabricated — payments that involved more than the loan itself in multiples of the supposed loan balance.

This is an important battle. Let’s win it. There is strength in numbers. We might find the scripts were prepared by someone who used scripts from other banks and that the banks were in agreement that despite the obligations under HAMP and HARP and despite their ,rinses in the AG and OCC settlement, their goal is to foreclose at all costs because if the general pattern of conduct is to settle these loans and make them “performing” loans again it is highly probable that for each dollar of principal that gets taken of the table there is a liability or claim for $10. This would establish that the requirements of HAMP and HARP has resulted in negotiating with the fox while the fox is in the henhouse getting fat.

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 690 Comments »

Monday Livinglies Magazine: Crime and Punishment

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Neil Garfield

Steal this Massachusetts Town’s Toughest New Foreclosure Prevention Ideas
http://www.keystonepolitics.com/2013/06/steal-this-massachusetts-towns-toughest-new-foreclosure-prevention-ideas/

Florida leads nation in vacated foreclosures — and it’s not even close http://www.thefloridacurrent.com/article.cfm?id=33330748

Editor’s Note:  it is only common sense. There are several things that are known with complete certainty in connection with the mortgage mess.

  • We know that the banks found it necessary to forge, fabricate and alter legal documents illegally in order to create the illusion that foreclosure was proper.
  • We know that the banks manipulated the published rates on which adjustable mortgages changed their payments.
  • We know that the banks typically abandon any property that the bank has deemed to be undesirable (then why did they foreclose, when they had a perfectly good homeowner who was willing to pay something including the maintenance and insurance of the house?).
  • And we can conclude that it is far more important to the banks that they be able to foreclose and have the deed issued then to actually take possession of the property for sale or rental.
  • And so we know that the mortgage and foreclosure markets have been turned on their heads. Lynn, Massachusetts has adopted a series of regulations which appeared to be constitutional and which make it very difficult for the banks to turn neighborhoods that were thriving into blight.  The actions of this city and others who are taking similar actions will continue to reveal the true nature of the mortgage encumbrances (the lanes were never perfected because the loan was never made by the party that is claiming to be secured) and the true nature of foreclosures (the cover-up to a Ponzi scheme and an illegal securities scam that does not and never did fall within the exemptions of the 1998 law claimed by the banks).

The Bank Of International Settlements Warns The Monetary Kool-Aid Party Is Over
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-23/bank-international-settlements-warns-monetary-kool-aid-party-over

Wells Fargo Sells Woman’s House In Foreclosure After She Reinstates Loan for $141,441.81
http://4closurefraud.org/2013/06/20/wells-fargo-sells-womans-house-in-foreclosure-after-she-reinstates-loan-for-141441-81/

Editor’s Note: In all of these cases you need to start with the premise that the bank has a gargantuan liability in the event that it took insurance, credit default swap proceeds, federal bailouts, or the proceeds of sales of mortgage bonds to the Federal Reserve. Most experts in finance and economics agree that if the Federal Reserve stops making payments on the “purchase” of mortgage bonds the entire housing market will collapse. I don’t agree.

It is the banks that will collapse in the housing market will finally recover bringing the economy back up with it. The problem for the Federal Reserve and the economy is that most likely they are buying worthless paper issued by a trust that was never funded and that therefore could never have purchased any loan. Thus the income and the collateral of the mortgage bond is nonexistent.

Many people in the financial world completely understand this and are terrified at the prospect of the largest banks being required to mark down their reserve capital;  if this happens, and it should, these banks will lack the capital to continue functioning as a mega-bank.

So why would a bank foreclose on house on which there was no mortgage and/or no default? The answer lies in the fact that they have accepted money from third parties on the premise that they lost money on these mortgages. If that turns out not to be true (which it isn’t) then they most probably owe a lot of money back to those third parties.

My estimate is that in the average case they owe anywhere from 7 to 40 times the amount of the mortgage loan.  It is simply cheaper to settle with the aggrieved homeowner even if they pay damages for emotional distress (which is permitted in California and perhaps some other states); it is even cheaper and far more effective for the bank to give the house back without any encumbrance to the homeowner. Without the foreclosure becoming final or worse yet, as the recent revelations from Bank of America clearly show, if the loan is modified and becomes a performing loan all of that money is due back to all of those third parties.

“Deed-In-Lieu” of Foreclosure and Other Things
http://www.fxstreet.com/education/related-markets/lessons-from-the-pros-real-estate/2013/06/20/

Editor’s Note: This has come up many times in  questions and discussions regarding dealing with the Wall Street banks. It seems that the banks have borrowers thinking that in order to file a deed in lieu of foreclosure they need the permission of the bank. I know of no such provision in the law of any state preventing the owner of the property from deeding the property to anyone.  Several lawyers are seeing an opportunity, to wit: once the homeowner deeds the properties to the party pretending to foreclose on the property, the foreclosure action against the homeowner must be dismissed. That leaves the question of a deficiency judgment.

The advantages to the homeowner appears to be that any lawsuit seeking to recover a deficiency judgment would be strictly about money and would require the allegation of a monetary loss and proof of the monetary loss which would enable the homeowner, for the first time, to pursue discovery on the money trail because there is no other issue in dispute.

In the course of that litigation the discovery may reveal the fact that the party who filed the foreclosure and misrepresented their right to the collateral would be subject to various causes of action for damages as a counterclaim; but the counterclaim would not be filed until after discovery revealed the problem for the “lender.” Therefore several lawyers are advising their clients to simply file the deed in favor of the party seeking foreclosure based upon the representation that they are in fact the right party to obtain a sale of the property.

The lawyers who are using this tactic obviously caution their clients against using it unless they are already out of the house or are planning to move. Homeowners who are looking to employ this tactic should check with a licensed attorney in the jurisdiction in which their property is located.

Must See Video: Arizona Homeowners Losing their Homes to Foreclosure Through Forged Documents
http://4closurefraud.org/2013/06/21/must-see-video-arizona-homeowners-losing-their-homes-to-foreclosure-through-forged-documents/

Monitor Finds Mortgage Lenders Still Falling Short of Settlement’s Terms

By SHAILA DEWAN

The biggest mortgage lenders in the United States have not met all of the terms of the $25 billion settlement over abuses, an independent monitor found.

British Commission Calls for New Laws to Prosecute Bankers for Fraud

By MARK SCOTT

As part of a 600-page report, the British parliamentary commission on banking standards is urging new laws that would make it a criminal offense to recklessly mismanage local financial institutions.

A Fit of Pique on Wall Street

By PETER EAVIS

Perhaps more than at any time since the financial crisis, Wall Street knows it must prepare for a world without the Federal Reserve’s largess.

S.E.C. Has a Message for Firms Not Used to Admitting Guilt

By JAMES B. STEWART

By requiring an admission of guilt in some cases, the S.E.C.’s new chairwoman is pressing for more accountability at financial firms.

Bank of America’s Foreclosure Frenzy
http://ml-implode.com/staticnews/2013-06-24_BankofAmericasForeclosureFrenzy.html

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 296 Comments »

SEC Corroborates Livinglies Position on Third Party Payment While Texas BKR Judge Disallows Assignments After Cut-Off Date

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Neil Garfield

Maybe this should have been divided into three articles:

  1. Saldivar: Texas BKR Judge finds Assignment Void not voidable. It never happened.
  2. Erobobo: NY Judge rules ownership of note is burden of the banks. Not standing but rather capacity to sue without injury.
  3. SEC Orders Credit Suisse to disgorge illegal profits back to investors. Principal balances of borrowers may be reduced. Defaults might not exist because notices contain demands that include money held by banks that should have been paid to investors.

But these decisions are so interrelated and their effect so far-reaching that it seems to me that if you read only one of them you might head off in the wrong direction. Pay careful attention to the Court’s admonition in Erobobo that these defenses can be waived unless timely raised. Use the logic of these decisions and you will find more and more judges listening with increasing care. The turning point is arriving and foreclosures — past, present and future — might finally get the review and remedies that are required in a nation of laws.

 

Courts and SEC Drilling Down on Reality of BANK Fraud.

The effects will be far-reaching. The complexity of the false securitization scam was intended to shield Wall Street from continuing its endless pattern of conduct of fraud, misdeeds, perjury and other crimes and other acts of contempt for the courts. The result was that the entire finance system and the economies of the world were turned upside down. Now we are going to see them turn right-side up.

It has taken years, but the SEC and the Courts are now unraveling the mysteries behind the secret curtains of the scam of securitization, which turns out to be nothing more than a cover for a giant PONZI scheme that fell apart as soon as investors stopped buying mortgage bonds. That is the hallmark of PONZI schemes — using the new investor money to pay the expected returns to the older investors.

If it was a legitimate business plan, the failure of the investors to buy more mortgage bonds would have no effect on the rest of the system. Each bond, each mortgage would have either succeeded or failed on its own merit. But that is not what happened.

As can be seen by the decisions noted below, Wall Street defrauded investors on many levels, defrauded the government, and defrauded the borrowers on mortgages they knew with certainty would never survive even a few months.

In confidential deals, the banks entered into agreements to be compensated for the failure of the mortgage bonds and defaulting loans and then simply lied to regulators, investors and borrowers — and kept the money for themselves instead of turning over the money to the investors who were going to lose more money than they had ever dreamed on “triple A” rated “insured” and “hedged” (credit default swaps).

The SEC is now ordering Credit Suisse (and soon others) to disgorge $60 million that clearly should have been paid to investors and thus reduced the accounts receivable of investors. A much better educated SEC and much better educated Judges are peeking behind the curtains and they don’t like what they see. These decisions are, in my opinion, the precursors of a wave of decisions that overturns the entire foreclosure tragedy.

The bottom line is that investors funded the mortgages (plus a lot of fees and “proprietary trading profits” that were hidden from the investors and indeed the world), the banks stole the money, the accounts due to the investors is much lower than what is alleged in foreclosure actions, and none of the foreclosers have any right to be in court because (a) they have no capacity to sue in the absence of financial injury caused by the borrower and (b) they are relying on assignments that in the eyes of the law never happened. They not only didn’t lose money, they made more money than most people imagined. Now they are being ordered to pay back the money they promised to investors whose losses will be correspondingly reduced.

