Banks Controlled Independent Reviews

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Neil Garfield

“TARP was supposed to cover losses from defaulting loans. But then it was switched to make direct capital infusions into the mega banks. Why the switch? Because everyone realized very early on that the banks had no losses from defaulting loans. It was the investors who made the loans and would take those losses. But even though the government recognized this fact, it did so in secret allowing the confusing notion of bank losses to permeate the judicial cases. All they had to do to stop foreclosures was to tell the truth and Judges would have correctly assumed that the Banks were mere intermediaries. PRACTICE HINT: Is Champerty and maintenance a cause of action for damages, a defense to a lawsuit or both?” — Neil F Garfield, livinglies.me

CHECK OUT OUR DECEMBER SPECIAL!

What’s the Next Step? Consult with Neil Garfield

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).

If you are having trouble believing that the recession, the mortgages, the foreclosures, the auctions, and the health of the banks are all a big lie click here for Matt Taibbi’s Article in Rolling Stone

Editor’s Comment: The so-called independent reviews were neither independent nor reviewed. They were processed. Which is to say they went in one end and came out the other. The so-called reviews relied completely on the banks themselves to review their own criminality in the foreclosure process that was only one step in a multifaceted plan to take down the wealth of America and concentrate in the hands of people who could claim it as their own.

The reviews were not independent because all the information offered was the information that the banks wanted to reveal and half of that was completely fictitious. The lack of an administrative hearing process made it impossible for the independent review conclusions to be challenged. Talk about stacking the deck.

A random survey of foreclosures would show that the forecloser was a complete stranger to the transaction, never invested a penny in the origination or purchase of the loan, and never accounted properly for its actions to the actual lender/investors. How do we know this with certainty? Because real independent reviews like the ones conducted in counties all over the country came to exactly that conclusion after reviewing foreclosures that were “completed.”

There is no ambiguity except whether the credit bid and ensuing deed upon foreclosure is void or voidable. I maintain it is void and not voidable. Voidable means that the victim must do something to replace the job of the county recorder. Voidable means that the transaction stands and the deed is valid even though we know it is a wild deed with no place for it in the chain of title. Voidable means that in a later refi or sale if some title lawyer is actually doing his work the way it was done since the dawn of title records, he or she is going to discover the wild deed and declare the title to be clouded defective or fatally defective. And that would be because of all the documents submitted by a series of entities that had no function except layering over the festering corruption of title created in the first place.

Actual findings that somehow leaked through the controlled review process were suppressed. It all comes down to the same thing in administrative action, law enforcement action, executive action and legislative action: homeowners are deadbeats who don’t count or can be managed through the miracle of telling big lies through the media. The conclusion reached in virtually all cases was the same: while the forgeries, fabrications and perjury were bad things and the ensuing theft of the homes was allowed to proceed anyway, the net result is that these people borrowed the money, defaulted on the payments and lost the house they were supposed to lose anyway.

It is a compelling argument if it was true. In fact, the posturing and lying of the banks enhanced the lender/investor losses and stopped the homeowners from connecting up with real lenders to settle the loans and then go after the banks together for lying to everyone about appraisals, underwriting, and loan quality.

As I see it, the only way this is going to wind up is that those people who fight back with Deny and Discover will be rewarded for their efforts if they persist. But on the whole, most people will not fight back leaving the Banks with windfall several times over. Government won’t help them. If the Banks lose every case that is contested it will be less than the amount they would reserve for loan losses if their loans were real.

We all know that the Banks were using investor money 96% of the time, and yet we allowed them to get insurance, credit default swaps, and federal bailouts on investments they never made. We allow them to pretend that they own what the investors own, thus corrupting their balance sheets with fictitious assets. We allowed them to book fictitious sales of bogus mortgage bonds to investors using the investors own money to create the infrastructure that was never used to sell, assign or securitize the loans. The Bankers who control the banks also control all the profits from these false “proprietary trades”, book them as they wish partly to keep the value of the stock higher and higher, and then keep the rest in off balance sheet off-shore transactions spread around the world.

In an economy that is still driven 70% by consumer spending these policies are arrogant and stupid. The investors who were the real lenders should be paid. The balance on the books owed to those investors should be reduced. And the process of separating the false tier 2 premiums on proprietary trades and the REAL balance owed by borrowers should proceed. This can only happen, given current circumstances by denial of all elements of the cause of action for foreclosure, and pressing on through discovery against the Master Servicer, subservicer (who did they pay? how long did they day after the declaration of default?), the Trustee of the REMIC trust (where are the trust accounts?), the aggregators and other parties that were engaged in the PONZI scheme that was covered over by a false infrastructure of assignments and securitization which never took place.

Our economy is projected to grow at a mere 2% this year if we are lucky, because the banks are holding all the fuel for the engine. If we were to apply simple precepts of law on fraud and contracts, the amount clawed back to investors and homeowners would end the crisis for the economy and yes, possibly threaten the existence of the large banks, but greatly enhance the prospects for the 7,000 other banks in the U.S. alone. But that of course would only happen if we were doing things right.

OCC Foreclosure Reviewer: “Independent” Reviews Were Controlled by Banks, Which Suppressed Any Findings of Harm to Foreclosed Homeowners
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/occ-foreclosure-file-reviewer-independent-reviews-were-controlled-by-banks-which-suppressed-any-findings-of-harm-to-foreclosed-homeowner.html

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 132 Comments »

Media Still Taking Their Queues from Wall Street

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Neil Garfield

CHECK OUT OUR DECEMBER SPECIAL!

What’s the Next Step? Consult with Neil Garfield

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: If you read the mainstream media instead of the actual complaints being filed by agencies and consumers, you get the message that it is foreclosures that are dragging the economy down because of how slow they are in judicial states. They present a compelling case consisting of half truths about diminishing property values, lower lending, overwhelming servicer capacity, resistance to modifications, and delays in the “inevitable” foreclosure caused by judicial backlog.

The message is clear — let’s get this over with and move on with our economic recovery. With consumer purchasing weakening and the threat of huge lawsuits against the banks that caused this mess, the spin is that if we just forget about the whole mess, everyone would be better off.

My message is that the foreclosure mess is the result of compounded fraud, Ponzi schemes and unethical behavior by the Wall Street banks — and that the victims of that fraud deserve restitution just like any other fraud case.

Those victims include almost every part of the economy but the focus is on investors (pension funds providing lifeblood to people on fixed incomes) and homeowners who were coerced, enticed and deceived by the values used at their loan closing certified by appraisers who under threat of coercion (never working again) gave the banks the values as instructed.

Both sides of the transactions — the investors who loaned their money and the homeowners who borrowed money were deceived and economically devastated by the same lies and false documentation created to give the appearance of a proper mortgage-backed bond, a proper mortgage and then a proper foreclosure.

None of it was true. The bets were made against those mortgages because the banks knew the loans were bad and that even if they were not bad, they had unconditional power (through the Master Servicer) to declare that the “pool” was impaired. The fact that the pool was never funded and never received any of the loans escaped the attention of most people.

Neither the investors nor the homeowners ever had a chance. And the “burden” now placed on the banks of coughing up hundreds of billions (trillions) of dollars for their fraudulent behavior is said to endanger our economy. My message is that the economy, the dollar and our standing in the world is far more endangered by letting it be known that if your fraud is big enough you will never be prosecuted. It creates an uncertainty in the marketplace where trust and reliance on such checks and balances as appraisers and rating agencies is used as a principal measure as to whether to get involved in a deal.

If the banks were using the investor (pension) money, why did the banks get the bailout and other  forms of relief totaling more than all the mortgage loans put together, whether “in default” or or completely current in payments? Why didn’t that money go to the investors and the resulting credit inure to the borrowers whose loans were improperly priced by fraudulent and deceptive means?

My message is that the economy will recover far more quickly when people recognize that the government and the judicial system requires that everyone play by the same rules. If you have a case, then prove it. That is why I keep harping on Deny and Discover as the principal strategy for foreclosure and mortgage litigation.

The facts are that most of the loans were bad — defective as to who they named as payee on a loan the borrower never received, and defective as to the principal due based upon fraudulent appraisals. The borrowers received loans from third parties in table funded loans that were not only not disclosed, they were hidden from the borrower and the source of the loan money, the investors (pension funds).

The loans that were funded were undocumented intentionally because the banks wanted a window of time within which they could claim the loans were the asset of the bank instead of the investors. The documentation enabled the banks to pretend to be the lender and therefore reap the benefits of large bets against loans that increasingly were doomed from the start. After they made their money they pitched the loans, contrary to the express terms of the Pooling and Servicing Agreement, over the fence and told the investors that THEY had lost money while the banks had made trillions of dollars.

The reason why foreclosures proceed more slowly through those states requiring a judicial process is that the banks don’t have the goods. Most of the loans were never funded by the party whose name was placed on the note and mortgage. And it is no different but easier to circumvent in the non-judicial states.

The borrowers, completely ignorant of what was done to them at closing and completely ignorant of the trillions paid on the loan liability and received by the banks assume that they owe the amount demanded by the bank — when in fact the overpayment received by the banks as agent for the investors might well be an overpayment that is due back to the borrower after the investor is paid.

The only reason things that gone so far astray is that the bank strategy is working — blame the borrower and admit to some negligence and some paperwork problems. But forgery, robo-signing, powers of attorney, false endorsements, false beneficiaries, false substitutions of trustees and false affidavits are not “paperwork problems.”

False documents would not be necessary if the loans were real secured loans in a real fair and free market. If the investors and borrowers knew what was really being done with the documents and the money, they never would have entered the deal in the first place.

These are crimes that should be prosecuted. THEN the economy will recover when restitution is given to investors and homeowners, the banks assets are written down to true market value (excluding loans they never funded or purchased).

PRACTICE TIP: Attack the lien first without regard to the outstanding obligation to avoid appearing that you are seeking a “free house.”

Don’t limit your Discovery to the Subservicer. You are only getting a small slice of the pie of the information that way. Demand the same discovery from the Master Servicer and the “Trustee” of the “trust.”

Only the Master Servicer has access to information regarding third party payments. And only the Investment Banker (the brokerage that sold the bogus mortgage bonds) can account for the bets they made using insurance and credit default swaps.

And don’t forget to ask the Trustee why the “trust” was not administered through their trust division or trust subsidiary. You might well find that that no trust account was ever created for the trust and that the “trustee” did not administer the affairs of the trust because there was nothing to administer and the trustee’s powers are claimed by Deutsch, Mellon, and U.S. Bank to actually be that of agent rather than trustee with fiduciary responsibility — when it comes time to assess damages against the losing pretender lender.

Upshot of the Foreclosure Backlog

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 104 Comments »

Ghost Equity — the House Next Door

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Neil Garfield

The biggest problem I encounter when speaking with people who are up to date on their payments is why should the others get a break when they are still paying. My answer of course is that they probably shouldn’t be paying because their debt was probably paid long ago through multiple sales of the same loan.

The OTHER major reason is that whether you think the person next to you is being foreclosed and is not deserving any relief, is that while you are standing on principle, the banks are standing on your money. Homes that were unaffected by direct foreclosure lost nearly $2 Trillion in equity as a result of the foreclosure mess and the unwillingness of the banks who created it, to cure it.

So your equity just flew out the window with the guy who is being foreclosed. But it doesn’t stop there. Housing drives the economy as the biggest consumer item offered for sale. The entire economy went into a near greatest of all time depression because the housing sector had, as President Lincoln once remarked (“the bottom has fallen out of the tub”).

So ALL marketplace activities were depressed which caused massive layoffs of up to 800,000 jobs per month as Bush handed the problem off to Obama. This caused an even greater loss in real median income, making it unlikely that your house will ever see the equity that you thought it had — at least not in your lifetime.

Then you have pension funds who have already announced they are under funded because of losses associated with buying the mortgage bonds that are being used as an excuse to foreclose on your neighbor and thus depress the value of your home. 2013 will be the year that pension funds cry for bailout because they don’t have the money to pay current pensioners their share of the pension money that they were promised. People on fixed income of social security plus pension won’t be happy. Are you one of those people?

foreclosures-wipe-out-2-trillion-equity-neighboring-homes

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , | 17 Comments »

Advice to Politicans: Run Against the Banks, not Foreclosures

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Neil Garfield

GOOD CAMPAIGN SLOGANS:

“I will fight to bring the mega-banks under control”
” I will fight for reporting requirements that reveal insolvent banks before they threaten our financial system again.”
” I will fight for audits of reporting to identify exotic financial instruments that are cover-ups for PONZI schemes”
” I will fight to recover the losses that threaten the solvency of our retirement funds.”

I am Neil F Garfield, Esq., author and editor of Livinglies.wordpress.com, now approaching 8 million visits. In South Florida I was a Democratic political strategist and was invited to run for Congress, which I declined. I  would like to brin attention an issue that will help in the polls and the election: housing — without talking about housing. Talking about the banks.

Like most candidates, Candidates staying away from the issue of housing and the relationship of the housing crisis to the economy of the State of Arizona and the nation. The problem is that attacking foreclosure sounds to some voters that you are looking to give a free ride to people who don’t deserve it. It is easier and more effective to attack the banks generally and not the specific subject of foreclosures.

Candidates who have listened to my advice have followed this guidance: run against the banks, not foreclosure. Too many politicians are getting money from the banking lobby and making Wall Street off limits. People are still seething from the bailouts and tricks of “securitization” (which never actually happened) of defective, botched, mortgage closings. I am prepared to bring together hundreds of people in a free seminar at which Carmona is featured as the man who who understands the problem and the man who will fight to correct it. I have a big following.

The facts are that the defaults resulting in actual losses are still less than $2 trillion, but bailouts and purchases are now near $20 trillion (50% more than the principal of ALL mortgages); yet the federal government has failed to act on that because of the fear that if the shadow banking system collapses, it will bring the legitimate banking system with it.