How this will be apportioned to the principal balance supposedly due from borrowers has yet to be determined. But it is clear that the receivable from the only real lender is being reduced by the amount of money received by the intermediaries in the securitization chain — in deals that were intended to defraud investors on two levels — not giving the money that the investors should have received and withholding disclosure about the actual quality of the loans.

The reduction in loss or accounts receivable of the investors should proportionately reduce the amount due from borrowers, which means that most foreclosures were based upon a number of false premises: a balance due, a default by borrowers, and the right to submit a false credit bid at auction from a non-creditor on a “foreclosure” that should never have occurred in the first place. Ownership of the note can only be proven if the would-be forecloser received the actual note (not a photo-shopped “original”) in a transaction in which it paid money pursuant to the actual authority to enter into the transaction. That is three elements: the real note, real ownership of the note and real authority to enter into the transaction by which the loans were allegedly assigned years after the cut-off date. The authority for this position is (a) New York Law, (b) the Internal revenue Code, (c) constitutional requirements of due process, (d) the UCC requiring an instrument to be “negotiated rather than just delivered (meaning payment was involved) and (e) common sense, to wit: lenders are entitled to be repaid but only once.

It has been argued here that the REMICs were ignored and that therefore they could not possibly be in the ownership chain of the note and mortgage. We have also argued that the originator of the mortgage has originated nothing if they didn’t pay anything.

With the help of the SEC and the these two court decisions we can see that there are many reasons why the REMIC could not be the owner of the loan and that no party in the securitization chain could be secured unless we invent a new entity in which all the parties in the securitization chain are rolled into one entity.

In the absence of such an entity or the lawful ability to create one retroactively we are left with an unsecured debt — the amount of which runs the gamut from the banks owing the borrower money to the substantial reduction of the principal due after credit is given for the ill-gotten gains stolen by the banks from the investors. Given these facts, there is no legal justification for even contemplating the purported existence of a default by the borrower since the amount due, and the amount of the required payment are both unknown without an accounting from ALL parties in the securitization chain.

If the cut-off date and the Internal Revenue Code and the Pooling and Servicing Agreement all state that any transaction assigning a loan after the cut-off date is not allowed, then the assignment is void. Add to that New York law that expressly states that the transaction is void, not voidable, (see below) which means that legally it never happened. Without a valid assignment, there can be no foreclosure. Add to that the lack of any consideration, and you have a dead shark on your hands —something that struck fear into the hearts of homeowners, governments, and investors but is now lying, gasping for breath, as the finale nears.

There is nothing left to hide because the doors are all open. It will still take years to unravel the financial mess, but now we have a chance to change policy and direct relief to where it belonged all along — to the investors who supplied the money and the homeowners who were duped into crazy, exotic mortgages that hid the real objective: foreclosure.

REQUIRED READING: Read Carefully and Take Notes

“Plaintiff’s ownership of the note is not an issue of standing but an element of its cause of action which it must plead and prove.(e.s.) … 

… dismissal on a pre answer motion by the defendant and are waived if not raised in a timely manner.” (e.s.) Wells Fargo v Saitta 4/29/13 Slip Op 50675
140156203-Ero-Bobo

PRACTICE AND DISCOVERY NOTE: ”

In fact, the identity of the owner of the note and mortgage is information that is often in the exclusive possession of the party seeking to foreclose. Mortgages are routinely transferred through MERS, without being recorded. (e.s.) The notes underlying the mortgages, as negotiable instruments, are negotiated by mere delivery without a recorded assignment or notice to the borrower. A defendant has no method to reliably ascertain who in fact owns the note, within the narrow time frame allotted to file an answer. In light of these facts and the fact that Defendant contested the factual allegations asserted in Plaintiff’s pleading, Defendant’s general denial is sufficient to contest whether Plaintiff owns the note and mortgage.”

4th paragraph, page 11

“Since the trustee acquired the subject note and mortgage after the closing date, the trustee’s act in acquiring them exceeded its authority and violated the terms of the trust.The acquisition of a mortgage after 90 days is not a mere technicality but a material violation of the trust’s terms, which jeopardizes the trust’s REMIC status.”

——————————————————
SEC FINDS FRAUD, ORDERS DISGORGEMENT OF ILLEGAL PROFITS.
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2012/33-9.368.pdf
This SEC decision is one that deserves several readings. It essentially condenses 6 years of teaching on this blog into one decision, although they have still not quite drilled down all the way on the money trail. But they have drilled down far enough to discover that the banks made settlements on buy-backs, kept the money and didn’t give to the investors because (1) they wanted to keep it for themselves and (2) the huge number of early defaults would have led the investors to question whether industry standards were being followed in the underwriting of these loans. Had that happened, the well would have dried and nobody would be buying mortgage bonds because they would be revealed as PONZI certificates.
Even if you have been following this blog for years, as I know many of you have done, reading this decision from the SEC will bring it all together as to who , what, where, why and when. Anyone who takes another step in litigation without reading this is stepping into the darkness.
—————————————————————
Next Case: Saldivar
And then there is this: the assignment is void, not voidable and therefore the banks can’t attack the ability of the homeowner to attack the assignment since they are arguing that the assignment never really took place. It puts the burden of proof back on to the banks, where it belongs — a burden they cannot sustain because they cannot prove anything that would give traction to their position of keeping the money, taking the houses, taking the insurance taking the credit default swap proceeds, and taking the federal bailouts, all without giving an accounting other than the subservicer’s partial snapshot consisting of accounting records reflecting ONLY transactions with the borrower, neither proving nor offering to prove the validity or existence of the assignment. What you have essentially is what I have said a few times before on this blog — offer, without acceptance or the right to accept and no consideration.
saldivar-memo-opinion
This decision is important because of the reasoning, the logic and most importantly the application of New York law. Virtually all the REMIC trusts were common law trusts formed under New York law for a lot of reasons. So this decision is extremely important as persuasive authority in its finding that if the REMIC is closed, there is nothing to make the assignment TO after the close-out date, which as the Judge points out is the start of business for the trust.
He reasons that if the assignment after the close out date could be ratified then it is voidable and not void. If it is voidable then the homeowner has no standing to challenge the validity of the assignment. But, the Judge says if the assignment was void ab initio then there is nothing to ratify because the event never happened. If the event never happened then the homeowner does have standing to challenge the validity if the assignment. Essentially the homeowners saying that he denies there was any assignment. If there was no assignment then any action by the assignee is without any right, justification or excuse.
It is potentially standing which is jurisdictional to be sure but it is in personam jurisdiction now instead of subject matter jurisdiction — or perhaps both.
As pointed out above, the capacity to sue involves the basic elements of any lawsuits for money or equitable relief based upon a money debt: (1) duty, (2) breach of duty, (3) injury and (4) causation — the injury was caused by the borrower. As pointed out by these cases, NONE of the required elements are present and therefore, there is no capacity to sue. Capacity to sue is close to the issue of standing but it isn’t the same thing. While standing involves jurisdictional issues over the parties, capacity to sue involves jurisdictional issues over the subject matter. There is no subject matter jurisdiction unless the foreclosing party can make a case for stating the four elements of any lawsuit.

The keys here are the Judge’s citation to two things. First that the law of New York says it is void and the court must use the laws of the state of New York — a position mercilessly pounded into the courts by the banks. Now that position is blowing up in their faces. Second, he points out that under the Internal Revenue Code contains huge penalties and negative economic consequences if the REMIC was still accepting assignments after the cut- off date. Thus the Judge used reason, logic, New York law, and the negative effect imposed by the IRC if the REMIC provisions were violated. We might also add that the PSA contained the same restrictions. He concludes that the assignment 3 years after the cutoff was void, not void able and that it was void ab initio which means that there was no effective assignment despite the fabrication of a piece of paper.
This puts Deutsch and others who have stated they are the trustee for the REMIC in a no-win position. To the extent they have corroborated the assignment they have delivered an economic blow to the investors in the REMIC — and are now subjected to potential liability in the trillions of dollars. If they have not tried to back up the assertions of those bringing foreclosure then they clearly won’t do it now. And it explains why no actual signature for an actual Deutsch officer or employee is on any document used in bringing the foreclosure.
The further interesting point is that this is the fire in the brush that flushes the investors out. They must corroborate what we have been saying — that their agents violated the restrictions of the pooling and servicing agreement and that they, the investors, cannot be held to be bound to the ultra vires actions of their agents. And it raises the question of what else did these intermediaries do that violated the terms of the investment in mortgage bonds? It raises, most importantly, the question of WHY they violated the terms of the PSA and prospectus.
The only rational answer is MONEY — like the insurance and CDS proceeds. But beyond that and tantalizingly raised in this decision is — if the investors gave up money and it wasn’t through the REMIC — then you have two choices, to wit: either they invested in nothing or, as I have repeatedly stated on the blog and in my expert testimony, they became involuntary common law partners in a common law general partnership.
This raises issues that Wall Street wants to stay very far from. All their authority comes from a PSA that is now revealed to have been violated resulting in the inescapable conclusion, using the logic from this Texas bankruptcy judge, that Wall Street has no power over these transactions — including servicing loans. This means we can insist on the identity of the investors and that the ONLY people to go to for HAMP are the investors or some new authorized agent. But remember that in a true common law general partnership with no documentation there are some real knotty problems as to how investors could hire a Servicer without 100% of the holders of what might indivisible interests in loans, insurance proceeds and credit default swaps bought with money from the investors.

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, Eviction, foreclosure, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 283 Comments »

The PR of Modifications: Banks Want Foreclosure Not Reinstatement of Loan

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Neil Garfield
If you are seeking legal representation or other services call our Florida customer service number at 954-495-9867 and for the West coast the number remains 520-405-1688. Customer service for the livinglies store with workbooks, services and analysis remains the same at 520-405-1688. The people who answer the phone are NOT attorneys and NOT permitted to provide any legal advice, but they can guide you toward some of our products and services.
The selection of an attorney is an important decision  and should only be made after you have interviewed licensed attorneys familiar with investment banking, securities, property law, consumer law, mortgages, foreclosures, and collection procedures. This site is dedicated to providing those services directly or indirectly through attorneys seeking guidance or assistance in representing consumers and homeowners. We are available to any lawyer seeking assistance anywhere in the country, U.S. possessions and territories. Neil Garfield is a licensed member of the Florida Bar and is qualified to appear as an expert witness or litigator in in several states including the district of Columbia. The information on this blog is general information and should NEVER be considered to be advice on one specific case. Consultation with a licensed attorney is required in this highly complex field.

Editor’s Comment: There has been a spike of questions about modifications, short sales and settlements with the banks. My unvarnished opinion is that all this activity is Public Relations and a substantive policy intended to increase rather than avert foreclosures. Quite the contrary, offers of modifications are excuses to drag more money out of borrowers, give them a “trial run” and then deny the modification. I will admit that there have been more modifications of late but they are few in comparison to the number of loans that should be modified, naming the creditor, the balance due, the terms of repayment and perfecting what is now an empty unperfected lien.

In the law we look to the intent to determine the intent. If a reasonable person would understand the consequences of their actions, it is deemed intentional despite all protestations to the contrary.

The result we see from bank policies and conduct is that people go into a declared “default” on a false loan because the bank representative who has no money in the game told them that the only way they can apply for relief is by being behind in their payments at least 90 days. Translation: We are advising you to breach your loan documents and go into debt on past due payments such that you won’t be able to reinstate.

People go into trial modifications on a false loan with a bank or entity with no authority to offer it during which they deplete their savings and retirement, go totally broke from paying the “offer of trial modification” thinking they are saving their home. Then they are told that the permanent modification was denied because of some obscure reason and they have a few days to reinstate the loan with money they don’t have and with a credit score that took a major hit because of the reporting by the same non-creditor who threatened them with foreclosure.

The objective is to wear people down financially, emotionally and physically. Turmoil in the household caused by the stress of impending foreclosure causes divorce, physical ailments and even suicides. The result is that the house goes into foreclosure despite the fact that the borrower made a perfectly valid offer of modification whose proceeds far exceed the proceeds from foreclosure.

The banks are like any other business searching for profit. So at first blush one might assume that anything they can do to mitigate their loss they would jump at, which is the way it always was until the whole “securitization” thing came along. What changed was that instead of having a risk of loss if the loan failed, the banks made tons of money betting on the failure. So as soon as mortgages were declared in default, they collected 100 cents on the dollar, insurance and the proceeds of hedges like credit default swaps. The irony here is that the banks collected the mitigation payments from insurance and credit default swaps while it was investors who were actually losing the money.

The payment from insurance and credit default swaps was triggered by a declaration from the Master Servicer that the value of the portfolio had decreased. This was not subject to challenge by the insurance company or the counterparty of the credit default swap contract. So in effect the loans were being sold multiple times. In the case of Bear Stearns, they were leveraged as much as 42 times. That means they were in a double bind position of taking fees for insuring portfolios that were sure to fail or at least sure to be declared as having failed, and they were getting money on their own insurance and credit default swap protections.

Translation: a loan that comes out of delinquency or declared default represents a huge liability for a bank that has already collected millions of dollars on a $200,000 loan. If everyone paid off their loan, the banks would owe back the money they received from insurance and credit default swaps. It isn’t the difference between the foreclosure proceeds and the offer of modification that motivates them, it is the difference between the millions they already received from insurers and counterparties and the nominal principal of the loan. And the only way they can be sure that they never have that liability to pay back millions of dollars on a loan they declared in default is by forcing it into foreclosure.

But the government and public are expecting the banks to act reasonably in the context of the old mortgages where the lenders had a risk of loss if the borrower didn’t pay. Now they have a risk of loss of the borrower does pay. Confusion over this had led the government, courts and borrowers to expect that the modification process would bring a stop to the tsunami of foreclosures, but as we have seen in recent weeks, the wave of foreclosures is coming again and millions of people are going to lose their homes to non-creditors who have already been paid multiple times for the “value” of the loan.

The only way out of this which has received some traction in the courts is to allege that contrary to the requirements of HAMP and HARP and other programs, the servicer and creditor did NOT “Consider” the modification proposal, which of course is an accurate portrayal of the the real world of loans that are subject to claims of securitization —  even though those claims are probably false.

People who have made this challenge and who do so with professional help point out the obvious: that the proceeds from the modification are far better than the proceeds of a foreclosure. But the question is better for whom? If we take the real creditors, the investor lenders, the analysis is simple. They want the most money they can get. Since they were not included in the payment of insurance and credit de fault swaps, their only hope to mitigate their real loss is by real money from the homeowner which the homeowner is offering, based upon real documentation which is enforceable unlike the current fabricated, forged documents done without authority, right justification or excuse.

So the banks have an interest that is entirely adverse to that of the investors who were their clients. The banks want foreclosure so they can keep the insurance money and the investors want the loans reinstated so they can get their money back. This conflict of interest is so severe that the country is barely grinding through a recession that is entirely caused by the behavior of these banks who sucked the money out of the economy and are now holding it all over the world in tens of thousands of  shell companies around the world.

The moral of the story is that if you are serious about modification or short-sale be prepared for a long journey where in the end your petition is denied and you must still litigate. For those who get the modification they want arising from the cover-up PR campaign of the banks, congratulations you are one in thousands who should have received the same benefit.

Filed under: CDO, Eviction, foreclosure, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , | 265 Comments »

Banks Could Owe Trillions on Fake Rigged Credit Bids

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Neil Garfield
If you are seeking legal representation or other services call our Florida customer service number at 954-495-9867 and for the West coast the number remains 520-405-1688. Customer service for the livinglies store with workbooks, services and analysis remains the same at 520-405-1688. The people who answer the phone are NOT attorneys and NOT permitted to provide any legal advice, but they can guide you toward some of our products and services.
The selection of an attorney is an important decision  and should only be made after you have interviewed licensed attorneys familiar with investment banking, securities, property law, consumer law, mortgages, foreclosures, and collection procedures. This site is dedicated to providing those services directly or indirectly through attorneys seeking guidance or assistance in representing consumers and homeowners. We are available to any lawyer seeking assistance anywhere in the country, U.S. possessions and territories. Neil Garfield is a licensed member of the Florida Bar and is qualified to appear as an expert witness or litigator in in several states including the district of Columbia. The information on this blog is general information and should NEVER be considered to be advice on one specific case. Consultation with a licensed attorney is required in this highly complex field.

Editor’s Analysis of Auctions of Foreclosed Properties: Nobody thinks about it because it basically never happened. The laws of each state whose statutes I have looked at including the provisions of most promissory notes are clear — if the creditor receives a payment in excess of the amount due, the excess must be paid to the borrower.

We all know how keen I am on applying that that precept to the receipt of insurance, credit default swaps, guarantees and Federal bailouts, but there is a much simpler aspect to this that can be pled in the alternative when one is attacking the foreclosure sale. Remember that in most states alternative pleading is allowed and even encouraged. So your alternative pleading in this case would be that the foreclosure was wrongful OR, if it wasn’t wrongful then the borrower is entitled to money. How? Why?

If the Judge won’t let you come in through the front door, you find another door or point of entry. In this case, the strategy I am proposing puts the issue  right on the table and could even be limited to this one cause of action. It would be breach o contract and perhaps a second count for breach of statutory duty, nullification of instrument (the deed in foreclosure). What you are looking for is damages.

The allegations supporting the cause of action for damages would be that the creditor never alleged pr proved the amount they lost or misrepresented the amount they lost. We are talking money here, not notes, mortgages, assignments and indorsements. Money is the key to the evil that was perpetrated and money is what will bring the perpetrators into a perp walk even if the government is reluctant to do so.

If the non-creditor bids $350,000 for the property based upon the  Foreclosure Judgment or the papers filed with the “substitute trustee” (why is there ALWAYS a substitute trustee?), then the amount due on the bid is $350,000.

If your allegation is that the “creditor” never had a loss, never showed proof of payment , proof of loss or any actual transaction in which money exchanged hands from the “creditor” to any other party to acquire or fund the origination of the loan, then there is no loss. Yet the non-creditor paid nothing because it submitted a credit bid which if you look at your state statutes you will see is near impossible for them to offer and certainly should not be accepted in lieu of cash. The statutes say the bidder must pay for the bid, especially if they have already received the deed on foreclosure (which you have pled alternatively should be nullified). Paying the bid means payment in cash.

So the court is faced with a conundrum. On the one hand it ignored your prior arguments of lack of standing, lack of injured party, but on the other hand the Judge has before him or her a perfectly valid complaint that cannot be dismissed on its face on the basis of res judicata or collateral estoppel because the cause of action arose AFTER final judgment. If the Judge does the right thing, then he wil deny any motion to dismiss from the other side and then allow discovery.

Once you get into discovery the only issue is whether the “creditor” was indeed a creditor and if so how much they actually “lost” by the alleged breach of the promissory note by the borrower. They can only prove their side of the case by showing that money exchanged hands and that the money came from their pocket, not someone else’s pocket.

This discovery will also lead to the question of what was reported to investors, how the proceeds of insurance and credit default swaps were applied, all of which reduce the amount due from the borrower because they reduce the amount payable to the “creditor.”

Assuming the “creditor” is unable to account for the application of proceeds of insurance and credit default swaps, and assuming that they are unable to show a canceled check or wire transfer receipt and wire transfer instructions, then the amount of their injury is zero or perhaps even less than zero if they received fees and compensation from the yield spread premium, the insurance, and the guarantees and hedges like credit default swaps.

The auctioneer has a duty to collect the money and distribute it according to statute. If the “Creditor” submitted any bid, you have just proved that they were owed nothing and therefore their bid should have been paid in cash. The Court must them either nullify the sale or, if enough time has gone by, the probabilities rise that the “creditor” will be forced to pay for the bid. The amount paid is an “overpayment” for the actual loss. Under statute and the note, such overpayment are due back to the borrower.

This is an easy case, like personal injury only less paperwork, for lawyers to take on contingency and make a ton of money for themselves and their clients. With standard contingency if the bidder is forced to make a payment in the amount of the bid, then your fee in the above example would be over $100,000.

If the Court nullifies the foreclosure, the next step is quieting title perhaps in the same order, and you get paid by a note from the client with collateral — namely the house upon which there are no longer any encumbrances. That note can be negotiated into the secondary market the way the banks should have done in the first place.