This is not true. There are more than 7,000 community banks and credit unions who can easily pick up the functions of the mega banks thanks to the backbone of electronic funds transfer. All of these institutions are small enough to regulate using existing resources. Leaving insolvent mega-banks alone means that we either increase the regulatory budget geometrically or wait for the next, bigger collapse. 40% of the wealth of  America’s hardworking citizens and retirees was lost, but the question that is not being asked is where did it go?

The shadow system dwarfs the actual monetary system. The shadow system consisting of derivative contracts and insurance amounts to over $800 trillion in private contracts that are treated as cash equivalent. The actual amount of actual, real money issued by fiat by all countries across the globe is less than $80 trillion. Do the Math. But most of the $800 trillion is pure fiction that will not take one penny out of the economy of any nation, state or city, because they are offset by bets in the other direction. Yet the bets are counted cumulatively with the intention of holding a hammer over the heads of government agencies and officials — so their threat appears (shadow) than it really is.

Permitting the shadow banking to stay on the books without adequate reporting and transparency is an invitation to disaster. It is a disaster waiting to happen whenever it suits the banks to go after bailouts again. This is what is allowing the currently insolvent mega banks to show fictitious assets of their balance sheet and leave off $ trillions in liabilities resulting from their diversion of money from innocent investor-lenders and diversion of paperwork from those investors and the borrowers.

Next year, because of the reporting requirements currently allowed, pension benefits are going to get slashed against existing retirees. The “underfunded” status of these retirement funds has already been sent up as trial balloon. The follow up is “no money, no benefits” (or a reduction in benefits). Nobody wants to talk about that until the election is over. Jack Kennedy won the 19060 election because of a perceived missile gap. This is real. There is a gap between the money that should be in the economy and the investors who bought bogus mortgage bonds from REMICS trusts that never had the money or the loans. This gap will result in the inability of these funds to continue payments at current levels or require another federal bailout. Do your fact checking on underfunded retirement funds.

These insolvent banks are going to collapse — a prediction we have made through simple arithmetic, just as I did in 2007 when I predicted the banks that would fail, and the order in which they would fail.  People know it already and will not be surprised by a politician bringing up the fact that our economy is improving despite the downward pressure of sham transactions, sham assets and the non-disclosure of liabilities. A politician who brings the fight to Flake and other Republicans who have voted solidly with the banks, will strike a cord in even the most right wing “Conservative” republican.

Should you wish to receive any further assistance on the economy, housing or Wall Street, I am available by email and my cell phone 954-494-6000. Do a few focus groups, as I have. Include people from all parts of the political spectrum and you will find that one are of universal agreements is that the banks are to blame for our crisis. And government has not failed to properly regulate, they have failed to collect taxes and fees that would go a long way to balancing local, state and federal budgets.

When the American electorate is awake, they are pretty smart. They are awake now and most of them are waiting to hear from someone who wants to deal with the improper reporting from the mega banks who are insolvent but pretending to contribute to the nations GDP and employment. Just try it out — stop people on the street at random. Politicians are missing a golden opportunity to trounce their opponents. The issue is hidden only because everyone is afraid of it and it appears too complex to explain. It can be boiled down to a few simple phrases:

“I will fight to bring the mega-banks under control”
” I will fight for reporting requirements that reveal insolvent banks before they threaten our financial system again.”
” I will fight for audits of reporting to identify exotic financial instruments that are cover-ups for PONZI schemes”
” I will fight to recover the losses that threaten the solvency of our retirement funds.”

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , | 22 Comments »

Barofsky: We Are Headed for a Cliff Because of Housing

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Neil Garfield

Editor’s Note: Hera research conducted an interview with Neil Barofsky that I think should be  read in its entirety but here the the parts that I thought were important. The After Words are from Hera.

After Words

According to Neil Barofsky, another financial crisis is all but inevitable and the cost will be even higher than the 2008 financial crisis. Based on the way that the TARP and HAMP programs were implemented, and on the watering down of the Dodd-Frank bill, it appears that big banks are calling the shots in Washington D.C. The Dodd-Frank bill left risk concentrated in a few large institutions while doing nothing to remove perverse incentives that encourage risk taking while shielding bank executives from accountability. Neither of the two main U.S. political parties or presidential candidates are willing to break up “too big to fail” banks, despite the gravity of the problem. The assumption that another financial crisis can be prevented when the causes of the 2008 crisis remain in place, or have become worse, is unrealistic. In the mean time, what Mr. Barofsky describes as a “parade of scandals” involving highly unethical and likely criminal behavior is set to continue unabated. Although the timing and specific areas of risk are not yet known, there is no doubt that U.S. taxpayers will be stuck with another multi-trillion dollar bill when the next crisis hits.

*Post courtesy of Hera Research. Hera Research focuses on value investing in natural resources based on original geopolitical, macroeconomic and financial market analysis related to global supply and demand and competition for natural resources

Excerpts from Interview:

HR: Did the TARP help to restore confidence in U.S. institutions and financial markets?

Neil Barofsky: Yes, but it was intended and required by Congress to do much more than that and Treasury said that it was going to deploy the money into banks to increase lending, which it never did.

HR: Were the initial goals of the TARP realistic?

Neil Barofsky: First, if the goals were unachievable, Treasury officials should never have promised to undertake them as part of the bargain. Second, even if the goals were not entirely achievable, it would have been worth trying. Treasury officials didn’t even try to meet the goals.

HR: Can you give a specific example?

Neil Barofsky: The justification for putting money into banks was that it was going to increase lending. Having used that justification, there was an obligation, in my view, to take policy steps to achieve that goal, but Treasury officials didn’t even try to do it. The way it was implemented, there were no conditions or incentives to increase lending.

HR: What policy steps could the U.S. Department of the Treasury have taken to help the economy?

Neil Barofsky: There are all sorts of things that Treasury could have done. For example, they could have reduced the dividend rate—the amount of money that the banks had to pay in exchange for being bailed out—for lending over a baseline, which would have decreased the bank’s obligations. Or, they could have insisted on greater transparency so that banks had to disclose what they were doing with the funds. Treasury chose not to do any of these things.

HR: Weren’t there other housing programs like the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP)?

Neil Barofsky: Yes, but there were choices made to help the balance sheets of struggling banks rather than homeowners. The HAMP program was a massive failure but it wasn’t preordained. It was the result of choices made by Treasury officials.

HR: What could have been done differently in the HAMP?

Neil Barofsky: HAMP was deeply flawed with conflicts of interest baked into the program. The management of the program was outsourced to the mortgage servicers, which were thoroughly unprepared and ill equipped. The program encouraged servicers to extend out trial modifications. It was supposed to be a three month period but it often turned into more than a year. The servicers, because they could accumulate late fees for each month during the trial period, were incentivized to string the trial periods out then pull the rug out from under the homeowner, putting them into foreclosure, without granting a permanent mortgage modification. The servicers could make more money doing that then by doing mortgage modifications. If they had done permanent mortgage modifications, the banks couldn’t have kept the late fees.

HR: Are you saying that the program encouraged banks to extract as much cash as possible from homeowners before foreclosing on them anyway?

Neil Barofsky: Yes. The mortgage servicers exploited the conflicts of interest that were in the program, and blatantly broke the rules, and Treasury did nothing.

HR: When you were serving as Inspector General for TARP, you issued a report indicating that government commitments totaled $23.7 trillion. What was that about?

Neil Barofsky: $23.7 trillion was simply the sum of the maximum commitments for all the financial programs related to the financial crisis. The number was misconstrued as a liability but the government never stood to lose that much. For example, the government guarantee of money market funds was a multi-trillion dollar commitment. Of course, not all of that money could have been lost because it would have required every fund to go to zero. The government guaranteed commercial paper but, again, for that commitment to have been wiped out, every company would have had to have defaulted. But the numbers were very important in terms of transparency. All of the data were provided by the agencies responsible for the various programs, so the $23.7 trillion number was simple arithmetic. It was important to understand the scope of the extraordinary actions that were being taken.

HR: What are the potential future losses that the U.S. government—that taxpayers—might have to absorb?

Neil Barofsky: The real issue is the potential for another financial crisis because we haven’t fixed the core problems of our financial system. We still have banks that are “too big to fail.” Standard & Poor’s estimated last year that the up-front cost of another crisis, including bailing out the biggest banks yet again, would be roughly 1/3 of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) or about $5 trillion. The resulting problems will be even bigger.

HR: What were the problems resulting from the 2008 financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: When you look at the fiscal impact of the 2008 crisis, you have to look at it not only in terms of lost tax revenues and increased government debt, but also in terms of the loss of household wealth. People who became unemployed suffered tremendous losses and the government’s social benefit costs expanded accordingly. One of the reasons we had the debt ceiling debate last year, when the U.S. credit rating was downgraded, and why we are facing a fiscal cliff ahead is the legacy of the 2008 crisis.

We have a lot less dry powder to deal with a new crisis and we almost certainly will have one.

HR: Why do you expect another financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: It just comes down to incentives. A normally functioning free market disciplines businesses. The presumption of bailout for “too big to fail” institutions changes the incentives of a normally functioning free market. In a free market, if an institution loads up on risky assets with too little capital standing behind them, it will be punished by the market. Institutions will refuse to lend them money without extracting a significant penalty. Counterparties will be wary of doing business with companies that have too much risk and too little capital. Allowing “too big to fail” institutions to exist removes that discipline. The presumption is that the government will stand in and make the obligations whole even if the bank blows up. That basic perversion of the free market incentivizes additional risk.

HR: Are “too big to fail” banks taking more risks today than they did before?

Neil Barofsky: Bailouts give bank executives an incentive to max out short term profits and get huge bonuses, because if the bank blows up, taxpayers will pick up the tab. The presumption of bailout increases systemic risk by taking away the incentives of creditors and counterparties to do their jobs by imposing market discipline and by incentivizing banks to act in ways that make a bailout more likely to occur.

HR: Is it just a matter of the size of banking institutions?

Neil Barofsky: The big banks are 20-25% bigger now than they were before the crisis. The “too big to fail” banks are also too big to manage effectively. They’ve become Frankenstein monsters. Even the most gifted executives can’t manage all of the risks, which increases the likelihood of a future bailout.

HR: Since bank executives are accountable to their shareholders, won’t they regulate themselves?

Neil Barofsky: The big banks are not just “too big to fail,” they’re ‘too big to jail.’ We’ve seen zero criminal cases arising out of the financial crisis. The reality is that these large institutions can’t be threatened with indictment because if they were taken down by criminal charges, they would bring the entire financial system down with them. There is a similar danger with respect to their top executives, so they won’t be indited in a federal criminal case almost no matter what they do. The presumption of bailout thus removes for the executives the disincentive in pushing the ethical envelope. If people know they won’t be held accountable, that too will encourage more risk taking in the drive towards profits.

HR: So, it’s just a matter of time before there’s another crisis?

Neil Barofsky: Yes. The same incentives that led to the 2008 crisis are still in place today and in many ways the situation is worse. We have a financial system that concentrates risk in just a handful of large institutions, incentivizes them to take risks, guarantees that they will never be allowed to fail and ensures that the executives will never be held accountable for their actions. We shouldn’t be surprised when there’s another massive financial crisis and another massive bailout. It would be naïve to expect a different result.

HR: Didn’t the Dodd-Frank bill fix the financial system?

Neil Barofsky: Nothing has been done to remove the presumption of bailout, which is as damaging as the actual bailout. Perception becomes reality. It’s perception that ensures that counterparties and creditors will not perform proper due diligence and it’s perception that encourages them to continue doing business with firms that have too much risk and inadequate capital. It’s perception of bailout that drives executives to take more and more risk. Nothing has been done to address this. The initial policy response by Treasury Secretaries Paulson and Geithner, and by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, was to consolidate the industry further, which has only made the problems worse.

HR: The Dodd-Frank bill contains 2,300 pages of new regulations. Isn’t that enough?

Neil Barofsky: There are tools within Dodd-Frank that could help regulators, but we need to go beyond it. The parade of recent scandals and the fact that big banks are pushing the ethical and judicial envelopes further than ever before makes it clear that Dodd-Frank has done nothing, from a regulatory standpoint, to prevent highly unethical and likely criminal behavior.

HR: Is the Dodd-Frank bill a failure?

Neil Barofsky: The whole point of Dodd-Frank was to end the era of “too big to fail” banks. It’s fairly obvious that it hasn’t done that. In that sense, it has been a failure. Dodd-Frank probably has been helpful in the short term because it increased capital ratios, although not nearly enough. If we ever get over the counter (OTC) derivatives under control, that would be a good thing and Dodd-Frank takes some initial steps in that direction. I think that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a good thing.

Nonetheless, the financial system is largely in the hands of the same executives, who have become more powerful, while the banks themselves are bigger and more dangerous to the economy than before.

HR: How are OTC derivatives related to the risk of a new financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: Credit default swaps (CDS) were specifically what brought down AIG, and synthetic CDOs, which are entirely dependent on derivatives contracts, contributed significantly to the financial crisis. When you look at the mind numbing notional values of OTC derivatives, which are in the hundreds of trillions, the taxpayer is basically standing behind the institutions participating in these very opaque and, potentially, very dangerous markets. OTC derivatives could be where the risks come from in the next financial crisis.

HR: Can anything be done to prevent another financial crisis?

Neil Barofsky: We have to get beyond having institutions, any one of which can bring down the financial system. For example, Wells Fargo alone does 1/3rd of all mortgage originations. Nothing can ever happen to Wells Fargo because it could bring down the entire economy. We need to break up the “too big to fail” banks. We have to make them small enough to fail so that the free market can take over again.

HR: Does the political will exist to break up the largest banks?