The next step would obviously be the abuse of process, wrongful foreclosure and slander of title just to name a few causes of action that can be prosecuted against the “creditor” and its successors or assigns, seeking damages, treble damages, punitive damages and exemplary damages.

The moral of the story is that the banks can fake the story about the money in the loan documents, the assignments and indorsements. But they can’t fake the money transaction for which their are footprints at the banks, account processors for the banks, Federal reserve and network exchanges where the money is routed when paid. They will argue that they already proved their case with the note. But the note proves the DEBT not the LOSS.

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, Eviction, foreclosure, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 79 Comments »

Insurance, Credit Default Swaps, Guarantees: Third Party Payments Mitigate Damages to “Lender”

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Neil Garfield
If you are seeking legal representation or other services call our Florida customer service number at 954-495-9867 and for the West coast the number remains 520-405-1688. Customer service for the livinglies store with workbooks, services and analysis remains the same at 520-405-1688. The people who answer the phone are NOT attorneys and NOT permitted to provide any legal advice, but they can guide you toward some of our products and services.
The selection of an attorney is an important decision  and should only be made after you have interviewed licensed attorneys familiar with investment banking, securities, property law, consumer law, mortgages, foreclosures, and collection procedures. This site is dedicated to providing those services directly or indirectly through attorneys seeking guidance or assistance in representing consumers and homeowners. We are available to any lawyer seeking assistance anywhere in the country, U.S. possessions and territories. Neil Garfield is a licensed member of the Florida Bar and is qualified to appear as an expert witness or litigator in in several states including the district of Columbia. The information on this blog is general information and should NEVER be considered to be advice on one specific case. Consultation with a licensed attorney is required in this highly complex field.

Editor’s Analysis: The topic of conversation (argument) in court is changing to an inquiry of what is the real transaction, who were the parties and did they pay anything that gives them the right to claim they suffered financial damages as a result of the “breach” by the borrower. And the corollary to that is what constitutes mitigation of those damages.

If the mortgage bond derives its value solely from underlying mortgage loans, then the risk of loss derives solely from those same underlying mortgages. And if those losses are mitigated through third party payments, then the benefit should flow to both the investors who were the source of funds and the borrowers balance must be correspondingly and proportionately adjusted. Otherwise the creditor ends up in a position better than if the debtor had paid off the debt.

If your Aunt Sally pays off your mortgage loan and the bank sues you anyway  claiming they didn’t get any payment from YOU, the case will be a loser for the bank and a clear winner for you because of the defense of PAYMENT. The rules regarding damages and mitigation of damages boil down to this — the alleged injured party should not be placed in a position where he/she/it is better off than if the contract (promissory) note had been fully performed.

If the “creditor” is the investor lender, and the only way the borrower received the money was through intermediaries, then those intermediaries are not entitled to claim part of the money that the investor advanced, nor part of the money that was intended for the “creditor” to offset a financial loss. Those intermediaries are agents. And the transaction,  while involving numerous intermediaries and their affiliates, is a single contemporaneous transaction between the investor lender and the homeowner borrower.

This is the essence of the “Single transaction doctrine” and the “step transaction doctrine.” What the banks have been successful at doing, thus far, is to focus the court’s attention on the individual steps of the transaction in which a borrower eventually received money or value in exchange for his promise to pay (promissory note) and the collateral he used to guarantee payment (mortgage or deed of trust). This is evasive logic. As soon as you have penetrated the fog with the single transaction rule where the investor lenders are identified as the creditor and the homeowner borrower is identified as the debtor, the argument of the would-be forecloser collapses under its own weight.

Having established a straight line between the investor lenders and the homeowner borrowers, and identified all the other parties as intermediary agents of the the real parties in interest, the case for  damages become much clearer. The intermediary agents cannot foreclose or enforce the debt except for the benefit of an identified creditor which we know is the group of investor lenders whose money was used to fund the tier 2 yield spread premium, other dubious fees and profits, and then applied to funding loans by wire transfer to closing agents.

The intermediaries cannot claim the house because they are not part of that transaction as a real party in interest. They may have duties to each other as it relates to handling of the money as it passes through various conduits, but their principal duty is to make sure the transaction between the creditor and debtor is completed.

The intermediaries who supported the sale of fake mortgage bonds from an empty REMIC trust cannot claim the benefits of insurance, guarantees or the proceeds of hedge contracts like credit default swaps. For the first time since the mess began, judges are starting to ask whether the payments from the third parties has relevance to the debt of the borrower. To use the example above, are the third parties who made the payments the equivalent of Aunt Sally or are they somehow going to be allowed to claim those proceeds themselves?

The difference is huge. If the third parties who made those payments are the equivalent of Aunt Sally, then the mortgage is paid off to the extent that actual cash payments were received by the intermediary agents. Aunt Sally might have a claim against the borrower or it might have been a gift, but in all events the original basis for the transaction has been reduced or eliminated by the receipt of those payments.

If Aunt Sally sues the borrower, it would  be for contribution or restitution, unsecured, unless Aunt sally actually bought the loan and received an assignment along with a receipt for her funds. If there was another basis on which Aunt Sally made the payment besides a gift, then the money should still be credited to the benefit of the investor lenders who have received what they thought was a bond payable but in reality was still the note payable.

In no event are the intermediary agents to receive those loss mitigation payments when they had no loss. And to the extent that payments were received, they should be used to reduce the receivable of the investor lender and of course that would reduce the payable owed from the homeowner borrower to the investor lender. To do otherwise would be to allow the “creditor” to end up in a much better position than if the homeowner had simply paid off the loan as per the promissory note or faked mortgage bond.

None of this takes away from the fact that the REMIC trust was not source the funds used to pay for the mortgage origination or transfer. That goes to the issue of the perfection of the mortgage lien and not to the issue of how much is owed.

Now Judges are starting to ask the right question: what authority exists for application of the third party payments to mitigate damages? If such authority exists and the would-be foreclosures used a false formula to determine the principal balance due, and the interest payable on that false balance then the notice of delinquency, notice of default, and foreclosure proceedings, including the sale and redemption period would all be incorrect and probably void because they demanded too much from the borrower after having received the third party payments.

If such authority does not exist, then the windfall to the banks will continue unabated — they get the fees and tier 2 yield spread premium profits upfront, they get the payment servicing fees, they get to sell the loan multiple times without any credit to the investor lender, but most of all they get the loss mitigation payments from insurance, hedge, guarantee and bailouts for a third party loss — the investor lenders. This is highly inequitable. The party with the loss gets nothing while a party who already has made a profit on the transaction, makes more profit.

If we start with the proposition that the creditor should not be better off than if the contract had been performed, and we recognize that the intermediary investment bank, master servicer, trustee of the empty REMIC trust, subservicer, aggregator, and others did in fact receive money to mitigate the loss on those certificates and thus on the loans supposedly backing the mortgage bonds, then the only equitable and sensible conclusion would be to credit or allocate those payments to the investor lender up to the amount they advanced.

With the creditor satisfied or partially satisfied the mortgage loan, regardless of whether it is secured or not, is also satisfied or partially satisfied.

So the question is whether mitigation payments are part of the transaction between the investor lender and the homeowners borrower. While this specific application of insurance payments etc has never been addressed we find plenty of support in the case law, statutes and even the notes and bonds themselves that show that such third party mitigation payments are part of the transaction and the expectancy of the investor lender and therefore will affect the borrower’s balance owed on the debt, regardless of whether it is secured or unsecured.

Starting with the DUTY TO MITIGATE DAMAGES, we can assume that if there is such a duty, and there is, then successfully doing so must be applicable to the loan or contract and is so treated in awarding damages without abridgement. Keep in mind that the third party contract for mitigation payments actually refer to the borrowers. Those contracts expressly waive any right of the payor of the mitigation loss coverage to go after the homeowner borrower.

To allow all these undisclosed parties to receive compensation arising out of the initial loan transaction and not owe it to someone is absurd. TILA says they owe all the money they made to the borrower. Contract law says the payments should first be applied to the investor lender and then as a natural consequence, the amount owed to the lender is reduced and so is the amount due from the homeowner borrower.

See the following:

Pricing and Mitigation of Counterparty Credit Exposures, Agostino Capponi. Purdue University – School of Industrial Engineering. January 31, 2013. Handbook of Systemic Risk, edited by J.-P. Fouque and J.Langsam. Cambridge University Press, 2012

  • “We analyze the market price of counterparty risk and develop an arbitrage-free pricing valuation framework, inclusive of collateral mitigation. We show that the adjustment is given by the sum of option payoff terms, depending on the netted exposure, i.e. the difference between the on-default exposure and the pre-default collateral account. We specialize our analysis to Interest Rates Swaps (IRS) and Credit Default Swaps (CDS) as underlying portfolio, and perform a numerical study to illustrate the impact of default correlation, collateral margining frequency, and collateral re-hypothecation on the resulting adjustment. We also discuss problems of current research interest in the counterparty risk community.” pdf4article631

Whether this language  makes sense to you or not, it is English and it does say something clearly — it is all about risk. And the risk of the investor lender was to have protected by Triple A rating, insurance, and credit default swaps, as well as guarantees and provisions of the pooling and servicing agreement, for the REMIC trust. Now here is the tricky part — the banks must not be allowed to say on the one hand that the securitization documents are real even if there was no money trail or consideration to support them on the one hand then say that they are not real for purposes of receiving loss mitigation payments, which they want to keep even if it leaves the real creditor with a net loss.

To put it simply — either the parties to the underwriting of the bond to investors and the loan to homeowners were part of the the transaction (loan from investor to homeowner) or they were not. I fail to see any logic or support that they were not.

And the simple rule of measure of how these parties fit together is found under the single transaction doctrine. If the step transaction under scrutiny would not have occurred but for the principal transaction alleged, then it is a single transaction.

The banks would argue they were trading in credit default swaps and other exotic securities regardless of what lender fit with which borrower. But that is defeated by the fact that it was the banks who sold to mortgage bonds, it was the banks who set up the Master Servicer, it was the banks who purchased the insurance and credit default swaps and it was the underwriting investment bank that promised that insurance and credit default swaps would be used to counter the risk. And it is inescapable that the only risk applicable to the principal transaction between investor lender and homeowner borrower was the risk of non payment by the borrower. These third party payments represent the proceeds of protection from that risk.

Would the insurers have entered into the contract without the underlying loans? No. Would the counterparties have entered into the contract without the underlying loans? No.

So the answer, Judge is that it is an inescapable conclusion that third party loss mitigation payments must be applied, by definition, to the loss. The loss was suffered not by the banks but by the investors whose money they took. The loss mitigation payments must then be applied against the risk of loss on the money advanced by those investors. And the benefit of that payment or allocation is that the real creditor is satisfied and the real borrower receives some benefit from those payments in the way of a reduction of the his payable to the investor.

It is either as I have outlined above or the money — all of it — goes to the borrower, to the exclusion of the investor under the requirements of TILA and RESPA. While the shadow banking system is said to be over $1.2 quadrillion,  we must apply the same standards to ourselves and our cases as we do to the opposing side. Only actual payments received by the participants in the overall obscured investor lender transaction with the homeowner borrower.

Hence discovery must include those third parties and review of their contracts for the court to determine the applicability of third party payments that were actually received in relation to either the subject loan, the subject mortgage bond, or the subject REMIC pool claiming ownership of the subject loan.

The inequality between the rich and not-so-rich comes not from policy but bad arithmetic.

As the subprime mortgage market fell apart in late 2007 and early 2008, many financial products, particularly mortgage-backed securities, were downgraded.  The price of credit default swaps on these products increased.  Pursuant to their collateral agreements, many protection buyers were able to insist on additional collateral protection.  In some cases, the collateral demanded represented a significant portion of the counterparty’s assets.  Unsurprisingly, counterparties have carefully evaluated, and in some cases challenged, protection buyers’ right to such additional collateral amounts.  This tension has generated several recent lawsuits:

• CDO Plus Master Fund Ltd. v. Wachovia Bank, N.A., 07-11078 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 7, 2007) (dispute over demand     for collateral on $10,000,000 protection on collateralized debt obligations).

• VCG Special Opportunities Master Fund Ltd. v. Citibank, N.A., 08 1563 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 14, 2008) (same).

• UBS AG v. Paramax Capital Int’l, No. 07604233 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Dec. 26, 2007) (dispute over demand for $33 million additional capital from hedge fund for protection on collateralized debt obligations).

Given that the collateral disputes erupting in the courts so far likely represent only a small fraction of the stressed counterparties, and given recent developments, an increase in counterparty bankruptcy appears probable.

http://www.capdale.com/credit-default-swaps-the-bankrupt-counterparty-entering-the-undiscovered-country

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 79 Comments »

Follow the Money Trail: It’s the blueprint for your case

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Neil Garfield
If you are seeking legal representation or other services call our Florida customer service number at 954-495-9867 and for the West coast the number remains 520-405-1688. Customer service for the livinglies store with workbooks, services and analysis remains the same at 520-405-1688. The people who answer the phone are NOT attorneys and NOT permitted to provide any legal advice, but they can guide you toward some of our products and services.
The selection of an attorney is an important decision  and should only be made after you have interviewed licensed attorneys familiar with investment banking, securities, property law, consumer law, mortgages, foreclosures, and collection procedures. This site is dedicated to providing those services directly or indirectly through attorneys seeking guidance or assistance in representing consumers and homeowners. We are available to any lawyer seeking assistance anywhere in the country, U.S. possessions and territories. Neil Garfield is a licensed member of the Florida Bar and is qualified to appear as an expert witness or litigator in in several states including the district of Columbia. The information on this blog is general information and should NEVER be considered to be advice on one specific case. Consultation with a licensed attorney is required in this highly complex field.
Editor’s Analysis and Comment: If you want to know where all the money went during the mortgage madness of the last decade and the probable duplication of that behavior with all forms of consumer debt, the first clues have been emerging. First and foremost I would suggest the so-called bull market reflecting an economic resurgence that appears to have no basis in reality. Putting hundred of billions of dollars into the stock market is an obvious place to store ill-gotten gains.
But there is also the question of liquidity which means the Wall Street bankers had to “park” their money somewhere into depository accounts. Some analysts have suggested that the bankers deposited money in places where the sheer volume of money deposited would give bankers strategic control over finance in those countries.
The consequences to American finance is fairly well known here. But most Americans have been somewhat aloof to the extreme problems suffered by Spain, Greece, Italy and Cyprus. Italy and Cyprus have turned to confiscating savings on a progressive basis.  This could be a “fee” imposed by those countries for giving aid and comfort to the pirates of Wall Street.
So far the only country to stick with the rule of law is Iceland where some of the worst problems emerged early — before bankers could solidify political support in that country, like they have done around the world. Iceland didn’t bailout bankers, they jailed them. Iceland didn’t adopt austerity to make the problems worse, it used all its resources to stimulate the economy.
And Iceland looked at the reality of a the need for a thriving middle class. So they reduced household debt and forced banks to take the hit — some 25% or more being sliced off of mortgages and other consumer debt. Iceland was not acting out of ideology, but rather practicality.
The result is that Iceland is the shining light on the hill that we thought was ours. Iceland has real growth in gross domestic product, decreasing unemployment to acceptable levels, and banks that despite the hit they took, are also prospering.
From my perspective, I look at the situation from the perspective of a former investment banker who was in on conversations decades ago where Wall Street titans played the idea of cornering the market on money. They succeeded. But Iceland has shown that the controls emanating from Wall Street in directing legislation, executive action and judicial decisions can be broken.
It is my opinion that part or all of trillions dollars in off balance sheet transactions that were allowed over the last 15 years represents money that was literally stolen from investors who bought what they thought were bonds issued by a legitimate entity that owned loans to consumers some of which secured in the form of residential mortgage loans.
Actual evidence from the ground shows that the money from investors was skimmed by Wall Street to the tune of around $2.6 trillion, which served as the baseline for a PONZI scheme in which Wall Street bankers claimed ownership of debt in which they were neither creditor nor lender in any sense of the word. While it is difficult to actually pin down the amount stolen from the fake securitization chain (in addition to the tier 2 yield spread premium) that brought down investors and borrowers alike, it is obvious that many of these banks also used invested money from managed funds as gambling money that paid off handsomely as they received 100 cents on the dollar on losses suffered by others.
The difference between the scheme used by Wall Street this time is that bankers not only used “other people’s money” —this time they had the hubris to steal or “borrow” the losses they caused — long enough to get the benefit of federal bailout, insurance and hedge products like credit default swaps. Only after the bankers received bailouts and insurance did they push the losses onto investors who were forced to accept non-performing loans long after the 90 day window allowed under the REMIC statutes.
And that is why attorneys defending Foreclosures and other claims for consumer debt, including student loan debt, must first focus on the actual footprints in the sand. The footprints are the actual monetary transactions where real money flowed from one party to another. Leading with the money trail in your allegations, discovery and proof keeps the focus on simple reality. By identifying the real transactions, parties, timing and subject moment lawyers can use the emerging story as the blueprint to measure against the fabricated origination and transfer documents that refer to non-existent transactions.
The problem I hear all too often from clients of practitioners is that the lawyer accepts the production of the note as absolute proof of the debt. Not so. (see below). If you will remember your first year in law school an enforceable contract must have offer, acceptance and consideration and it must not violate public policy. So a contract to kill someone is not enforceable.
Debt arises only if some transaction in which real money or value is exchanged. Without that, no amount of paperwork can make it real. The note is not the debt ( it is evidence of the debt which can be rebutted). The mortgage is not the note (it is a contract to enforce the note, if the note is valid). And the TILA disclosures required make sure that consumers know who they are dealing with. In fact TILA says that any pattern of conduct in which the real lender is hidden is “predatory per se”) and it has a name — table funded loan. This leads to treble damages, attorneys fees and costs recoverable by the borrower and counsel for the borrower.
And a contract to “repay” money is not enforceable if the money was never loaned. That is where “consideration” comes in. And a an alleged contract in the lender agreed to one set of terms (the mortgage bond) and the borrower agreed to another set of terms (the promissory note) is no contract at all because there was no offer an acceptance of the same terms.
And a contract or policy that is sure to fail and result in the borrower losing his life savings and all the money put in as payments, furniture is legally unconscionable and therefore against public policy. Thus most of the consumer debt over the last 20 years has fallen into these categories of unenforceable debt.
The problem has been the inability of consumers and their lawyers to present a clear picture of what happened. That picture starts with footprints in the sand — the actual events in which money actually exchanged hands, the answer to the identity of the parties to each of those transactions and the reason they did it, which would be the terms agreed on by both parties.
If you ask me for a $100 loan and I say sure just sign this note, what happens if I don’t give you the loan? And suppose you went somewhere else to get your loan since I reneged on the deal. Could I sue you on the note? Yes. Could I win the suit? Not if you denied you ever got the money from me. Can I use the real loan as evidence that you did get the money? Yes. Can I win the case relying on the loan from another party? No because the fact that you received a loan from someone else does not support the claim on the note, for which there was no consideration.
It is the latter point that the Courts are starting to grapple with. The assumption that the underlying transaction described in the note and mortgage was real, is rightfully coming under attack. The real transactions, unsupported by note or mortgage or disclosures required under the Truth in Lending Act, cannot be the square peg jammed into the round hole. The transaction described in the note, mortgage, transfers, and disclosures was never supported by any transaction in which money exchanged hands. And it was not properly disclosed or documented so that there could be a meeting of the minds for a binding contract.
KEEP THIS IN MIND: (DISCOVERY HINTS) The simple blueprint against which you cast your fact pattern, is that if the securitization scheme was real and not a PONZI scheme, the investors’ money would have gone into a trust account for the REMIC trust. The REMIC trust would have a record of the transaction wherein a deduction of money from that account funded your loan. And the payee on the note (and the secured party on the mortgage) would be the REMIC trust. There is no reason to have it any other way unless you are a thief trying to skim or steal money. If Wall Street had played it straight underwriting standards would have been maintained and when the day came that investors didn’t want to buy any more mortgage bonds, the financial world would not have been on the verge of extinction. Much of the losses to investors would have covered by the insurance and credit default swaps that the banks took even though they never had any loss or risk of loss. There never would have been any reason to use nominees like MERS or originators.
The entire scheme boils down to this: can you borrow the realities of a transaction in which you were not a party and treat it, legally in court, as your own? So far the courts have missed this question and the result has been an unequivocal and misguided “yes.” Relentless of pursuit of the truth and insistence on following the rule of law, will produce a very different result. And maybe America will use the shining example of Iceland as a model rather than letting bankers control our governmental processes.