Neil Barofsky: The center of neither party is committed to breaking up “too big to fail” banks. Of course, pretending that Dodd-Frank solved all our problems, as some Democrats do, or simply saying that big banks won’t be bailed out again, as some Republicans have suggested, is unrealistic. Congress needs to proactively break up the “too big to fail” banks through legislation. Whether that’s through a modified form of Glass-Steagall, size or liability caps, leverage caps or remarkably higher capital ratios, all of which are good ideas, we need to take on the largest banks.

HR: Do you think the U.S. presidential election will change anything?

Neil Barofsky: No. There’s very little daylight between Romney and Obama on the crucial issue of “too big to fail” banks. Romney recently said, basically, that he thinks big banks are great and the Obama Administration fought against efforts to break up “too big to fail” banks in the Dodd-Frank bill. Geithner, serving the Obama White House, lobbied against the Brown-Kaufman Act, which would have broken up the “too big to fail” banks.

HR: What will it take for U.S. lawmakers to finally take on the largest banks?

Neil Barofsky: Some candidates have made reforms like reinstating Glass-Steagall part of their campaigns but the size and power of the largest banks in terms of lobbying campaign contributions is incredible. It may well take another financial crisis before we deal with this.

HR: Thank you for your time today.

Neil Barofsky: It was my pleasure.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Politics Diverting Us From the Real Issues

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Neil Garfield

“The bottom line is that conservatives don’t conserve anything. They have their hand deeper into the public purse than anyone else. Liberals don’t liberate anyone either, providing the tools to prospects for progress and prosperity. The terms should not be used because nobody means what they say.” Neil F Garfield livinglies.me

Editor’s Comment: Romney’s latest gaffe is only a mistake in terms of him having said it, not that that he didn’t mean it. To set the record straight the 47% pay payroll taxes that the rich don’t pay, have incomes under $50,000 per year, and one third of them are seniors and disabled with incomes lower than $20,000 per year getting Social Security and similar benefits that they paid for when they were working. But isn’t really the problem.

The problem is that what Romney gave voice to was a feeling amongst the elite Democrats and Republicans who look at the bottom economic half of the country with disdain. Although they are working, paying Social Security and Unemployment taxes most of these people are treated as though they are trash to be taken out and cleaned somehow. Those taxes amount to over 12% of their income whereas the income from wealth, escape those taxes altogether.

And THAT is the reason it is so easy for banks to manipulate politicians, law enforcement and regulators into doing nothing about the cancer growing on our society — fake mortgages, fake foreclosures, fake evictions, and fake income and assets reported for the banks. Some of the media are picking up on the fact that the stolen money from investors is not being recognized as taxable income, which it is, and that the IRS isn’t pursuing hundreds of billions of income taxes that are due from the Banks. Talk about getting a free ride.

Today’s conference call (7 PM EDT) with members will touch on this along with the usual report on what is getting traction and what tactics and strategies might be used to confront the banks who are faking ownership of the loans when they neither loaned the money nor purchased the loan with money.

My take on the political landscape is this: I speak with people from the so-called far right political spectrum to the far left political spectrum. I speak to members of fringe groups too.

The overwhelming consensus amongst all of them from one end to the other is that government is corrupt, banks are corrupt and that our society is in the wrong hands mostly without candidates who will speak to these issues. We need a new crop of politicians who are no so encumbered with loyalties to the bank oligopoly because at some time, the ticking time bomb is going to blow. I speak of economic meltdown, caused by fabricated transactions and assets that our counted as part of our national wealth and GDP.

If you ask people specific questions about what is fair, just, moral, ethical and legal nearly all of them respond with the same answers. So why are we a divided nation? Why to we listen to sound bites instead of forcing the candidates to speak to us about our issues, about our stress and anxiety — whether we will have a roof over our heads, whether we will have food on the table, whether our children will be educated well enough so that they can fill the jobs that are ready to be filled. Right now there are 3 million such jobs.

You would think that someone would want to do something about it. Obama tried to put through a bill to do something about that but he didn’t push hard enough. Republicans scoffed at it because of their allegiance to the super rich whose boatloads of money are floating nearly all the republicans and many of the democrats in local, state and Federal elections.

But we can’t blame one or even a group of politicians if we, the Boss, as the voters who control who governs us, don’t do our job and get educated about issues, educated about candidates and exercise our absolute right to vote in the elections.

The current crop of incumbents doesn’t worry about our reaction because we don’t have any reaction tot heir stupid policies, bills and laws. We are a nation of apathy where vote turnout has been going lower and lower. The reason is the same as the unemployment situation. The figures would be worse if we added those back who simply gave up. Don’t give up your vote. Use it and mean it!

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments »

Even the Chinese Know It

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Neil Garfield

Featured Products and Services by The Garfield Firm

LivingLies Membership – Get Discounts and Free Access to Experts
For Customer Service call 1-520-405-1688

Editor’s Comment:

AUSTERITY MEANS “PROTECT THE BANKS AND SCREW THE PEOPLE”

The Financial Times ran an article 2 days ago about the Chinese being encouraged to spend more aand save less. I’m no fan of China’s political system, or even its economic policies (which come to think of it are the same thing, as Von Mises points out). As we look around the world and see Iceland prospering, China’s growth slowing to a mere 8% while our REAL GDP is still negative or by the reckoning of most economists, headed into downward territory. These propering countries who have concentrated on stmulating the rate of commerce (i.e. the economy) are the countries that are reducing debt (Iceland is now at the point where more than 25% of household debt has been eliminated not with spending fiscal stimullus money but with pressure on the idiots that got us into this messs- the banks.

Then look at the countries who are effectively governed by the banks, directly or indirectly— like US and Europe. They stand in stark contrast to Iceland and China. We are headed into what is called a “double dip” recession as though we would have hands up with ice cream cones in them, but the truth is that these recessions is literally taking food, medicine, and clothes off the table while they send their children into schools that are no longer able to teach and are located in neighborhoods that are less safe from criminal activity and the occoasional warehouse fire all because of “austerity.” Such neighborhoods are also less familiar and less appealing than the ones they got thrown out of after being tricked into using a home in which generations of their family grew up as the source of cheap capial encouraging, cajoling and pushing them with literally midnight visits to get them to sign on the dotted line to purchase a defective, fraudulent loan products whose purpose was to fail.

As we look at those countries who have adpted the politics and economics of austerity (“less spending” or “spending cuts” as it is known in the U.S.) the consequences could not be more clear — austerity, spending cuts, less spending, get the government out of the way are all slogans  that are leading us into disaster. And they are all spoken by people who are owned and controlled by the banks. And at the risk of offending my readers with political statements, Obama was exactly right when he said that the purpose of government was not to turn a business profit like Romney said he did (my sources tell me that Mitt was a figurehead running for president and they were making him look good, not that he was actually of any value). Obama correctly points out that government’s purpose is to maintain a society in which everyone gets a fair shake and a fair shot at the brass ring. Thus government is not for the rich who already got wealthy but for those who have not yet  achieved wealth. And this is because history teaches that no society has ever endured without a strong middle class.

This country needs to revive its economy by having more people spend more money. The obstacles to that are that too many people have no money, no  credit and no jobs. This is the time to divert the corporate welfare of farm subsididies and oil subsidies and the like to those programs that will give all our citizens a fair shake and a fair shot at success.

Like Iceland, the way to increasing the value of our currency, the way to prosperity is to reduce household debt. And the biggest item here that not only decreases household debt but increases household wealth is to return the homes that were wrongfully foreclosed and not to give a pittance of money to the victims with a slap on the wrist to those who stole the home with a credit bid when they were not only not the creditor, but they had never invested a dime in purchasing the loan. That used to be illegal. Wait a minute, it still is illegal. So why are we allowing the banks to continue this charade and why does the government, including Obama’s administration, drag its feet in taking apart these monsters that destroyed our economy? Why is the administration assume that the 7,000 OTHER banks and credit union wolld not prosper and enter into tacit agreements to keep the government afloat while we wait for the stimulus to take effect?

There is no expert or pundit that says we are wrong. All the banks have been able to do is to roll out doomsday sayers who say that if we follow the law we will be headed for disaster. Well take a look.  Disaster is here. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average is not a proper indicator or substitutute for people who can’t put food on a table that is now located in a dwelling that the rest of us would not even consider — their car.

We choose instead to protect the banks at all costs and we call that austerity because where else is the money going to come from except the banks who siphoned it out illegally? That is our policy, our politics and our economics. And while our soldiers risk life and limb because their country called them to duty, their families were being foreclosed, some at the precise moment they were taking a shot in the leg or heart for us. Is this the society we sent them to fight for?


Filed under: foreclosure | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 19 Comments »

Consumer Gloom: Could it be Housing?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

“That has led a growing number of economists to argue that the collapse of housing prices, a defining feature of this downturn, is also a critical and underappreciated impediment to recovery. Americans have lost a vast amount of wealth, and they have lost faith in housing as an investment. They lack money, and they lack the confidence that they will have more money tomorrow.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wonder if it could be housing. Is it possible the consumers have lost faith in the system and their prospects, having lost all their wealth and being mired in debt in an economy dragged down by the collapse of the financial system (except for a few companies)? It’s a difficult question — but only if you have had your eyes and ears closed and blocked to hearing the cries of the people of our once great nation. Bank of America, once great for being the largest bank, is now number two and probably on its way to dying off altogether. Why so gloomy?

For four years I have been writing about the depression — economic and psychological and how they relate — caused by the the crisis caused by Banks stealing the wealth out of the belly of the nation. In a scheme to issue securities to unwary investors, they involuntarily enlisted homeowners to sign and accept financial products that were doomed from the start. This isn’t like driving a new car off the lot and losing value because now it is a used car. This is like driving off a cliff.

HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED: The banks sold investors on the idea of buying “mortgage bonds.” But there actually were few real bonds. The Banks sold them and the world on the idea of pooling mortgage assets into trusts. There were no trusts. And the pools never had anything in them. AFTER they had the money, the Banks organized aggregators who supposedly were collecting mortgages, loans, notes and obligation from originators that were created or enlisted by the aggregators offering higher compensation than anything the world has ever seen.

Then the Banks ordered the aggregators to arrange the loans” which were not owned, into pools that did not exist. The Banks arranged for the aggregators to sell the pools to the Banks and then the Banks sold them to the special purpose vehicles into which the investors had invested their money.The Banks made a “proprietary trading profit” by diverting money that should have been used to fund mortgages into their own pockets. On average the Banks skimmed between 15% and 25% of the money given to them by investors. The rest was a cover-up of forged, fabricated, robo-signed, surrogate signed, fraudulent documents.

The investors were expecting 5% return but the loans were for rates as high as 18%, which meant that the dollar income from the loans exceeded the dollar return expected by the investors (on paper, because the loans did not conform to industry standard underwriting standards). So the amount funded as loans was far less than the amount that the investors advanced. The difference between the amount advanced by investors and the amount loaned out was called a proprietary trading profit for the Bank, which has now vanished because nobody except the Banks wants this system anymore. That’s why Goldman Sachs no longer reports high “proprietary” trading profits. It isn’t regulation that is depressing Bank earnings it is the fact that the market won’t tolerate theft anymore.

There was no profit. They merely didn’t loan out the amount that investors gave them to fund mortgages. They kept the rest and called it profit. Under the Truth in Lending Act, this would be an undisclosed yield spread premium — that puts the Bank squarely in the sites of investors who didn’t get what was promised and borrowers who didn’t get the disclosure that was required. What investor and what borrower would have signed onto a deal where the intermediaries were making in fees as much as the loan itself? These Banks are doomed and so are their shareholders and management who thought they could away with calling theft of investor money by another name — “proprietary trading profits.”

The effect on investors was devastating while the effect on banks was bountiful with bonuses, supercharged earnings, and the esteem of the world as they posted ever higher values on their balance sheets and income statements. The effect on borrowers was also devastating as they had been steered into loans that were guaranteed to fail, and that MUST fail, in order for the Banks to cover up the theft from investors. The money received from insurance and bailouts and such was taken by the Banks who never had any loss in the first instance because it was investor money that was used to fund the loans.

The ultimate result is that everyone who had anything invested in real property was demolished by the scheme of the banks. The scheme was covered up as a lending program but in fact it was a scam to cover up the theft from investors and the theft of money that was received to cover the investors’ advance. So the borrowers are portrayed as owing money on obligations that have been paid several times over and they not only have no money to pay it, they also have no prospects of getting out from under this mess. The mess includes millions of vacant homes and of course millions of homeless people. The effect also includes millions of closed businesses whose customers have no money to buy anything.

HERE IS WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT: Apply existing standards of generally accepted accounting principles to the Banks and have them cough up the truth, disgorge the illicit profit, apply them to the investor accounts, and thus reduce the obligations, pro rata of borrowers for the money that was paid to cover the losses. Then we will have a basis for settling all the foreclosures, and the wealth of the pensioners and homeowners alike will be restored.

Investors and borrowers will be smarter and less gloomy if they know that their government demanded the truth and acted on it. Their rage will increase exponentially if their government insists on going to the Banks for projections and status reports. Politicians beware! The people now understand what was done to them, their neighbors and their nation — and they are not just gloomy, they are angry.

Gloom Grips Consumers, and It May Be Home Prices

By

ORLANDO, Fla. — Ernest Markey lost his stone-cutting business in 2009. He then sold his home for half a million dollars less than its value at the peak of the housing bubble and moved with his wife, Marie, to a smaller home in a less affluent suburb. They gave up two new cars and bought one. Used.

The Markeys have since patched together a semblance of their old life, opening a new stone-cutting shop. But they do not expect that they will ever recover financially from the loss of equity in their old home.

“For two years I kept thinking that things would get better,” Mr. Markey, 51, said as he stood in his empty store on a recent weekday. “Now I think the future doesn’t look so good.”