Banking Chief Calls For 15% Looting of Italians’ Savings
http://www.infowars.com/banking-chief-calls-for-15-looting-of-italians-savings/

Filed under: alternative medicine, AMERICAN HOMEOWNERS COOPERATIVE, AMGAR, ATM, bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 146 Comments »

The Truth Keeps Coming: When Will Courts Become Believers?

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Neil Garfield
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Editor’s Comments and Practice Suggestions: On the heels of AG Eric Holder’s shocking admission that he withheld prosecution of the banks and their executives because of the perceived risk to the economy, we have confirmation and new data showing the incredible arrogance of the investment banks in breaking the law, deceiving clients and everyone around them, and covering it up with fabricated, forged paperwork. And they continue to do so because they perceive themselves as untouchable.

Practitioners should be wary of leading with defenses fueled by deceptions in the paperwork and instead rely first on the money trail. Once the money trail is established, each part of it can be described as part of a single transaction between the investors and the homeowners in which all other parties are intermediaries. Then and only then do you go to the documentation proffered by the opposition and show the obvious discrepancies between the named parties on the documents of record and the actual parties to the transaction, between the express repayment provisions of the promissory note and the express repayment provisions of the bond sold to investors.

Practitioners should make sure they are up to speed on the latest news in the public domain and the latest developments in lawsuits between the investment banks, investors and guarantors like the FHA who have rejected loans as not conforming to the requirements of the securitization documents and are demanding payment from Chase and others for lying about the loans in order to receive 100 cents on the dollar while the actual loss was incurred by the investors and the government sponsored guarantors.

Another case of the banks getting the money to cover losses they never had because at all times they were mostly dealing with third party money in funding or purchasing mortgages. It was never their own money at risk.

Three “deals” are now under close scrutiny by the government and by knowledgeable foreclosure defense lawyers. For years, Chase, OneWest and BofA have taken the position that they somehow became the owner of mortgage loans because they acquired a combo of WAMU and Bear Stearns (Chase), IndyMac (OneWest), and a combo of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch (BofA).

None of it was ever true. The deals are wrapped in secrecy and even sealed documents but the truth is coming out anyway and is plain to see on some records in the public domain as can be easily seen on the FDIC site under the Freedom of Information Act “library.”

The naked truth is that the “acquiring” firms have very complex deals on those mortgage loans that the acquiring firm chooses to assert ownership or authority. It is  a pick and choose type of scenario which is neither backed up by documentation nor consideration.

We have previously reported that the actual person who served as FDIC receiver in the WAMU case reported to me that there was no assignment of loans from WAMU, from the WAMU bankruptcy estate, or the FDIC. “if you are looking for an assignment of those loans, you are not going to find it because there was no assignment.” The same person had “accidentally” signed an affidavit that Chase used widely across the country stating that Chase was the owner of the loans by operation of law, which is the position that Chase took in litigation over wrongful foreclosures. Chase and the receiver now take the position that their prior position was unsupportable. So what happens to all those foreclosures where the assertions of Chase were presumed true?

Now Chase wants to disavow their assumption of all liabilities regarding WAMU and Bear Stearns because it sees what I see — huge liabilities emerging from those “portfolios” of foreclosed properties that were foreclosed and sold at auction to non-creditors who submitted credit bids.

You might also remember that we reported that in the Purchase and Assumption Agreement with the FDIC, wherein Chase was acquiring certain operations of WAMU, not including the loans, the consideration was expressly stated as zero and that the bid price from Chase happened to be a little lower than their share of the tax refund to WAMU, making the deal a “negative consideration” deal — i.e., Chase was being paid to acquire the depository assets of WAMU. Residential loans were not the only receivables on the books of WAMU and the FDIC receiver said that no accounting was ever done to figure out what was being sold to Chase.

Each of the deals above was complicated by the creation of entities (Maiden Lane LLCs) to create an “off balance sheet” liability for the toxic loans and bonds that had been traded around as if they were real.

Nobody ever thought to check whether the notes and mortgages recorded the correct facts in their content as to the cash transaction between the borrower and the originator. They didn’t, which is why the investors and the FDIC both now assert that not only were the loans not subject to underwriting rules compatible with industry standards, but that the documents themselves were not capable of enforcement because the wrong payee is named with different terms of repayment to the investors than what those lenders thought they were buying.

In other words, the investors and the the government sponsored guarantee organizations are both asserting the same theory, cause of action and facts that borrowers are asserting when they defend the foreclosure. This has been misinterpreted as an attempt by borrowers to get a free house. In point of fact, most borrowers simply don’t want to lose their homes and most of them are willing to enter into modifications and settlements with proceeds far superior to what the investor gets on foreclosure.

Borrowers admit receiving money, but not from the originator or any of the participants in what turned out to be a false chain of securitization which existed only on paper. The Borrowers had no knowledge nor even access to the knowledge that they were actually entering into a loan transaction with a stranger to the documents presented at the loan “closing.” This pattern of table funded loans is branded by the Truth in Lending Act and Reg Z as “predatory per se.” The coincidence of the money being received by the closing date was a reasonable basis for assuming that the originator was not play-acting, but rather actually acting as lender and underwriter of the loan, which they were certainly not.

The deals cut by Chase, OneWest and BofA are models of confusion and shared losses with the FDIC and other investors who participated in the Maiden Lane excursion. The actual creditor is definitely not Chase, OneWest nor BofA. Bank of America formed two corporations that merely served as distractions — Red Oak Merger Corp and BAC Home Loans and abandoned both after several foreclosures were successfully concluded by BAC, which owned nothing.

As we have previously shown, if the mortgage securitization scheme had been a real financial tool to reduce risk and increase lending, the REMIC trust would have ended up on the note and mortgage, on record in the office of the County Recorder. There would have been no need to establish MERS or any other private database in which trades were made and “trading profits” were booked in order to siphon off a large chunk of the money advanced by investors.

The transferring of paper does not create a transaction wherein a loan is proven or established in law or in fact. There must be an actual transaction in which money exchanged hands. In most cases (nearly all) the actual transaction in which money exchanged hands was between the borrower and an undisclosed third party entity.

This third party entity was inserted by the investment bankers so that the investment bank could claim ownership (when legally the loans already were owned by the investors) and an insurable interest in the loans and bonds that were supposedly backed by the loans. This way the banks could assert their right to proceeds of sale, insurance, and credit default swaps leaving their investor clients out in the cold and denying the borrowers the right to claim a reduction in the liability for their loan.

In litigation, every effort should be made to force the opposition to prove that the investor money was deposited into the a trust account for the REMIC trust and that the REMIC trust actually paid for the loans. Actually what you will be doing is forcing an accounting that shows that the REMIC was never funded and was never the buyer of the loans. Hence nobody in the false securitization chain had any ownership of the debt leading to the inevitable conclusion that for them the note was unenforceable and the mortgage was a nullity for lack of consideration and a lack of a meeting of the minds.

Once you get to the accounting from the Trustee of the Trust, the Master Servicer and the subservicer, you will uncover trades that involve representations of the investment bank that they owned the loans and in fact the mortgage bonds which were clearly pre-sold to investors before the first application for loan was ever received.

Thus persistent borrowers who litigate for the actual truth will track the money and then show that the cash transactions differ from the documented transactions and that the documented transactions lacked consideration. The only way out for the banks is to claim that they embraced this convoluted route as agents for the investors, but then that still means that money received in federal bailouts, insurance and credit default swaps would reduce the receivable of the actual creditors (investors) and thus reduce the amount payable by the actual borrowers (homeowners).

The unwillingness of the Department of Justice to enforce long standing laws regarding fraud and deceit, identity theft and other crimes, tends to create an atmosphere of impunity a round the banks and a presumption that the borrowers are merely technical objections of a certain number of documents not having all their T’s crossed and I’s dotted.

From a public policy perspective, one would have to concede that protecting the banks did nothing for liquidity in the marketplace and nothing for the credit markets in particular. Holder’s position, which I guess is also Obama’s position, is that it is better to allow average Americans to sink into poverty than to hold the banks and bankers accountable for their white collar crimes.

Legally, if the prosecutions ensued and the cases were proven, restitution would be ordered based not on some back-room deal but on approval of the Court. Restitution would clawback much of the capital of the mega banks who are holding that money by virtue of illegal transactions. And restitution would provide the only stimulus to the economy that would be fundamentally sound. Investors and borrowers would both share in the recovery of at least part of the wealth lost to the banks during the mortgage maelstrom.

I have no doubt that the same defects will appear in auto loans, student loans and other forms of consumer loans especially including credit card loans. The real objection of the banks is that after all this effort of stealing the money and the homes they might be forced to give it all back. The banks perceive that as a “loss.” I perceive it as simple justice applied every day in the courtrooms of America.

JPM: The Washington Mutual Story
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/jpm-wamu/

Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase, and Maiden Lane LLC
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_bearstearns.htm

Mistakenly Released Documents Reveal Goldman Sachs Screwed IPO Clients
http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/03/12/mistakenly-released-documents-reveal-goldman-sachs-screwed-ipo-clients/

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 136 Comments »

Bond Buyers Beware: Student Loans Mirror Mortgage Meltdown

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Neil Garfield

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For assistance with presenting a case for wrongful foreclosure, please call 520-405-1688, customer service, who will put you in touch with an attorney in the states of Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, California, Ohio, and Nevada. (NOTE: Chapter 11 may be easier than you think).

Editor’s Comments: Close your eyes. Imagine an upside down world in which the borrowers are having the most trouble keeping their loans current are the very same loans that investors can’t get enough of. Sound like the mortgage meltdown? That is because Wall Street is using the same business model. “Demand for the riskiest bunch—those that will lose money first if the loans go bad—was 15 times greater than the supply, people familiar with the deal said.”