The United States has a confidence problem: a nation long defined by irrational exuberance has turned gloomy about tomorrow. Consumers are holding back, businesses are suffering and the economy is barely growing.

There are good reasons for gloom — incomes have declined, many people cannot find jobs, few trust the government to make things better — but as Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, noted earlier this year, those problems are not sufficient to explain the depth of the funk.

That has led a growing number of economists to argue that the collapse of housing prices, a defining feature of this downturn, is also a critical and underappreciated impediment to recovery. Americans have lost a vast amount of wealth, and they have lost faith in housing as an investment. They lack money, and they lack the confidence that they will have more money tomorrow.

Many say they believe that the bust has permanently changed their financial trajectory.

“People don’t expect their home to regain value, and that’s really led to a change in consumer attitudes about the economy that we’ve just never seen before,” said Richard Curtin, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan who directs its Survey of Consumers. The latest data from the survey, released Friday by Thomson Reuters, shows that expectations for economic growth have fallen to the lowest level since May 1980.

In Orlando, a city that trades in upbeat fantasies, the housing crash has been particularly painful. The total value of area homes has fallen below the total mortgage debt on those homes, according to the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic. In the parlance of the real estate world, Orlando is underwater, a distinction matched by Las Vegas.

“I don’t know that it’s going to get better. We just have to get used to it,” said Sherry DeWeese, whose home in Ocoee, a northwestern suburb of Orlando, is worth less than she paid for it 13 years ago — and about a third of its value at the peak of the market. “It was nothing to buy whatever we wanted. Now we just think about what we really need.”

Economists have only recently devoted serious study to how a decline in housing prices affects consumer spending, not least because this is the first decline in the average price of an American home since the Great Depression. A 2007 review of existing research by the Congressional Budget Office reported that people reduce spending by $20 to $70 a year for every $1,000 decline in the value of their home.

This “wealth effect” is significantly larger for changes in home equity than in the value of other investments, such as stocks, apparently because people regard changes in housing prices as more likely to endure.

A recent paper by Karl E. Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College, and two co-authors estimated the decline in home prices from 2005 to 2009 caused consumer spending to be $240 billion lower in 2010 than it otherwise would have been. That figure is equal to about 1.7 percent of annual economic activity, enough to be the difference between the mediocre recent growth and healthy growth. And it does not include all the other effects of the housing crash, including the low level of new home construction, that are also weighing on the economy.

Roy Pugsley, who owns a pool supply store in Winter Garden, another suburb here, said that he made 2,500 fewer sales during the first eight months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2007. That translates to one less person walking through the doors to buy chemicals or toys or spare parts in each hour that the store is open.

Mr. Pugsley said business actually increased in the early days of the recession; customers had told him they were spending more time at home. But now people buy only what they need for maintenance. “People realized that it wasn’t going to get any better, and they stopped spending on their pools, too,” he said.

At Milcarsky’s Appliance Center in the adjacent town of Longwood, business now comes from people remodeling their own homes rather than builders, and customers are picking cheaper models, said Doug Morey, a sales manager.

“People who might have bought that” — he taps a stove with chunky burners, designed to look like it belongs in a restaurant kitchen — “are double-thinking it. Everyone has had to cut back.”

That means Milcarsky’s has cut back too. The company, which employed 26 people three years ago, now has about a dozen workers, and they are making less in salary and commissions.

“I might like to think that I’m middle class, but I’m not. I’m not anymore,” said Rae-Anne Crotty, a customer service manager at the store. She now shops for groceries at discount stores, she said, and buys gifts for her children at Christmas but not on their birthdays.

It remains the prevailing view of economic policy makers that economic activity will eventually return to the same trajectory as before the recession. Mr. Bernanke and others have said that they see no evidence of any permanent change in the economy. Previous bouts of economic pessimism, as in the early 1980s and early 1990s, went away once growth picked up.

But many people in the Orlando area do not share this confidence, at least not when it comes to their own prospects. Instead, like the Markeys, they are settling into lives of less prosperity.

The couple moved to Orlando 12 years ago from central Massachusetts in search of opportunities. The business Mr. Markey created, Stone Giant, grew to include two factories and 60 employees, and it installed granite countertops in up to 15 new kitchens every day.

His new company, Winter Park Granite, now installs two kitchens on the average day. He has eight employees but cannot afford health insurance for them or himself. The family income last year was less than a third of the $175,000 that he and his wife made in 2007, their last good year.

And he sees little room for growth. He has stopped spending money on advertising.

“We’re never going to get that big again,” he said. “I was someone employing people and taking people to the good life. Now I’m just trying to survive.”

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

NY TIMES: LOUSY JOBS, NO JOBS, NO GOOD PROSPECTS

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Times Editorial hits the nail on the head, but uses the wrong hammer. Jobs and growth of the middle class is the only thing that will stand between us sustaining ourselves as a world power or becoming a banana republic. Jobs and growth are not magical concepts that suddenly happen when you waive a wand.

Jobs are created when businesses start and grow. Businesses start and grow with capital. Wall Street, directly or indirectly is holding $3.5 TRILLION hostage in its effort to force Obama from office while it starves the economy and literally takes food of the plates of tens of millions of Americans. The capital held by Wall Street is NOT the capital of Wall Street, it is the money stolen from other people that Wall Street is holding.

That money was stolen in the world’s largest financial fraud of all time — something that will remain unequaled for decades, perhaps hundreds of  years. They did it with the sale of exotic instruments to investors, betting against those investments because they knew they had the power to torpedo the investments, and the tools of destruction were exotic mortgages where even the simplest looking transaction was based upon fraudulent appraisals, non-disclosure of important information required by law, and in particular using conduits as though they were lenders, thus achieving insulation from charges of predatory and fraudulent lending practices. In fact the entire mortgage mess was really just part of the larger scheme of the issuance of unregulated securities in fraudulent schemes to deprive investors, pension funds and homeowners of what little they had left to survive.

As with all crimes against society the only way to cover them up is with more fraud. More deception and more intimidation. So the paperwork is mostly fabricated, forged and unduly notarized documents pretending to attest to the authority and knowledge of signors. But the paperwork is a distraction from the fact that the the “mortgage” transactions were really part of the securities issuance. This actually makes the signing of the mortgage documents an integral part of the issuance of the mortgage bonds. That changes the character of the transaction and probably the laws that apply.

Applying existing laws without any changes to substantive law, procedure or the rules of evidence, the banks will lose, pure and simple. Every time a Judge takes a close look at some piece of paper that is

  • signed by “John Jones, as authorized signor (it doesn’t even say agent) [without any document showing agency authority],
  • on behalf of XYZ corporation, as attorney in fact (same defect),
  • as successor to ABC, as servicer (under a PSA in which the loan transfer requirements were never satisfied and therefore never completed),
  • for the DEF Trust (a non-existent trust that is actually a general partnership),
  • on behalf of JKL Corp. Trustee (a trustee of a Trust that never existed because it lacked the elements under New York State law to create a common law trust, and in which the powers of the trustee actually amount to nothing once you read the whole document purporting to describe the “trustee”)”
  • all out of the chain of title using some private system of keeping track of the owners thus depriving anyone of the knowledge as to who can sign a satisfaction of a mortgage that was obviously never perfected into a valid lien, even though ti was recorded —
  • every time the Judge really looks —- he/she decides this smells to high heaven and that the entire process is defective.
  • There is no lending institution in existence that would accept such a signature from an agent for a borrower.
  • That they accept it from each other as they treat the loan was though it was transferred even though it wasn’t is just a game without risk because nobody is paying anything for the loan and nobody funded the loan except the hapless pension fund whose money was taken for fees first and mortgage later.

Housing drives the economy directly and indirectly. So if we want to see a change we must bring the banks and big business to task, force them to act like good citizens and return the favor of special tax treatment and subsidies with growth money, start-up money and easier credit for consumers, who drive 70% of the economy. Ignore housing and you abandon hope of a solution. Ignore consumers and their jobs and earnings, and you have disrupted 70% of the economy with no prospects for improvement.

Somehow the banks continue to be heard on their spin that it is better to let them keep the proceeds from stealing the purse than to give it back to the consumers from whom they stole it. That is ending now with Occupy Wall Street. The OWLS are wise beyond their years.

More Bleak Job Numbers

It would take a lot of optimism to put a positive spin on the jobs report for September, released on Friday by the Labor Department.

Employers added 103,000 jobs last month, allaying fears, for now, of a double-dip recession. But even if the economy avoids another contraction, the numbers confirm that the job market is in a deep rut that is, for all purposes, indistinguishable from recession. There are still 14 million people officially unemployed, and nearly 12 million more who have given up actively looking for work or who are working part time but need full-time jobs.

Earlier this week, President Obama and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, delivered bleak economic assessments, which demand a government response. The economy, already at a crawl, could well slow down further in response to economic setbacks in Europe and China or to homegrown problems like political gridlock that delay spending on job-creation efforts.

The economy is not producing enough jobs, and many of the ones created are lousy. Much of last month’s job growth came as 45,000 striking Verizon employees returned to work. Without that one-time boost, the economy added only 58,000 new positions in September, roughly in line with the slow pace of job creation over the past several months.

That is not nearly enough to lower the unemployment rate, which is at 9.1 percent and is almost certain to rise in the months ahead, barring an unexpected upsurge in economic activity.

The new jobs are generally in lower-paying fields, like home health care, and in part-time and temporary employment. These kinds of employment may be better than no work, but they are generally not the types of jobs that allow workers to get ahead.

The September report also shows the permanent scars caused by persistent joblessness. The share of workers who have been unemployed for more than six months increased from 42.9 percent to 44.6 percent, near its record high from early last year. That is likely to translate into irreversible reductions in the standard of living for millions of Americans because the longer one is unemployed, the harder it becomes to find new work, especially at previous pay levels.

Children will be among those most harmed by the jobs crisis. The Economic Policy Institute, using data from the September report, has calculated that 278,000 teachers and other public school employees have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Over the same period, 48,000 new teaching jobs were needed to keep up with the increased enrollments but were never created. In all, public schools are now short 326,000 jobs.

At a time when more and better education is seen as crucial to economic dynamism and competitiveness, larger class sizes and fewer teachers are the last thing the nation needs. Staffing reductions also mean that schools are less able to respond to the needs of poor children, whose ranks have increased by 2.3 million from 2008 to 2010.

The situation calls out for swift passage of Mr. Obama’s jobs bill and even more far-reaching efforts to revive growth and employment. The alternative is lasting damage from a jobs crisis that has already done enormous harm to families and communities.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS NEGOTIATING (SELL-OUT!) WITH BANKS AND TAKING POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

SELL-OUT!

EDITOR’S COMMENT: WHAT ARE THEY NEGOTIATING ABOUT AND WITH WHOM ARE THEY NEGOTIATING? This is theater in the most absurd. Our government is negotiating with the very people who have demonstrated that they must fabricate and forge documents in order to establish their authority to do anything. Even in hostage negotiations we don’t give as much as we are giving to the servicers. They have no authority.

By definition they don’t own the obligation which means the obligation of the borrower is not owed to them. They are not the authorized agent of the real owner of the obligation until the real owner is identified and says they give authority to the agent to negotiate on their behalf.

Those documents don’t exist because those facts don’t exist. The investors are not going to give the servicers anything. If they were going to do that it would have happened en masse and avoided lots of paperwork problems for the banks. If it were not for political contributions, thousands of people would be headed for jail cells.

Instead we are negotiating away the future of America — for what? All homeowners are affected by these negotiations because when the so called honest Joe Homeowner goes to sell his home he is going to be hopping mad that not only can’t he deliver marketable title, he now has nobody to sue because the government sold him out. AND he still can’t sell his house because there is no way to clear up title.

These negotiations are a farce because down the road, they will be meaningless except that they will have added time to the already corrupted title registries across the country.

Mortgage servicers spend millions on political contributions

Banks under scrutiny as housing crisis festers

Posted Aug 8, 2011, 2:55 pm

Michael Hudson & Aaron Mehta Center for Public Integrity

As the financial markets roil, one of the critical factors weighing down the U.S. economy is the flood of home foreclosures. Thursday’s crash underscores how difficult it will be for the economy to make significant strides while the housing market is still in tatters.

The pace of the housing market recovery may depend in part on the outcome of intense negotiations underway among state and federal authorities and the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers.

Government officials are negotiating with the firms — Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Wells Fargo & Co. and Ally Financial Inc. — over allegations of widespread abuses in the foreclosure process. State attorneys general around the country have been investigating evidence that the big banks used falsified documentation to process foreclosures.

Four of the five companies under scrutiny—Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and Citigroup — are major donors for state and federal political campaigns. Between them, they have donated at least $8 million since the start of 2009 to candidates, party committees and other political action committees, according to an iWatch News analysis of campaign finance data.

(Ally Financial hasn’t given money during that period to campaigns under its current name or is previous name, General Motors Acceptance Corp., or GMAC).

The fate of foreclosure negotiations could go a long way toward determining where the housing market will go in the next few years.

Normally, the housing market plays a leading role in any economic recovery. But that hasn’t been the case in the aftermath of the U.S. financial crisis of 2008.

“It’s has been a negative factor in this recovery — or lack of recovery,” housing economist and consultant Michael Carliner said.

Generally, when interest rates go down, that spurs the mortgage and housing markets and helps move the economy in the right direction. But that hasn’t happened this time around, said Carliner, a former economist for the National Association of Home Builders. “We have lowest mortgage rates since the early 1950s and it’s not doing anything,” he said.

Interest rates on 30-year fixed rate mortgages averaged 4.39 percent for the week ending Aug. 4, according to a survey by mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

What’s holding back the housing market, Carliner said, is a glut of available homes for sale, due in part to overbuilding during the housing boom and to continuing foreclosure woes. An “excess inventory” of perhaps 2 million homes is making it hard for the housing market to get going again, he said.

The inventory of foreclosures continues to grow. In June, one out of every 583 housing units in the United States received a foreclosure notice, according to data provider Realty Trac. The numbers are even worse in the hardest hit markets, where housing prices climbed the fastest during the housing boom and fell the most when the housing crash came. In Nevada, one out of every 114 housing units was the subject of a foreclosure filing in June.

Investigations and negotiations over allegations of fraudulent foreclosure practices by big banks have helped slow down the foreclosure process, making it harder for the market to work through defaults and readjust, Carliner said.

He would like to see a deal between government officials and mortgage servicers that would pave the way to swifter foreclosures that would help put the foreclosure problem in the past. “If people haven’t paid their mortgages in two years, they shouldn’t be able to keep their house,” Carliner said.

Not everyone agrees.

Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, a consumer attorneys group, argues that any national settlement should be about keeping people in their homes. He wants a settlement that would require banks to reduce the amount of mortgage debt held by distressed homeowners.

Reducing their payments and overall debts would help keep them in their homes and reduce the number of foreclosures, he said. It would also provide a measure of justice, he said, for homeowners who were defrauded via bait-and-switch salesmanship, falsified documentation and other predatory tactics that were common during the mortgage frenzy of the past decade.

Rheingold acknowledges, though, that extracting large concessions from big banks will be a “tough slog.”

Concerned about keeping quality reporting alive in Tucson?
A metro area of nearly 1 million deserves a vital & sustainable source of news that’s independent and locally run.
The banks have high-powered legal talent and lobbyists on their side, and four of the top five mortgage services have given generously to state and federal political campaigns, according to an iWatch News analysis of election data provided by the subscription-only CQMoneyLine. 

  • Since the start of 2009, Bank of America has donated at least $3.2 million to candidates, party committees and other PACs. Among the top recipients was Rep. Jeb Hensarling (at least $17,500), a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Another Texan Republican, Randy Neugebauer , received at least $16,000 from the financial giant. Neugebauer also serves on the Financial Services Committee, and chairs the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
  • JPMorgan Chase has donated over $ 2.8 million to candidates, party committees and other PACs since the start of 2009. The firm has made donations to the Republican Governors Association (at least $50,000), the National Republican Senatorial Committee (at least $45,000) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (at least $45,000), the Democratic Governors Association (at least $25,000) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (at least $15,000). The firm also donated at least $15,000 to the Blue Dog PAC, the fundraising arm of the Blue Dog Democrats who were vital to financial corporations when the Democrats controlled the House.
  • and ranking member on the financial services committee’s Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.
  • Wells Fargo gave over $1 million to candidates, party committees and other PACs since the start of 2009. Wells Fargo has given at least $45,000 each to the NRCC and NRSC and at least $30,000 each to the DSCC and DCCC. It also donated at least $17,000 to Rep. Ed Royce , a California Republican who serves on the Financial Services committee. Another top recipient was Democrat Carolyn Maloney of New York, the vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee
  • Citigroup has given $850,000 to candidates, party committees and other PACs since the start of 2009. Among its top individual recipients is Democrat Gregory Meeks of New York. Meeks, who sits on the House Committee on Financial Services, has received at least $10,000 from Citi. Another is Ohio Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi (at least $15,000), a member of the powerful Ways and Means committee. Tiberi is currently the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Select Revenue, which has jurisdiction over federal tax policy.

Related stories

More by Michael Hudson

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 31 Comments »

NY Times Editorial: As Housing Goes, So Goes the Economy

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Neil Garfield

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

EDITOR’S NOTE: Where were they three years ago? Well it is still a good thing that the lead editorial connects the dots. The housing market is continuing to decline and it will continue as long as we regard the foreclosures as having any color of legitimacy. For decades housing has been the bell-weather of our economy, the driving force for jobs and innovation. This farce, wherein the banks are pretending to have securitized loans to cover up simple theft of historically huge sums of money draining the life out of the economy, must end or we are condemned to servitude with the Banks as our Masters.

NY Times editorial May 25, 2011:

The Great Recession began with the bursting of the housing bubble. Today, nearly two years after the recession officially ended, the housing market is still in trouble.

At times, it has looked as if things were improving, like last year’s jump in sales because of a temporary homebuyer’s tax credit or the recent rise in new-home sales from near-record lows. But, over all, sales and construction have been flat for two years, while prices, driven down by foreclosures, are plumbing new depths.

Even a recent drop in foreclosure filings isn’t a reason for optimism. April was the seventh straight decline in monthly filings — which include notices of default, auction and bank repossessions — according to RealtyTrac, a real estate data provider. But the decline appears to be largely the result of banks slowing the foreclosure process in order to keep properties off the market until prices recover. The catch is that prices are unlikely to recover as long as millions of foreclosures are imminent.

This isn’t just bad news for homeowners. Selling and building of houses are one of the economy’s most powerful engines. Until the market recovers, the entire recovery is imperiled. Falling home equity dents consumer confidence, making things even worse.

Since the problems in housing are not self-curing, a government fix is in order. But the Obama administration’s main antiforeclosure effort has fallen far short of its goal to modify three million to four million troubled loans.

Its basic flaw is that participation by the banks is voluntary. Most have joined the program but face no real pressure to meet its goals. Another big problem is that banks often do not own the troubled loans; rather, they service the loans for investors who own them. As servicers — in charge of collecting payments and managing defaults — banks can make more from fees and charges on defaulted loans than on modifications. Not surprisingly, defaults proceed and modifications lag. Banks win. Homeowners and investors lose. The economy suffers.

That does not have to be the end of the story. In a recent hearing in a Senate banking subcommittee, witnesses proposed new laws and regulations to change loan-servicing standards in ways that would prevent banks from putting their interests above those of everyone else.

For starters, various government guidelines on loan servicing would be replaced with tough national standards. Among the new rules, homeowners would be evaluated for loan modifications before any foreclosure — or foreclosure-related fee — is initiated. The bank analysis used to approve or reject modifications would be standardized and public, and failure by the bank to offer a modification when the analysis indicates one is warranted would be grounds for blocking any attempt to foreclose.

National servicing standards could succeed where antiforeclosure programs have failed, namely, in compelling banks to help clean up the mess they did so much to create.

In the Senate, Democrats Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Sherrod Brown of Ohio have introduced bills to establish standards. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can also impose servicing rules. The Obama administration should champion national standards, and Congress and regulators should act — soon.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments »

HOME PRICE CRASH STARTS ALL OVER AGAIN

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Neil Garfield

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary SEE LIVINGLIES LITIGATION SUPPORT AT LUMINAQ.COM

FRAUDULENT FORECLOSURES WEIGH HEAVY ON ECONOMY

EDITOR’S NOTE: The illusion of securitization has popped as analysts pore over balance sheets and income statements, coming up empty — no real assets worth the necessary amount to sustain the megabanks while at the same time the real assets are not perceived where they have been all along — with the average American consumer, homeowner, borrower, credit card holder, student loan borrower etc., because the great weight of the impossibly high debt that is claimed does not exist, for the most part, and is certainly not secured, nor qualified to be called non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

As long as government and society sticks with the illusion we will be going around in circles and the housing market will never find a bottom because the current state of the title registry across the nation is corrupted. We can pretend it isn’t true but the reality is there is no way out except to tell the truth and get it over with, thus stimulating the economy, the housing market, and the our society back into the engine of growth, prosperity and the envy of the world.

By accepting the illusion we are stuck with the same thought going around in the heads of most people: “You borrowed the money, you didn’t make the payments, a contract is a contract and so you lose.” The reason this doesn’t work is simple: it isn’t true – none of it. Nobody borrowed money in the old conventional sense. They bought a loan product that seemed like a normal loan but was really the issuance of a security as part of a scam that included the issuance of multiple securities based upon the same transaction.

By moving the shells around, and relying upon the perception that these are moral obligations that the buyer (“borrower”) should repay Wall Street gets the benefit of both worlds — (1) profits from the sale of all the securities issued and traded and subjected to all sorts of sophisticated insurance contracts, credit default swaps and other third party guarantees that went to the benefit of Wall Street instead of the real parties in interest — the buyers of bogus bonds and the buyers of bogus loan products who still think of themselves as borrowers (2) the real assets as well, all of which were falsely represented at the commencement of any any of the transactions.

Our predictions have held true and constant since we began this blog — that this mess will probably continue for decades because the politics of it will interfere with  basic application of simple laws, rules and procedures that have been in place for centuries. There won’t be a housing recovery until we end the foreclosures and reverse the ones that have the appearance of being completed. They were and shall always be a farce that continue their corrupting influence, growing like a cancer on our economy every time another transaction takes place either at the level of high finance where another security is traded, or at ground level where they are “selling” a house they don’t own or which still has multiple mortgages and clouds on title that can never be fixed.

Home Prices Slid in December in Most U.S. Cities, Index Shows

By DAVID STREITFELD

Real estate prices slid in just about every part of the country in December, pushing a housing market that once seemed to be rebounding nearly back to its lowest level since the crash began.

At this dismal point, some economists and analysts say that the damage has been done, and there is nowhere to go but up. Many others argue that the market has still not finished falling.

And then there are those who maintain that, possibly, things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist who is the author of “Irrational Exuberance” and who helped develop the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, put himself in this last group. Mr. Shiller said in a conference call on Tuesday that he saw “a substantial risk” of the market falling another 15, 20 or even 25 percent.

The 20-city Case-Shiller composite is already off 31.2 percent from its peak, according to data released Tuesday. Average home prices in Atlanta, Cleveland, Las Vegas and Detroit are below the levels of 11 years ago. A drop the size that Mr. Shiller says he thinks could happen would put Chicago, Dallas, Charlotte and Minneapolis there, too. It would create a lost decade for housing in much of the country even before the effects of inflation.

Mr. Shiller said several political trends indicated a dreary future, including the uncertainty over the mortgage holding companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and proposals to reduce the mortgage tax deduction.

Mr. Shiller’s colleague, the economist Karl E. Case, a professor emeritus of economics at Wellesley College, says he does not think the outlook is so dire. He said in the conference call on Tuesday that he thought the housing market was at “a rocky bottom with a down trend.”

The S.& P./Case-Shiller index of 20 large metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in December from November, although the drop was just 0.4 percent when the data was adjusted for seasonal variations. Eleven cities in the index posted their lowest levels in December since home price peaks in 2006 and 2007, up from nine cities in November. Phoenix and New York joined a list that includes Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle.

The only city in the index that posted a monthly gain on an unadjusted basis was Washington. Five cities posted a gain on an adjusted basis.

One data point that favored Mr. Case’s optimism: The adjusted declines in December and November were about half the drops in the previous two months, indicating the slide might be slowing.

Most analysts seem to fall between Mr. Shiller and Mr. Case in their forecasts.

“Even though affordability is exceptionally high and housing is incredibly cheap, the double-dip in house prices that began last year will continue throughout this year,” Capital Economics, a consulting firm, said Tuesday. Their estimate was that prices would drop another 5 percent unless a “vicious circle” of falling prices and rising foreclosures developed, in which case prices would be worse.

Also released Tuesday was the Case-Shiller quarterly index that covers all homes in the country. It showed prices fell 3.9 percent in the fourth quarter and 4.1 percent for all of 2010.

The Case-Shiller index is a three-month moving average, which means it changes slowly. It is now less than 3 percent above the low recorded in the spring of 2009, when there was widespread hope that the market was starting to recover.

To accelerate the process, the Obama administration offered a carrot for new buyers: a tax credit. The credit did its job, enticing hundreds of thousands of buyers to accelerate their purchases in the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010. But the credit did not lay the groundwork for a permanent rebound.

“Every place is pretty much getting hit a second time for essentially the same reasons,” said Andrew LePage, an analyst with DataQuick Information Systems. “Slow economic recovery, little job growth, still-tight credit, no more government stimulus, a pervasive and gnawing sense that prices could fall more, too few people getting jobs and too many worrying about losing the one they have.”

Amid all this gloom, one group thinks the situation is much better than generally portrayed: the National Association of Realtors. Its data shows the median existing single-family home price rose in 78 out of 152 metropolitan statistical areas in the fourth quarter of 2010 from the fourth quarter of 2009, including 10 with double-digit increases.

But even as the group asserts that the market’s decline has been overstated, it is being accused of having bad numbers of its own.

The blog Calculated Risk wrote last month that the real estate group was planning major downward revisions to the last three years of house sales data. CoreLogic, a data company, said last week that it estimated 2010 home sales at 3.6 million, much less than the 4.9 million the National Association of Realtors was claiming. If accurate, the CoreLogic numbers would indicate a market even more troubled than is generally assumed.

Against this welter of conflicting claims and dark predictions, many would-be sellers are opting out until that distant moment when they can get what they think they deserve. Some are renting their home after moving to new quarters; others are simply turning down that new job and staying put.

This can work to the advantage of those who plunge ahead. Jordan and Caitlin Van Horn bought their house in the fashionable Seattle neighborhood of Ballard three years ago. Ever since then, the market has slumped. The couple is moving to Alabama and feared the worst when they put their home on the market.

They were pleasantly surprised. Their four-bedroom house fetched $545,000 after less than a week, only 5 percent less than they paid.

“The lack of inventory really worked to our advantage,” said Mr. Van Horn, a co-developer of a bookkeeping system for small businesses. “We feel thankful for the way things turned out.”