So why would fund managers intentionally invest money in which they are most likely to lose money and their jobs? Answer: they wouldn’t. Somehow wall Street has again convinced or coerced fund managers to buy bogus bonds backed by student loans that are spiraling down the toilet even as we speak.

The “experts” attribute the surge to investor demand. I would scratch the surface and see why investor demand was so high, besides the obvious need to increase yield at a time when yields have never been lower.

The problem is that there is still no accountability for these loans or bonds. A young student asks for a loan and the bank showers him with “extra” amounts beyond what he requested. The payment is zero, so it is like free money and the novice financial victim doesn’t have the knowledge or skills to understand the flaws in what is being proposed to him or her.

Before you know it, the $25,000 loan he asked for is now $50,000 to take care of incidentals and living expenses, and the real amount borrowed will go up by anywhere from 6%-15% as interest accumulates is added to the principal. Once out of school, the interest rates shoots up and the next he or she knows, she now has around a $60,000 loan (despite asking for $25,000) with an interest rate of 8%, which means that interest alone is $4800 per year or $400 per month — the payment for a small car and insurance.

The mystery of why demand is so high when on the last round there was such a disaster can only be explained by reference to the sales talk given to fund managers and perhaps some overlapping or conflicting areas of interest.

This is not rocket science. The number of student loans failing is spiking and getting worse every day. Any asset backed security using student loans is depreciated worse than a new car driving off the show room floor. And listening to the bankers selling this stuff is like getting medical advice from a crack dealer.

So why are they putting pension fund money into an obviously failing investment? That is my quest. When I have the answer i will probably be able to further unravel the mortgage backed bonds a little further as well.

I keep  wondering if the bankers are actually doing the same thing they did with the mortgage backed bonds — tell the investor the investment is triple A rated, insured and hedged with credit default swaps. And I wonder if the fund managers understand that the triple A rating is subject to revision down to unrated, and that the insurance and hedges are payable not to the investors but to the investment bankers.

I also wonder if the notes will again disappear because of misrepresentations as to their content, and if the intermediary banks will again retain control over the collection process, create fabricated forged documents and offer of perjured testimony and affidavits from incompetent witnesses?

And I wonder if once again we have a stream of money coming from an unidentified funding source whose name is not included in the closing documents, and who agreed to repayment terms different than those set forth on the promissory note signed by the borrower.

This is why I am including Student Loans as an area of concentration on this blog and I will include other subjects as well that inform and assist those “in trouble” due to the greed and predatory lending tactics used by private bankers. It is worth mentioning that the private banking loans are in the process of being phased out for precisely the reasons stated above.

Now SOMEBODY must be making money on these bad loans and the good loans far in excess of the basis points usually applicable to lending. Where is that profit coming from? It can only come from the investors since they are the only ones who are putting their money at risk.

So to recap, after the mortgage meltdown we have what appears to be a repeat situation going on with student loans. The investment bankers are skimming deeply into investor money before they lend out anything. The loans were mostly bad loans that will eventually fail. The  bankers will collect insurance, credit default swaps and potentially another federal bailout. Nobody ends up with what they wanted except the investment bankers, of course.

Student-Loan Securities Stay Hot
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323293704578334542910674174.html

What’s Really Behind the Student Debt Boom
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/05/whats-really-behind-the-student-debt-boom.aspx

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , | 27 Comments »

Don’t Take Advice from Banks! It’s All Scripted to Get You in Foreclosure and then Default

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Neil Garfield

For information on our services call our customer service number at 520-405-1688. Services include legal representation in Florida, Nevada, Ohio, California and other states. Neil Garfield is a member of the Florida Bar. Readers should consult with an attorney licensed in the jurisdiction in which their property is located before deciding or acting upon anything seen on this blog.

————-

Neil F Garfield, February 28, 2013

If you are directly talking to the bank you are talking to people who have been carefully scripted in what they are supposed to say. The goal of the bank is to get you in foreclosure. That is why they tell you that in order to be considered for modification or relief you must stop paying on your mortgage. Then they lead you along in the so-called modification process extending the time you are in default so that it is unlikely that you will have the money to reinstate.

After they are pretty sure you can’t reinstate they tell you your request for permanent modification has been denied and they give crazy reasons like someone didn’t call them back (after they have repeatedly “lost” the documents). In judicial states they file a foreclosure lawsuit. When you call them up and ask what is going on, they tell you your loan modification is denied and they proceeding with foreclosure unless you have the money to reinstate, which includes fees and costs that are probably fabricated. Meanwhile they refuse to provide you with proof they have any right to collect anything from you much less foreclose.

In the judicial states and sometimes even in the non-judicial states the banks encourage homeowners to write “hardship” letters to the Judge. This is a very clever way of getting a lot of people to file a paper with the court that essentially admits all elements of the foreclosure and creates a default situation because you didn’t file a formal answer. The next thing you know a final judgment is entered setting the date for the auction of your property stating the amount due based upon a flimsy affidavit filed by someone with no idea who you are, what the history has been on your file, and what amount is owed to the actual creditor.

In a sense, as pointed out to me by some other lawyers, the banks are practicing law without a license when they give legal advice to borrowers and they have a blatant conflict of interest when doing so. Do NOT follow the advice of the bank representative as he or she is only parroting what they have been told to say. They are all going after foreclosures with the same frenetic energy that went after the loans because if the loans don’t end up in foreclosure they have some questions to answer to the insurers who already paid them (several times over) on the markdown of the value of the pool claiming an interest in your loan.

Here is a simple example: Imagine your call is stolen and your insurance company cuts you a check for the loss. And then another insurance company cuts you a check for the same loss. In real life this doesn’t happen to insured motorists. But in finance the loan insurance works exactly that way. So now you have twice the value of the car that was stolen. Suddenly the police call and tell you the car has been found. If you follow the law, you give back the insurance money and take the car back but that is not what the banks do with your loan. They make sure the car gets buried so they can keep the insurance money which is twice the value of the loan (or ten times the value of the loan). In your case “buried” means foreclosure. It is only through foreclosure that they can demonstrate the claimed loss was real.

Another way they get you is with force placed insurance. They get a “notice” from the carrier that the insurance has lapsed and then contrary to law, without notice to you they get insurance that costs three times what you were paying. This raises the payments to a level you can’t pay and then they give you a notice of default that you failed to make your payment, even though the payment they are demanding is wrong. Then they foreclose, give the same advice over the phone to write a hardship letter to the Judge which admits the debt, note, mortgage and default and then raises the issue of force placed insurance which the average pro se litigant doesn’t really know how to state in a formal pleading. The judge takes the letter to be your answer and with little fanfare enters final judgment for the bank.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , | 134 Comments »

Major Economists Tell Obama to Reduce Mortgage Debt

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Neil Garfield

What’s the Next Step? Consult with Neil Garfield

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For assistance with presenting a case for wrongful foreclosure, please call 520-405-1688, customer service, who will put you in touch with an attorney in the states of Florida, California, Ohio, and Nevada. (NOTE: Chapter 11 may be easier than you think).

Editor’s Comment: I think Obama is stuck on the idea that correction of loans to reflect their true value is a gift to undeserving people — because that is the message he is getting from Wall Street. I have demonstrated on these pages that correction of loan principal is not a gift, it is paid in full, and even if you disagree with indisputable facts, it is the only practical thing to do as Iceland has clearly shown, with the only growing economy in Western nations.

Now we find out that Obama was given exactly that advice 18 months before he won reelection. Let’s see if he does it. He sought got the advice of seven of the world’s leading economists who all agreed that reduction of household debt — and in particular the dubious mortgage debt that Wall Street is using to make more and more profit, is something that the administration should do right away.

We can only guess why the administration has not done it, but I know from background sources that this ideological battle has been going on in the White House since Obama was first elected. What is needed is for Obama to take the time to get to know the real facts. And those facts show clearly that (1) the foreclosures that already were allowed to proceed did so on imperfected liens which is to say the right to foreclose was absent regardless of the amount and (b) the principal claimed as due on those loans was (1) not due to the people who claimed it and (2) far above the real amount that was due because the banks stole the money from insurance, credit default swaps and federal bailouts from investing pension funds and other managed funds.

The banks claimed ownership of loans they neither funded nor purchased and also had the audacity to claim the losses and then overstated the losses by a factor of 10. The insurance companies and counterparties on the credit default swaps, along with the federal government, paid the banks who didn’t have a dime in the deal and therefore lost nothing. The investors received small pittances in settlements when they should have received from their investment bankers (agents of the investors) the money that was received.

An accounting from the Master Servicer and the trustee or manager of the “pools” would clearly show that the money was received and not allocated in accordance with the contrnacts nor common law. As a result we are left with a fake loss that was tossed over the fence at the investors. Had they allocated the gargantuan payments received from multiple insurance policies on the same bonds and loans, the principal would be reduced anyway.

This is why I keep saying that you should use Deny and Discover as  your principal strategy and direct it not just to the subservicer who deals directly with the homeowner borrowers but also the Master Servicer who deals with the subservicer, the insurance companies, the counterparties on credit default swaps, and the federal government.

Following the money trial will in most cases show that the lien recorded was imperfect and not enforceable because the party who was designated as the lender was not the lender, hence “pretender lender.” Following this trail from one end to the other and forcing the books open will show that most loans were table funded (predatory per se as per TILA reg Z) — and not for the benefit of the investors, but rather for the benefit of the bankers (a typical PONZI scheme).

In an economy driven by consumer spending, the reduction in household debt will drive the economy forward and upward. The real total in many cases is zero after credits for insurance, CDS, and federal bailouts. If you leave the tax code alone, and let the “benefit” be taxed, the federal government will receive a huge amount of taxes that the banks evaded, but they would get it from homeowners, whose tax debt would be a small fraction of the mortgage debt claimed by the banks.

The problem can be solved. It is a question of whether the leader of our nation studies the issues and comes to his own conclusions instead of being led on a string by Wall Street spinning.