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Alabama Court: Busted Securitization Prevents Foreclosure

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Neil Garfield

CLE SEMINAR: SECURITIZATION WORKSHOP FOR ATTORNEYS — REGISTER NOW

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary SEE LIVINGLIES LITIGATION SUPPORT AT LUMINAQ.COM

FAILURE TO COMPLETE TRANSFERS BARS FORECLOSURE FOREVER

NOTABLE QUOTE:

“the judge found the securitization of the Horace loan wasn’t done properly, so the trustee — LaSalle National Bank Association, now part of Bank of America (BAC) — couldn’t foreclose. In making that decision, the judge is the first to really address the issue, head-on: If a screwed-up securitization process meant a loan never got securitized, can a bank foreclose under the state versions of the Uniform Commercial Code anyway? This judge says no, finding that since the securitization was busted, the trust didn’t have the right to foreclose, period.”

EDITORIAL COMMENT: The fact that this case came from Alabama makes it all the more important to be watched and noted. Despite the reluctance of many Judges to give a free house to homeowners, this Judge picked up on the fact that the homeowner wasn’t getting a free house and that if he allowed the foreclosure it would have been the pretender lender getting the free house.

When it comes down to it, this really is simple: the trustee never got the loan. The asset-backed pool didn’t have it despite their claim to the contrary. Saying it doesn’t make so.

The Pooling and Service Agreement is very specific as to what can and cannot be done, it has an internal logic (the investors are expecting performing loans and are not authorizing acceptance of non-performing loans), and it specifies the manner in which the loan must be transferred. None of these things were e found in compliance. If you don’t get the deed then you don’t get the property. This is just common sense — a point disputed by securitizers who see an unparalleled opportunity to pick up trillions of dollars in homes that (a) belong to homeowners and (b) even if they were subject to foreclosure should be for the benefit of the people who put up the money — the investors who purchased bogus mortgage-backed securities.

The investors now easily recognize the invalidity of the liabilities, notes and mortgages and deed of trust, and the liability attached to wrongful foreclosure of invalid documents and making credit bids on property on which the creditor is not the bidder and has not been identified. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff, this is application of Property 101, Contract 101, and Common sense as it has been applied in commercial and real estate transactions for hundreds of years in statutes and common law predating the creation of the United States and fully adopted by the U.S. when it came into existence.

THE CLAIM OF PRETENDER LENDERS (OR “TEMPORARY LENDERS” AS SOME WOULD CALL THEM) IS BOGUS. THE NOTE DOES NOT DESCRIBE THE TRANSACTION, WHICH TOOK PLACE BETWEEN THE BORROWER AND AN UNDISCLOSED LENDER UNDER TERMS NOT REVEALED IN THE LEGALLY REQUIRED DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS, NOR EVEN IN THE PROMISSORY NOTE, MORTGAGE OR DEED OF TRUST. THERE IS NO CREDIBLE CLAIM TO THE MILLIONS OF FORECLOSED HOMES THAT ARE CURRENTLY HELD BY REO (BANK-OWNED) ENTITIES OR EVEN THIRD PARTIES. THE ORIGINAL HOMEOWNER STILL LEGALLY OWNS THE HOME AND FEW, IF ANY OF THE FORECLOSURES IN PROCESS OR PLANNED ARE OR EVER WILL BE VALID. THIS IS A FATAL DEFECT THAT MAKES PERFECT ECONOMIC SENSE CONSIDERING THE NUMBER OF TIMES THERE WAS PAYMENT IN PART OR IN FULL TO THE SECURITIZERS (WHO PROBABLY HAVE AGENCY RESPONSIBILITIES TO THE INVESTORS WHO ARE SUING THEM).

Court: Busted Securitization Prevents Foreclosure

By Abigail Field Posted 6:25PM 04/01/11 Columns, Bank of America, Real Estate

On March 30, an Alabama judge issued a short, conclusory order that stopped foreclosure on the home of a beleaguered family, and also prevents the same bank in the case from trying to foreclose against that couple, ever again. This may not seem like big news — but upon review of the underlying documents, the extraordinarily important nature of the decision and the case becomes obvious.

No Securitization, No Foreclosure

The couple involved, the Horaces, took out a predatory mortgage with Encore Credit Corp in November, 2005. Apparently Encore sold their loan to EMC Mortgage Corp, who then tried to securitize it in a Bear Stearns deal. If the securitization had been done properly, in February 2006 the trust created to hold the loans would have acquired the Horace loan. Once the Horaces defaulted, as they did in 2007, the trustee would have been able to foreclose on the Horaces.

And that’s why this case is so big: the judge found the securitization of the Horace loan wasn’t done properly, so the trustee — LaSalle National Bank Association, now part of Bank of America (BAC) — couldn’t foreclose. In making that decision, the judge is the first to really address the issue, head-on: If a screwed-up securitization process meant a loan never got securitized, can a bank foreclose under the state versions of the Uniform Commercial Code anyway? This judge says no, finding that since the securitization was busted, the trust didn’t have the right to foreclose, period.

Since the judge’s order doesn’t explain, how should people understand his decision? Luckily, the underlying documents make the judge’s decision obvious.

No Endorsements

The key contract creating the securitization is called a “Pooling and Servicing Agreement” (pooling as in creating a pool of mortgages, and servicing as in servicing those mortgages.) The PSA for the deal involving the Horace mortgage is here and has very specific requirements about how the trust can acquire loans. One of the easiest requirements to check is the way the loan’s promissory note is supposed to be endorsed — just look at the note.

According to Section 2.01 of the PSA, the note should have been endorsed from Encore to EMC to a Bear Stearns entity. At that point, Bear could either endorse the note specifically to the trustee, or endorse it “in blank.” But the note produced was simply endorsed in blank by Encore. As a result, the trust never got the Horace loan, explained securitization expert Tom Adams in his affidavit.

But wait, argued the bank, it doesn’t matter if if the trust owns the loan — it just has to be a “holder” under the Alabama version of the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code), and the trust is a holder. The problem with that argument is securitization trusts aren’t allowed to simply take property willy-nilly. In fact, to preserve their special tax status, they are forbidden from taking property after their cut-off dates, which in this case was February 28, 2006. As a result, if the trust doesn’t own the loan according to the PSA it can’t receive the proceeds of the foreclosure or the title to the home, even if it’s allowed to foreclose as a holder.

Holder Status Can’t Solve Standing Problem

Allowing a trust to foreclose based on holder status when it doesn’t own the loan would seem to create yet another type of clouded title issue. I mean, it’s absurd to say the trust foreclosed and took title as a matter of the UCC, but to also have it be true that the trust can’t take title as a matter of its own formational documents. And what would happen to the proceeds of the foreclosure sale? That’s why people making this type of argument keep pointing out that the UCC allows people to contract around it and PSAs are properly viewed as such a contracting around agreement.

I’m sure the bank’s side will claim the judge was wrong, that he disagreed with another recent Alabama case that’s been heavily covered, US Bank vs. Congress. And there is a superficial if flat disagreement: In this case, the judge said the Horaces were beneficiaries of the PSA and so could raise the issue of the loan’s ownership; in Congress the judge said the homeowners weren’t party to the PSA and so couldn’t raise the issue.

But as Adam Levitin explained, the Congress decision was procedurally weird, and as a result the PSA argument wasn’t about standing, as it was in Horace and generally would be in foreclosure cases (as opposed to eviction cases, like Congress). And what did happen to the Congress proceeds? How solid is that securitization trust’s tax status now anyway?

In short, in the only case I can find that has ruled squarely on the issue, a busted securitization prevents foreclosure by the trust that thinks it owns the loan. Yes, it’s just one case, and an Alabama trial level one at that. But it’s still significant.

Homeowners Right to Raise Securitization Issue

As far as right-to-raise-the-ownership issue, I think the Horace judge was just being “belt and suspenders” in finding the homeowners were beneficiaries of the PSA. Why do homeowners have to be beneficiaries of the PSA to raise the issue of the trust’s ownership of their loans? The homeowners aren’t trying to enforce the agreement, they’re simply trying to show the foreclosing trust doesn’t have standing. Standing is a threshold issue to any litigation and the homeowners axiomatically have the right to raise it.

As Nick Wooten, the Horaces’ attorney, said:

“This is just one example of hundreds I have seen where servicers were trying to force through a foreclosure in the name of a trust that clearly had no interest in the underlying loan according to the terms of the pooling and servicing agreement. This conduct is a fraud on the borrower, a fraud on the investors and a fraud on the court. Thankfully Judge Johnson recognized the utter failure of the securitization transaction and would not overlook the fact that the trust had no interest in this loan.”

All that remains for the Horaces, a couple with a special needs child and whose default was triggered not only by the predatory nature of the loan, but also by Mrs. Horace’s temporary illness and Mr. Horace’s loss of overtime, is to ask a jury to compensate them for the mental anguish caused by the wrongful foreclosure.

Perhaps BofA will just want to cut a check now, rather than wait for that verdict. (As of publication BofA had not returned a request for comment.)

No one is suggesting the Horaces get a free house; they still owe their debt, and whomever they owe it to has the right to foreclose on it. Wooten explained to me that the depositor –in this case, the Bear Stearns entity –i s probably that party. Moreover if the Horaces wanted to sell and move, they’d have to quiet title and would be wise to escrow the mortgage pay off amount, if that amount can be figured out. But for now the Horaces get some real peace, even if a larger mess remains.

Much Bigger Than A Single Foreclosure

The Horaces aren’t the only ones affected by the issues in this case.

Homeowners everywhere that are being foreclosed on by securitization trusts — many, many people — can start making these arguments. And if their loan’s PSA is like the Horaces, they should win. At least, Wooten hopes so:

“Judge Johnson stopped a fraud in progress. I am hopeful that other courts will consider more seriously the very serious issues that are easily obscured in the flood of foreclosures that are overwhelming our Courts and reject the systemic and ongoing fraud that is being perpetrated by the mortgage servicers. Until Courts actively push back against the massive documentary fraud being shoveled at them by mortgage servicers this fraudulent conduct will not end.”

The issues stretch past homeowners to investors, too.

Investors in this particular mortgage-backed security, take note: What are the odds that the Horace note is the only one that wasn’t properly endorsed? I’d say nil, and not just because evidence in other cases, such as Kemp from New Jersey, suggests the practice was common. This securitization deal was done by Bear Stearns, which other litigation reveals was far from careful with its securitizations. So the original investors in this deal should speed dial their lawyers.

And investors in bubble-vintage mortgage backed securities, the ones that went from AAA gold to junk overnight, might want to call their attorneys too; this deal was in 2006, and in the securitization frenzy that followed processes can only have gotten worse.

Some investors are already suing, but the cases are at very early stages. Nonetheless, as cases like the Horaces’ come to light, the odds seem to tilt in investors’ favor — meaning they seem increasingly likely to ultimately succeed in forcing banks to buy back securities or pay damages for securities fraud connected with their sale. And that makes the Bank Bailout II scenario detailed by the Congressional Oversight Panel more possible.

The final, very striking feature of this case is what didn’t happen: No piece of paper covered in the proper endorsements –an allonge — magically appeared at the eleventh hour. The magical appearance of endorsements, whether on notes or on allonges, has been a hallmark of foreclosures done in the robosigning era. And investors, as you pursue your suits based on busted securitizations, that’s something to watch out for.

My, but the banks made a mess when they forced the fee-machine of mortgage securitizations into overdrive. The consequences are still unfolding, but one consequence just might be a whole lot of properties that securitization trusts can’t foreclose on.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/fN0piz

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments »

Housing starts see biggest drop since 1984

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Neil Garfield

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary SEE LIVINGLIES LITIGATION SUPPORT AT LUMINAQ.COM

EDITOR’S NOTE: That we have ANY housing starts is nearly preposterous considering the number of homes that are unoccupied — mostly because the banks don’t want to report on the financial outcome of selling them. In truth, the banks are taking these homes with “credit bids” which is to say that they are buying the home at auction with a fabricated piece of paper instead of cash. It is a net gain to them for whatever the home is worth. THEY GET THE FREE HOUSE.

But the way they have reported it, for purposes of establishing the level of capital they in reserves, you would think that they own the homes, when in fact, they don’t. Worse yet, they are showing the homes at “principal due” on the defective notes that were used at closings with borrowers, when the real value, if the notes were real, would be a small fraction of the amount on the books of the bank. So the sale would require them to report a loss that never really occurred, while in truth they realized a gain.

If you read this article a couple of times, it will dawn on you that the TARP and other bailout programs totaling more than $7 trillion had nothing to do with bad mortgages. But by making it appear as though they had those losses, they were able to play the Chicken Little game and the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve fell for it, intentionally or not, hook, line and sinker. All that money legally, ethically and morally should be back in play IN the U.S. economy and not in the pockets of Wall Street. Our current policy is the equivalent of providing safe haven and encouragement to terrorists.

Biggest Drop in 27 years may be followed by larger declines

Photo
Wed, Mar 16 2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Housing starts posted their biggest decline in 27 years in February while building permits dropped to their lowest level on record, suggesting the beleaguered real estate sector has yet to rebound from its deepest slump in modern history.

Groundbreaking on new construction dropped 22.5 percent last month to an annual rate of 479,000 units, according to Commerce Department data released on Wednesday. This was just above a record low set in April 2009 and way below the estimates of economists, who had been looking for a smaller drop to 570,000.

January’s figure was revised up to 618,000 units from 596,000. But that did not change the tenor of the report, which confirmed that the sector is failing to recover despite interest rates near record lows.

Building permits, a hint of future construction demand, fell to a record low of 517,000 units from a revised 563,000, and were down by about 20 percent from levels seen in February 2010.

Housing was at the epicenter of the financial crisis of 2007-2009.

One key impediment to the sector’s recovery is a vast backlog of unsold inventory, while a shaky job market has also made consumers reluctant to embark on any major new financial commitments. Making matters worse, a glut of foreclosures, stalled in recent months by revelations of improper loan documentation, is depressing the market.

(Reporting by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , | 11 Comments »

America Is Not Broke

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Neil Garfield

COMBO Title and Securitization Search, Report, Documents, Analysis & Commentary COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION SEARCH, REPORT, ANALYSIS ON LUMINAQ

“For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.” — Michael Moore

“400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.” — Michael Moore

EDITORIAL ANALYSIS: Michael Moore GETS IT! He understands that what happened was political, not economic. It was theft and a grab for power that worked. And he understands that “we the people” in the preamble of our great  Constitution of the United States of America together with the 9th Amendment to that great instrument of human rights, that we THE PEOPLE have the right to take back both the power and the money.

AND that is because, as Thomas Jefferson said, that when in the course of human events” it becomes necessary for the people to act to break the bonds of governance and reinstate the rule of law, we have the right to do it. And in this great country we have every right and obligation to do it without changing our form of government or even resorting to violent revolution. We need only the will to take the streets because we mean it and to start voting and acting like we are in charge, to give up fear as our prime motivator and replace it with hope.

Just because Wall Street has TAKEN the money and the power doesn’t mean we are required to let them keep it. The framers of our government meant for us to correct imbalances of power, high crimes, misdemeanors and other criminal acts and to enable people to get fresh starts and to deprive freedom to those who commit sins against our humanity and our society, committing them to imprisonment, fine and forfeiture —- just like any little guy.

Michael Moore
Oscar and Emmy-winning director

 

America Is Not Broke

Speech delivered at Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, March 5, 2011
America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here’s what I learned: Money doesn’t grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the state can’t function. The schools can’t produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs.  That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It’s part of the Big Lie. It’s one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can’t win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there’s lots of money to go around. LOTS. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn’t work, they’ve got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day ˆ this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart — because you — yes, you, too! — might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don’t rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it’s Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin’ awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. “Here! Take our money! We don’t care. We’ll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!”

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It’s just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois — whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn’t have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn’t be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more ˆ something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job — their $19,000 a year job. That’s how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he’s stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn’t have to sleep in his car between shifts at O’Hare airport. That’s how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn’t be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he’s just another slob.

And that, my friends, is Corporate America’s fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement — a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don’t understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. “Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

“There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you…?”

America ain’t broke! The only thing that’s broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it’s one person, one vote, and it’s the thing the rich hate most about America — because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

Madison, do not retreat.  We are with you. We will win together.

Follow Michael Moore on Twitter: MMFlint

 

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 28 Comments »

Securitization and the Future of Finance

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Neil Garfield

The Future of Securitization
By ETHAN PENNER
July 10, 2008; Page A15

The deconstruction of the financial services industry this past year has been something to behold. Unfortunately, the responses have been shortsighted, the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. The blunt fact is that we’re in the midst of a major structural shift in the financial world: Yesterday’s business model has been invalidated.

Securitization as it has been practiced will not be the dominant means of financing it has been for the past decade and a half. And it has been truly dominant – moving from $1 trillion to $12 trillion in annual new issuance, capturing a significant share of all new loans including residential mortgages, commercial real estate and corporate loans, even auto and college tuition loans. Yet securitization will continue to play an important role – if adapted appropriately.

Securitization involves transferring a loan or pool of loans into a trust and then having that trust issue securities, or bonds, that are rated by the large rating agencies and purchased in the institutional bond market. Effectively, through what I will call “risk transference” securitization, whereby the originator retains no ongoing interest in the loan, the bond market becomes the at-risk lender. Implicit in that arrangement, especially at the high volume levels of past years, is the nearly complete delegation of credit underwriting by the ultimate lenders, the bond buyers, to others, mostly the credit rating agencies, and to a lesser extent the banks that originated, repackaged and sold the loans to these bond buyers.

It’s easy to see the model’s appeal over portfolio lending, where the banker held an originated loan to maturity. This limited the potential gross return on equity (ROE) that the loan could generate to something in the mid to high-teens. And from this seemingly unappetizing return, one must still deduct overhead expenses. Further, the bank remained on the hook for any losses during the life of the loan.

In the risk transference securitization model, the potential of significantly enhanced ROE was breathtaking. The originating bank became an intermediary, or a manufacturer of loans. A loan originated and resold within six months for a 2% profit could – when combining the yield spread in the six-month warehouse period with the gain on sale – double the bank’s ROE, while also permanently removing the credit risk associated with that loan from the bank’s balance sheet. Thus large banks shifted from purely portfolio lending to a mix of portfolio lending and risk transference securitization.

The most profound change occurred in the investment banks. Their balance sheets ballooned more than 100-fold as they morphed, from entities engaged primarily in the business of advising corporate America and facilitating access to the capital markets, into gigantic originators and intermediaries of all forms of credit assets. Without the huge fixed costs associated with deposit-gathering that the banks have – and the benefit of nearly double the leverage ratios of their more tightly regulated competitors – risk transference securitization generated staggering gross ROEs that, in the good times, ranged between 50%-100%.

That business model is now being dismantled, and the search is on for a new vision. Financial players need to explain to investors, whose capital they may desperately need to survive this painful transition period that, even in the best case, the ROE upside will be significantly less. Investment banks need to construct a vision justifying their huge balance sheets.

And yet the truth is that securitization, with a simple tweak, is actually something that can and will surely continue to play an important role in finance. This mechanism brings two main attributes to the table that are worth preserving.

First, it is the only method available to the asset originator to finance his position in a loan without incurring a mismatch risk between the terms of his assets and the terms of his liabilities. In the old portfolio-lending model, the bank would make a loan that may have a five- or 10-year fixed-rate term with all sorts of prepayment provisions that could shorten the term, and then finance that asset with deposits or other liabilities that didn’t match the term or the duration characteristics of the loans themselves.

This model created the sort of systemic risk that has caused most of the serious financial dislocations of the past, including the collapse of the Savings & Loans in the 1980s all the way to the collapse of the SIVs in 2007 and Bear Stearns in 2008.

The second significant benefit of securitization is the transparency that it brings to bear on the system. While this is painful in bad times, as the mistakes of the market are more immediately and broadly known, only the most cynical among us would argue that better information is not hugely beneficial to the market at large.

Were a portfolio lending model crafted in which the lender – instead of relying upon shorter term deposits or other liabilities whose terms are uncorrelated to the assets that they are intended to finance – financed his loan inventory through the securitization process, the duration mismatch risk would be solved. The lender would create distinct pools of loans, all of which it would retain on its balance sheet and hold appropriate equity capital against, and then have the trust issue only the lowest risk and most highly rated securities.

Further, in this construct the bond market will not be taking on the full ownership of the loan. Instead it will be providing lower risk leverage to the originator, who will retain ownership. Thus, the bond market will be relying less on the rating agencies and more on the lender’s acumen, and the alignment of interest that results from the originator’s ongoing ownership of the loan. These securities would have payment and maturity characteristics that exactly mirrored those of the underlying loans they were financing, and it would be this perfect match that would serve to remove the heretofore systemic duration mismatch risk that has resulted in numerous bailouts.

I believe the next step for finance in the Western world is to create a system that marries the discipline of portfolio lending with the asset-liability management and transparency benefits of securitization. As in the portfolio-lending model, the originator will be left to hold the loan. The bond-buying community will provide financing to the originating lender by purchasing the securitized debt that is backed by the loans originated.

Equity markets will provide the capital to own assets and will thus discriminate as to which origination franchises deserve the licenses to participate in the business of finance going forward. It will be those franchises that have demonstrated credit underwriting expertise in the areas in which they are extending credit, and clean and understandable balance sheets with commitments to transparent reporting, that will likely dominate in the next cycle.

Filed under: CDO, currency, GTC | Honor | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

From Ashes to Angels: Economics of Morality

Posted on March 22, 2008 by Neil Garfield

There was an interesting study published in the Economist (March 15, 2008 pp 83-85), a conservative news magazine read around the world, that disclosed an incredibly close correlation between the “rule of law” and the health of the economy. It turns out that laws, rules and enforcement create a culture of integrity, civility and good faith. The epiphany is that those societies that follow morality, as we commonly know it around the world, have the strongest economies and greatest purchasing power. 

It’s true. Go read it yourself and research it all you want. Von Mises and Rothbard,  largely ignored but highly respected economists, came up with the same conclusion decades ago from a slightly different approach. (They are ignored because they sought truth rather than power. They believe the premise of modern economists is essentially skewed. History, particularly economic history proceeds from the motivation of people in public office or personal lives to change their current situation to something better. Reporting history relies on people who seek to be seen in the best light and thus their reports, whether of facts or indexes like the GDP, CPI etc., are skewed to mislead the reader. The theories used to explain economic history are therefore always based upon measurements of inaccurate reports. The policies based on those theories work only by happenstance — i.e., if consensus or conventional wisdom is created around the theory and policy, not the other way around).

The corollary is more disturbing and quite obvious in the context of today’s news stories of a collapsing economy.  Stray from morality as a matter of policy and practice and you undermine your economy, your society, your ability to achieve, and you gut the basis of your own happiness and contentment, as well as the prospects of future generations. 

All politics and all economics is about income distribution in some way or another. When we are out of touch with our own Godliness, we become out of balance in our society and our economy. By having no rule of law, secular or otherwise, govern the actions of those with power to do what they wanted, we have undermined our foundation, cut our societal fabric and diminished our moral high ground at the same time as losing our purchasing power in world commerce.

While Americans have pursued the dollar with religious zeal, other countries have been pursuing happiness, morality, civility, and integrity – albeit with the usual human imperfections.  The resulting changes in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar and the relative strength of the U.S. in the marketplace of ideas and commerce can thus be explained. 

The fundamentalist in any major religion has a point: that societies, especially U.S. dominated societies, have lost their way. There is a growing sense of senselessness and lack of meaning in such societies. 

American men are dropping out of the work force and discarding goals and plans for their future, American children are not being educated nor are they taught to think critically, make moral judgments, build character, know their personal and world history and geography, please themselves and the world with their talent in the arts, or acknowledge the obligation and rewards of doing good deeds. 

Of course fundamentalists of all sects violate their own standards when they create inequality between women and men, when they impose a rule of a leader in lieu of a rule of laws, and so forth. But even from the most obvious perversity of fact and good sense, we can gleam some truth about ourselves, our society and where we are heading.

Today’s Torah reading talks about removing the ashes from the alter, an almost janitorial task. Yet the ancient Rabbi’s rushed to perform this task, competing for who would be first. Yes for fun but also to Honor the higher sense, the higher power we have the capacity to follow, if we are willing. My lesson in this world has been worship the riches and become poor regardless of how much money you have. Worship goodness and you become rich regardless of how much money you have.

Competition is fine if we follow our best instincts, our higher calling which all of us know we have inside. When we step onto the track and enter the secular race, make your goal the altar of your own Godliness. 

“There is much in life that people value, yet is utterly meaningless. There is equally much in life that people do not value – that is very meaningful and good. Do not judge by wealth. Do not judge by what others think. Judge by what you honestly believe to be good. And do it, no matter how belittling and ‘dishonorable’ it might seem to others. In the end, that’s what is truly worthy of praise.”

Whether we look to leadership to inspire us, or we simply change our minds and take the high road in our lives regardless of what others do, we rebuild our American experiment, we strengthen our society and reassert ourselves in the marketplace of ideas, morality and commerce. 

If we want to finish the American experiment, rejoin England and the European Union and give up our role as leaders, we are certainly on the right track. 

It won’t be long before the currency of choice becomes the Euro, a currency of consensus from countries actively seeking to do good things for their citizens. 

The U.S. dollar, including those bills in your pocket and those numbers in your bank and securities accounts, are being undermined by you and what you allow in your little corner of the marketplace. 

Only you (all of us in our own worlds) can turn it around. But it takes real faith rather than faking it or just giving lip service to it.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, community banks, CORRUPTION, credit unions, currency, education, Eviction, foreclosure, foreign relations, GTC | Honor, inflation, interest rates, Investor, Mortgage, Obama, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Mortgage/Credit Bust: Vapor without Value

Posted on January 29, 2008 by Neil Garfield

The American Economy: Vapor without Value

My effort here has been to point out that we are creating a fraudulent environment, much like an embezzler, that requires more fraud and more lies each time to cover up the last fraud and the prior lies. Our economy is now one which runs on boom and bust and cannot run any other way unless fundamental changes are made in the paradigm of American politics, econometrics and economics.

This morning, Paul Farrel wrote an article that is precisely on point, in explaining the bust we had in the 1990’s, explaining the bust we are having now, and explaining the next bust which is already in the making. 

The only thing I would add is that I think the policy makers are going to try the same thing again right now to “bail out” the current economic collapse.

If you want to protect your wealth, your retirement, your nest egg your rainy day fund, read this carefully and start thinking about it. 

The American economy is now a house of cards trading in vapor that is “rated” with value. There isn’t enough  real “money” in existence that will bail us out of the funny “money” that has been created. A major shift in our perspective must occur, and it starts with telling the truth. Here, reprinted from this morning, is the best summary of the unvarnished truth that I have found. 

PAUL B. FARRELL

A mind-blowing machine

In America, land of the bubbles, the next pop will be the biggest

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Last update: 7:32 p.m. EST Jan. 28, 2008

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Three cheers! Wall Street’s got a new rally song: “I’m dreaming dreams, I’m scheming schemes, I’m building castles high.”

Actually it’s the 1919 tune that launched the roaring run-up to the ’29 crash and the Great Depression. Remember the lyrics: “I’m forever blowing bubbles. Pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, nearly reach the sky. Then like my dreams they fade and die.”

  

And it still fits today! Listen to venture capitalist Eric Janszen’s scary new paradigm in “The Next Bubble,” a Harper’s Magazine report: “That the Internet and the housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of 10 years, each creating trillions of fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning.”