Failure to act will produce a wave of strategic defaults because like any business failure, the “businessman” — i.e., the homeowner — has concluded that the investment went bad and they will just walk away — resulting in another windfall to the banks who after cornering the world’s supply of money will have cornered the world’s supply of real estate.

dc83f25e-2e87-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 126 Comments »

More Bailouts Coming

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Neil Garfield

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Editor’s Comment: Ignoring the obvious, Federal Agencies and the Courts are compounding the problems caused by the sham securitization scheme that covered up the largest PONZI scheme in history. And the taxpayers are paying for it. Investors are losing money and homeowners are losing money and their homes as the plain fact of defects in the origination documents are ignored, except when it comes to agencies and institutions suing each other, all alleging the same thing — the documents are unenforceable.

This isn’t just a paperwork problem, which is why I keep saying that while the UCC arguments have merit they are not dispositive of the real issues. The paperwork is bad because banks intentionally created a scheme that they never would have accepted from borrowers — using layers and ladders of corporate veils to hide the real parties in interest.

They diverted the investor money into their own piggy banks and they diverted the origination documents from the investors because they had plans for that paperwork — plans that required them to be able to “prove” they owned the loan and therefore could trade the loans, sell them, hedge them, insure them and even take Federal bailouts because of “defaults” on loans the mega banks never made nor purchased.

Now the FHA is going to need extra money to make good on guarantees on toxic documents that are not necessarily bad loans but were insured at the mortgage bond level. The banks are getting paid over and over again as they laugh all the way to their accounts in the Cayman Islands.

But it doesn’t end there. The investors were mostly managed funds for retirement including vested pension funds that in some cases have reduced the assets held by the fund so drastically that they have already declared themselves “underfunded” which is another way of saying they are insolvent. Some are insured and some are not. But either way, if pensioners and retirees are going to get the income they counted on in retirement the funds are going to need money. And there is no place to get it except from the Federal government.

The accounting for the loans excludes any information from the Master Servicer (the only party with ALL the information about the loan and the money and the documents) and specifically the third party payoffs received by the banks who at all times were, whether they like it or not, acting as agents of the investors. The money the banks made belongs to the investors — the managed retirement funds; but they are not getting it except if they sue for fraudulent representations made at the time of the sale of the bogus “mortgage-backed” bonds.

If the investors did get their share of the money that was paid by insurance, credit default swaps, other hedges and federal bailout, they would not have lost nearly as much as they did in the value of their assets and they probably would not be “underfunded.”

But this creates the politically unacceptable consequence of lowering the amount due on each obligation owed to the investor — a benefit that would inure to the benefit of homeowners who are one of the obligees on those debts.

Somehow we have arrived at the conclusion that it is better to reward the perpetrator of the crime rather than give restitution to the victims. Somehow we have arrived at the conclusion that the windfalls should continue going the way of the banks instead of the investors and borrowers.

Just looking at all the actions filed by agencies and institutions there is a clear consensus that the loans were bad from the start. They named the wrong (strawman) payee, they named the wrong mortgagee/beneficiary (strawman) and they never disclosed or referred to the real obligation to the investors as set forth in the mortgage bond which was the ONLY reason the investors advanced the money.

This is why I am pushing DENY AND DISCOVER  as the principal strategy to pursue coupled with discovery aimed not at the document trail but at the money trail where the would-be forecloser must show that the origination documents accurately recited the the true facts of the transaction and where the assignments were transferred for “value received.” When you ask for proof of payment, wire transfer instructions, wire transfer receipts, they are completely absent in assignments and in the origination they clearly show that the loan was never funded by the party “disclosed” as the lender at closing. They never show the terms of repayment as set forth in the bond. And therefore they leave the borrower and all other people or entities with a stake in the property after that transaction in a state of limbo because there is no clear path to clear title.

Too many cases are being lost in all forums because pro se litigants and lawyers and Judges are too willing to take the word of the party in the room that they MUST be the creditor — why else would they be there? It is because in most cases they are getting a free house when they were playing with investor money and they have created the losses to the investors, the homeowners and the taxpayers.

The government should claw back the money paid to the banks and claw back the profits they made using investor money to gamble with. The accounts should be settled with the investors and then allocated to the debts of each borrower to see what balance, if any, is left. The losses will largely vanish just be applying existing law and long-standing standards of accounting and bookkeeping. The resulting balance, if  any can easily be paid off by borrowers who will again have some equity in their homes because of the vast amount of over-payments received by the banks which they paid out in bonuses to their employees for their participation and silence in the PONZI scheme. As soon as the investors stopped buying the the bogus mortgage bonds the scheme collapsed — the hallmark of every illicit scheme based not on on real business but rather the appearance of of doing business.

F.H.A. Audit Said to Show Low Reserves

By

The Federal Housing Administration’s annual report is expected to show a sharp deterioration in the agency’s financial condition, including a shortfall in reserves, the result of escalating losses on the $1.1 trillion in mortgages that it insures, according to people with knowledge of the entity’s operations.

The F.H.A., the Department of Housing and Urban Development unit that insures home mortgages, reports on its capital reserves at the end of each fiscal year and makes projections for its financial position in the coming year. If the report, due later this week, showed that the F.H.A.’s capital reserves had fallen deep into negative territory, it would be a stark reversal from projections last year that it would show a positive economic value of $9.4 billion in 2012.

Capital reserves are kept to cover future losses. Outsiders have questioned whether the agency would some day need an infusion from Treasury if its reserves are insufficient.

Alex Wohl, a spokesman for the F.H.A., said, “We’re not going to comment on it until the actuarial report comes out on Friday.”

This year, the F.H.A. has tried to improve its financial position by raising the premiums that it levies on loans and increasing its volume significantly. But those efforts may have been negated by rising loan losses, even on mortgages that it insured long after the credit crisis took hold.

More than one in six F.H.A. loans are delinquent 30 days or more, according to Edward Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in housing. Delinquencies increased by 166,000 from June 30, 2011, to September 2012, he said, a 12 percent increase. Loans insured by the F.H.A. often allow very small down payments of 3.5 percent of the purchase price.

“There’s a fundamental problem with the F.H.A.,” Mr. Pinto said. “Its loans are too risky and that has to be addressed. It’s not the legacy book that’s creating all the problems. It’s beyond that.”

Brian Chappelle, a former F.H.A. official who is now at Potomac Partners, a mortgage consulting firm, said that he had not seen the audit report but that he had been told some of the shortfall resulted from less optimistic projections for home prices than were in last year’s audit.

“In and of itself, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to need a draw from the Treasury,” he said.

At the same time, “there is no question that F.H.A. was going to suffer,” he added. “The amazing thing is that F.H.A. stayed solvent for as long as it did.”

The F.H.A. is subject to a statutory capital requirement of 2 percent of loans, or about $22 billion on its $1.1 trillion portfolio. An economic value of negative $5 billion to $10 billion would leave the F.H.A. $27 billion to $32 billion short of this statutory requirement, Mr. Pinto said. This would be the fourth consecutive year that F.H.A. has failed to meet the requirement, he added.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Tax “break” about to expire on debt “forgiveness”

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Neil Garfield

Editor’s Comments on policy:

Depending upon what Congress does between now and the end of the year the waiver of a tax on debt forgiveness as ordinary income will expire. My take is that it should expire and that at the same time the debt should be reduced by virtue of payments received or due from  subservicers, Master Servicers,  insurers, and counterparties to credit default swap contract, where appropriate. This is because (a) it was never secured and (b) it was never funded or acquired for “value received” by the parties whose name appears as payee and mortgagee on closing papers and (c) the debts have been paid off multiple times by multiples sales of the same loan under the structure of an outright sale (of something they didn’t own), insurance, credit default swaps and even federal bailout.

The added reason is that the homeowners were defrauded: the appraisals were cooked and the borrower justifiably relied upon them as did the investors. So we are talking restitution here not forgiveness.

That would leave each borrower with a tax instead of a mortgage. It would also give back the money to the Federal government and investors. In many cases the investors are also the borrowers if they pay taxes or are depending upon a managed institutional fund that bought the bogus mortgage bonds. By converting the defective mortgage, note and assignments to a tax, the borrower’s liability would be reduced and payable in installments.

Obama wants as little Federal involvement as possible, but he is missing the point that a large scale fraud took place here that ended up corrupting the title records in all fifty states and in which investors suffered losses only because their agents, the investment banks, never shared the enormous profits they received from “trading” (Tier 2 yield spread premium), buying insurance in which the investment bank was the payee instead of the investors, and buying additional coverage from credit default swaps again making themselves the payee instead of the investors.

This is a mirror of the closings at which the loans were supposedly originated. Instead of making the investors or their REMIC the payee on the note or recording an assignment with actual payment in cash, the banks “borrowed” ownership from the investors and made a ton of money trading on it.

The Federal government MUST get involved here and straighten this out or there will continue to be uneven inconsistent opinions emanating from state and federal courts across the country making the title situation (and uncertainty in the marketplace) even worse than it is now.

The fact is that in most loans the amount received from Federal bailouts and the hedge contracts that were used, as well as the outright multiple sales of the same loans, have been paid in full several times over whether they are in foreclosure or not — and that includes the prior “foreclosures” that were put through the system based upon false, defective documentation and fraudulent representations to the borrowers and all others involved in the process.

The remedy I propose is indeed extreme if you look at it as a gift. But if you look at it from the point of view that the investors and borrowers were lured into the scheme by the same lies to support a PONZI scheme that collapsed as soon as investors stopped buying the bogus mortgage bonds, it is easy to see that the balance due from borrowers is zero. In fact, it is even possible that legally the overpayment left over after the investors are paid, might be due back to homeowners by virtue of the terms of the notes they signed. That might also be taxable but the homeowner would have the money with which to pay the tax.

This proposal would stimulate the economy by automatically reducing the amount of household debt based upon tax brackets, while also increasing revenue to pay back the Federal government for all the “favors” done for the banks. Whether the Feds decide to prosecute the banks for restitution would their choice.

As it stands now, as long as homeowners focus their strategy or DENY and DISCOVER and demand to see the actual transfers of money to prove ownership of the loan and the existence of an unpaid loan receivable, the decisions are already turning toward the borrowers, albeit slowly. One way or the other, this issue with taxation of the “forgiveness” of debt when in fact it was actually paid is going to surface.

Think about it. Comments welcome.

Tax break for struggling homeowners set to expire
http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/07/real_estate/mortgage-forgiveness-tax-break/

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 142 Comments »

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