 

Translation: The next bubble is already expanding. Now listen very closely as Janszen makes the single most dangerous prediction of 2008: “There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.”

 

After the collapse of the 1990s dot-com bubble we laughed at all the hype they had spewed: “This time it’s different.” “New paradigm.” “New economy that only went up.”

 

Well, stop laughing: The new, new came true, says Janszen. Seriously, the economy and the stock market can no longer function without an ever increasing series of bubbles, one after another, rapidly expanding then bursting, with all the manic trading, risk, uncertainty, hypervolatility and distortions that come with it.

Janszen traces bubbles through history: From the 1720’s South Sea Bubble to the housing-subprime bubble. Bubbles are accelerating, becoming more frequent, a frenzy feeding on itself: “Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble fully deflated, a new mania began to take place.”

 

What’s so scary is not that the subprime bubble was happening so fast on the heels of the dot-com bubble, not that the pundits, the public and the policy makers all appeared to be ignoring it. What’s really scary is that our best and brightest leaders in Washington, Wall Street and Corporate America wanted to create a bubble! They even threw jet fuel on this raging fire with cheap money, favorable taxes and minimal oversight.

 

Of course the Treasury and the Fed will never admit it, but they saw the housing bubble as a healthy economic necessity in their warped ideology! In their myopic minds, the housing bubble was the messiah “saving” America from a big, bad bear/recession.

 

Publicly they denied the bubble’s toxicity, dismissing it as “regional froth.” Privately, they conspired to create a massive new bubble driving America deep into debt.

 

‘New economy’ morphs into out-of-control robot

 

This new ideology is extremely dangerous: It assumes the American economy can no longer be managed by politicians or Wall Street quants. The “new economy” has a life of its own, a “Terminator” from a dark future, an “I, Robot” from Asimov’s sci-fi world.

 

Yes, our economy has become a self-sustaining “bubble-blowing machine” inventing new bubbles at warp-speed even before the last is buried, in endless reincarnations of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” cycles.

 

What’s next? More asset-backed bubbles. The dot-com ’90s created $7 trillion in market value. The housing boom created $12 trillion in “fake wealth.” Janszen predicts the next great bubble will be a $20 trillion “alternative energy” bubble. In fact, Wall Street’s already hustling biofuels, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric as the new alternative energies destined to replace oil, gas and coal in this next new economy.

 

Timing? The new “alternative energies” bubble will last about 8 years, from a 2005 launch till a peak around 2013, when it will “creatively destruct,” when all possible “fake wealth” is squeezed out, when investors wise up to the scam, when that new bubble pops.

 

In his finale, Janszen admits that when the “alternative energy” bubble finally self-destructs around 2013, “we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry,” while Wall Street “will already be engineering its next opportunity.”

 

But be warned: Even before we near the end of the “alternative energy” bubble, the law of unintended consequences could trigger a meltdown, not of the bubble but of the “bubble-making machine” itself! The machine will implode, taking down Wall Street, Washington, Corporate America … and with it, the “new economy,” the “new paradigm” and the “bubble-making machine!” (e.s.)

 

‘Black Swan’ self-destructs ‘shadow banking’ derivatives

 

The trigger? A “black swan” off the radar and invisible to the quants managing the world’s derivatives.

 

The brilliant supertrader and risk manager Nassim Nicholas Taleb says a “black swan” is an extremely rare, improbable event (like 9/11) that cannot be predicted, yet has catastrophic impact. Black swans are events outside the vision, experience and technology of the world’s derivative traders’ geniuses.

What will the black swan destroy? How about the derivatives market that spreads so far beyond subprime loan obligations.

 

Pimco’s Bill Gross warns that $500 trillion of derivatives are hiding in a “shadow banking system” that “craftily dodges the reserve requirements of traditional institutions and promotes a chain letter, pyramid scheme of leverage … with no requirements to hold reserves against a significant ‘black swan’ run that might break them.”

 

Derivatives have become a renegade army of “I, Robots.” “According to the Bank for International Settlements … total derivatives amount to over $500 trillion, many of them finding their way onto the balance sheets of SIVs, CDOs and other conduits of their ilk comprising the Frankensteinian levered body of shadow banks.”

 

Shadowy? Pyramid schemes? Frankenstein? Terminator? Black swan: Gross paints a much darker future than Janszen: “The last two decades alone have witnessed pyramid schemes involving savings and loans/junk bonds, the small investor/dot-coms, and now global bonds/subprimes … in each and every case the originator of a surefire ‘can’t miss’ concept collected huge premiums from a willing investment public, only to see the pyramid collapse either of its own merits or from the lack of additional gullible investors. There will be more to come, much like a regular university that welcomes a never-ending stream of new ‘students’ who pay annual ‘tuition’ to be ‘educated.'”

 

Higher truth

 

Never-ending: Gross and Janszen agree on that. But they’re both wrong. The biggest low in Janszen’s argument: “Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble is its absence.”

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Remember, this new paradigm assumes that the only way the American economy can exist in the future is if Wall Street’s greedy “bubble-blowing machine” keeps feeding on itself, creating an endless, accelerating succession of ever-bigger bubbles.

 

Folks, that’s one of the dumbest economic theories ever, silly “new age” magical-thinking touted as a scientific basis for the new self-indulgent ideology of Wall Street, Washington and Corporate America.

 

There’s a higher truth: The best (not worst) strategy would be to let the “bubble-blowing machine” implode, live with the absence of a new bubble for a while, then quietly step back and reassess our unsustainable “growth-at-all-costs” economic policies that are secretly designed to benefit the self-interests of Wall Street’s insiders who profit by endlessly blowing bubble after bubble … after bubble … after ...(e.s.)

Brave words from someone who isn’t afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom folks. Listen closely to what he says.

Filed under: ATM, bubble, Bush, CDO, community banks, CORRUPTION, credit unions, currency, education, Eviction, foreclosure, foreign relations, GTC | Honor, inflation, interest rates | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Mortgage Meltdown: Reverse Negative ARM With Equity Kicker is Answer

Posted on January 8, 2008 by Neil Garfield

Strategies for Living in a Failing Economy: Break the Bond of Mortgage and Note

While You Deal with Foreclosure and Eviction: Buy time and Make Money

Time for States and People to Act Now — Don’t Wait for Federal Government

Even while the Bush administration and bell ringers on Wall Street attempt to maintain the appearance of business as usual, the underpinnings of the entire U.S. economy are coming unglued and taking the Euro Union with it. Oil prices are up in U.S. dollars by 350%, up in Euros by 200%, and up in gold by 0% — that’s right. If you held gold when the price of oil started its meteoric climb in dollars, you would be sitting in the same position as before (no loss of purchasing power, oil would cost the same as before). If you held Euro’s, you would have lost ground, but only about half the ground lost by 300 million Americans who perform commercial transactions in dollars.

Besides the obvious importance of this to investment strategies, the consequence for every day American lives has been bad and is now turning catastrophic. The net buying power of the average American has been going down persistently for more than 20 years and the loss is likely to accelerate to hyper inflation levels that were unheard of in the lifetimes of most people living today.

The CDO (free money) scheme hatched on Wall Street where they created money and moved the risk away from those who were granting loans, opened the barn door and all the horses left. The scheme probably worked far better than they ever imagined it would — and far worse. The net effect is that tens of trillions of dollars have been moved like the water moving out from the beach before the tsunami hits. And now, like everything else, the pendulum starts swinging the other way. When the wave hits, it will bury some of the best companies along with the worst, and it will forever shake-up the way we conduct our commerce, monetary policy and political regulation of financial markets. Firing a bunch of CEOs isn’t going to cut it. Neither will sending them to jail, although they certainly deserve it.

And attempting to hold back the forces of change by avoiding the benefit to undeserving buyers/borrowers falls flat in view of the enormity of this worldwide fraud. Frankly, I don’t care if some people get an undeserved benefit and I don’t care if whether some people get fired or go to jail. What I care about is finding a way out of this mess — a solution that works, even if it means getting the people involved who created the mess or who should have known better. 

Current estimates now show a $10,000 decrease in the value of all homes that are near areas with high rates of foreclosures. So if you live in an area where there are 10,000 homes and 1500 of them are foreclosed, the 8500 other homes will sustain an $85 million loss. But the government and Wall Street reports only the loss in the foreclosures which is only part of the value of the 1500 homes that were foreclosed. So the government and Wall Street might report a loss of $5 million when in fact the direct economic effect is $85 million and the indirect economic effect caused by loss of consumer purchasing power is over $400 million. Multiply that times tens of thousands of communities all over the country and the world and you get a picture of how big this REALLY is.

So if you read the previous posts on strategies for dealing with eviction and foreclosure, here are a few pointers about why you should fight and why you will win if you take the fight to them.

IF THEY HAVE NO LIEN, THEY CAN’T EVICT AND THEY CAN’T FORECLOSE: A legal objective would be to separate the mortgage lien from the note in the transaction that you signed. This can be done in state court, bankruptcy court or by local government enforcement filing an action to help everyone stuck with this mess. By alleging fraud and other torts relating to the execution of the original documents, you form the basis of a “quiet title” action that can result in extinguishing the mortgage lien. This will still leave the note, but the note can then be adjusted downward either by negotiation, mediation judicial declaration or cram-down in bankruptcy. By separating the lien from the note, the right to foreclose and evict is permanently removed. They can’t evict and they can’t foreclose. Yes you probably need a lawyer to accomplish this, but you can probably find considerable help from a city, county or state attorney who is looking at state revenues dropping like a rock.

Reverse Negative ARM With Equity Kicker is Answer

Your only hedge against the massive inflation that is in process is the house you were cheated into buying. And the only hedge that CDO investors have against total or near total loss is to maintain a deal where recovery in full or nearly in full is possible. And this is the only hope for the intermediaries — developers, mortgage brokers, appraisers,  “lenders”, investment bankers, and retail securities brokers and institutional sales agents. The entire transaction must be recast to (1) stop the tide from coming back in caused by defaults and losses to CDO holders, (2) provide a reasonable period of time for recovery (sell-out of housing inventories), (3) provide a reasonable period of time for growth (normal demand-pull inflation), (4) provide a reasonable probability for recovery of investment in CDO securities and (5) provide a low but acceptable return to CDO holders while this mess gets cleaned up.

In order to make this happen, all the players — including culprits and ne’er do wells — must cooperate and will cooperate because they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Lower mortgage payments to teaser rates or keep them there if they have not been reset. Keep it simple and gradually adjust it upward on a very slow schedule spanning 10 years. Eliminate negative amortization — except if the house is sold for more than the price paid. Provide an equity kicker to CDO holders that allows participation in the proceeds of sale over the adjusted principal borrowed. Adjust the original principal borrowed downward by 15% of the price of the house. 

Meanwhile, holders of gold reserves should be paid a fee for allowing issuance of gold redemption certificates that are issued as currency in the areas hardest hit by the meltdown. The spread of the new currency(ies) might occur in areas not directly impacted by the meltdown. Dollars will trade freely, but after some wild gyrations will find an equilibrium in parity with gold. Eventually a complete return to fiat money is possible but more likely, parallel currencies are likely to continue for quite some time. Hyper inflation will be mitigated, and the dollar, now headed for extinction might be saved. No guarantees, mind you, but it is worth a try. 

This writer, under the sponsorship of General Transfer Corporation has offered a prospectus to government leaders all over the country for the creation of two new entities immediately: The Interstate Finance Commission for regulation and the Interstate Currency Network, that will (a) make arrangements for issuance of gold redemption certificates as currency and (b) regulate the electronic funds networks who until now have operated as quasi-governmental entities with no accountability to the government, merchants taking electronic payments (credit, debit, ATM) or the consumers. 

The Federal government has demonstrated its lack of relevance and lack of power to do anything about this mess. By the time the next president and the next congress is sworn in, the damage will be irreversible. The people an the states must act immediately under the powers vested in them by the U.S. Constitution, forming regional coalitions and cooperating groups to facilitate and if necessary coerce the parties in cooperating with these remedies.

If you agree, send a copy of this email to your local government officials and newspapers. 

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, foreign relations, GTC | Honor, inflation, Investor, politics, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Bank Bailout $75 billion isn’t enough

Posted on October 14, 2007 by Neil Garfield

Well here it is. BOA, JPM et al are getting together a fund to “buy out (i.e.., bailout) the blood soaked securities they have been spewing out into the marketplace for years. They understand the likely response of the public. They understand disaster is just days away and they are actually trying to do something about it. While it is doubtful that the $75 billion bailout will itself stop the fall, it COULD spur others into action. The $75 billion is probably 1/10th of what is needed, and even if they get all the players in line, it will mean a series of write-offs over several years (permitted by current regulations and deals with Treasury allowing them to mis-report their earnings). The write-offs will depress earnings and the scare will decrease price earnings multiples and overvaluations of start-up companies. So the market is in for a long haul of bad returns, under the very best scenario. This is future shock and culture shock coming together in the perfect storm. Deferring the cost to future generations was the plan, a greater fool theory driving the Peter principle. Unfortunately, the excess of the last 7 years or so has drained the resources of the government, and the spending (and predatory) spree at the top echelons of corporations has sucked the life out of the purchasing power of the U.S. consumer. That leaves us with about a $2.5 trillion problem over and above the $750 billion created by the credit shock caused by free money. It looks like the piper has to be paid a little earlier than anyone had planned. Templeton, in his off-shore hideaway, is well protected from what will be one of the shakiest economies in history — not because it got into trouble, but because it got so good at getting into trouble and magnified its losses into numbers that are mind-numbing. Hopefully, real estate will not suffer nearly as much as those who are mostly invested in the securities markets. High inflation, high unemployment and high interest rates are likely. Plans like this might soften the landing or defer the crash for a few weeks at a time, but that is the best they can do.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Next Page »
%d bloggers like this: