Livinglies's Weblog

Editor’s Comment: At the heart of the entire scam called securitization was the abandonment — in fact the avoidance of repayment of the loans. The idea was to make bigger and bigger loans without due any evidence of due diligence, so that the “lender” could claim plausible deniability and more importantly, make a claim for losses that were insured many times over. It was the perfect storm. Banks were using investor money to make bad loans on which the banks were raking in huge profits through multiple sales or insurance of the same loan portfolio. The only way the plan could fail was if the loans performed and the loan was in fact repaid.

For years, I have been pounding on the fact that the root of the method used was appraisal fraud, which as far as I can tell was present in nearly 100% of all loans subject to securitization, where loans were NOT bundled, and the securitization documents were ignored.

Now ICP Capital managing a vehicle called Triaxx, has countered the mountain of documents with real data sifted through algorithms on computers and they have come to the conclusion that loans were far outside the 80% LTV ratio that was presented to investors, that loans were never paid from the start (not even the first payment) and that probability of repayment was about zero on many loans. Soon, with some tweaking and investigation they will discover that repayment was never in the equation.

Thanks again to the learning curve of Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times and her excellent investigations and articulation of her findings, we are all catching up with the BIG LIE. Banks made loans to lose money because they the money they were losing was the money of investors — pension funds etc. And at the same time they bet against the loans that were guaranteed to fail and put the money in their own pockets.

In classic PONZI scheme methodology, they used the continuing sales of false mortgage bonds to pay investors until the inevitable collapse.

Once this is established 2 things are inevitable — the investors will prove their case that they the mortgage bonds were fabricated and based upon lies, deceit and cheating.

And the other inevitable conclusion is that the money came from the investors and not from the named payee, lender or secured party on the notes and mortgages that were executed in the tens of millions during the mortgage meltdown decade.

But did the investor money come to the closing through the REMIC? The answer appears to be a big fat “NO” based upon a big fat LIE. And THAT is where the problem is that caused the banks and servicer to fabricate, forge, robo-sign, lie, cheat and steal in court the same way they did when they sold the investors and sold the borrowers on a deal doomed from inception.

Legally and practically all that means that the borrowers were equally defrauded by the false appraisals that are legally the representation of the “lender” not the borrower. But even more importantly it means that Wall Street cannot show that the money for funding or purchase of the loans ever actually came from the investment pools.

It turns out that the Wall Street was telling the truth when it denied the existence of the pools and the switched to a lie which we forced on them because it never occurred to us that they would blatantly cheat huge institutions that could do their own digging and litigating. 

The legal and accounting effect of all this is enormous. The Payees, Lenders and Secured Parties named in the closing were not the source of funding and therefore the documents that were signed must be construed as referring to a transaction that has never been completed because it was never funded.

The deception was complete when Wall Street investment bankers sent money down to closing agents without regard to any pool, REMIC, SPV or other specific collection of investors. The funding arrived from Wall Street a the same time as the papers were signed.

But in order to prevent allegations of false appraisals and predatory and deceptive lending from moving up the ladder, Wall Street made sure that there was NO CONNECTION between the PAYEE, LENDER or SECURED PARTY and either the investment bank or the so-called unfunded pool into which no assets were placed other than the occasional purchase or sale of a credit default swap.

FREE HOUSE?: As Arthur Meyer is fond of pointing out in his history of banking every 5 years, bankers always manage to step on a rake. The banks had severed the connection between the funding and the documents.

If the court follows the documents a windfall goes to someone in the alleged securitization documents WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN PAID.

If he follows the money, the loan is not secured by a perfected mortgage lien, which means that (1) the unsecured debt can be wiped out in its entirety by bankruptcy AND/or (2) with investors slow on the uptake, there might not be a creditor left to make a claim.

THE ULTIMATE AND RIGHT APPROACH TO PRINCIPAL REDUCTION: But as pointed out previously, there is a Tax liability that would put the federal, state and local budgets back in balance due from homeowners who got their “free house.” It would be a small fraction of the balance claimed on the original loan, but it would reflect the real valuation of the house, the real terms that should have applied, and a deduction for the predatory and deceptive lending practices employed.

BOA ET AL DEATHWATCH: The political third rail here is that 5-6 million homeowners might well have a right to return to their old homes with no mortgage — an event that would put our economy on steroids, end joblessness and crush the mega banks whose accounting and reporting to the SEC and shareholders has omitted the huge contingent liability to pay back the ill-gotten funds from reselling the same portfolio AS THEIR OWN  loans dozens of times.

Too Big to Fail may well be amended to “Too Fat to Jail”, a notion with historical traction even in our own society corrupted by money, influence peddling and lying politicians.

See Gretchen Morgenson’s Article at How to Find the Weeds in the Mortgage Pool

How to Find Weeds in a Mortgage Pool
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON, NY Times

IT sounds like the Domesday Book of the housing bust. In fact, it is a computerized compendium of millions of housing transactions — a decade’s worth from across the country — that could finally help us get to the bottom of troubled mortgage investments.

The system is an outgrowth of work done by a New York investment manager, Thomas Priore. In the boom years, his investment firm, ICP Capital, navigated the dangerous waters of collateralized debt obligations via an investment vehicle called Triaxx. Buyers of Triaxx C.D.O.’s did better than most, but Triaxx still incurred losses when the bottom fell out.

Now Triaxx’s database could help its managers and other investors identify bad mortgages and, perhaps, learn who snookered whom when questionable home loans were bundled into investments that later went bad.

Triaxx’s technology came to light only last month, in court documents filed in connection with the bankruptcy of Residential Capital. ResCap was the mortgage lending unit of GMAC, now known as Ally Financial. As an investor in mortgage securities, Triaxx gained access to a lot of information about loans that were pooled, including when those loans were made, where the properties are and how big the mortgage was, relative to the property’s value. After Triaxx fed such details into its system, dubious loans popped out.

Granted, Mr. Priore is no stranger to controversy. He and ICP spent two years defending themselves against a lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused them of improperly generating “tens of millions of dollars in fees and undisclosed profits at the expense of clients and investors.” On Friday, ICP and Mr. Priore settled the matter. As is typical in such cases, they neither admitted nor denied the accusations. Mr. Priore paid $1.5 million. He declined to discuss the settlement.

But he did say that, looking ahead, he believed that Triaxx’s technology would help its investors recover money they deserved. Many other investors, unable or unwilling to dig through such data, have settled for pennies on the dollar.

“Our hope is that the technology will level the playing field for mortgage-backed investors and provide a superior method to manage residential mortgage risk in the future,” Mr. Priore said.

A step in that direction is Triaxx’s recent objection to a proposed settlement struck last May between ResCap and a group of large mortgage investors. Triaxx, which invested in mortgage loans originated by ResCap, criticized that settlement because it was based in part on estimated losses. Triaxx said the estimates had assumed that all the trusts that invested in ResCap paper were the same. Triaxx argued that a settlement based on estimated losses, rather than one based on an analysis of actual misrepresentations, unfairly rewards investors who bought ResCap’s riskier mortgages.

ResCap replied that it would be a herculean task to examine the loans in the trusts to determine the validity of each investor’s claims. But Triaxx noted that it took only seven weeks or so to do a forensic analysis of the roughly 20,000 loans held by the trusts in which it is an investor. Of its investments in loans with an original balance of $12.8 billion, Triaxx has identified approximately $2.17 billion with likely breaches. A lawyer for ResCap did not return a phone call on Friday seeking comment about problem loans.

John G. Moon, a lawyer at Miller & Wrubel who represents Mr. Priore’s firm, said: “Large institutions have been able to hide behind the expense of loan file review to evade responsibility for this very important national problem that we now have. Using years of data and cross-referencing it, Triaxx has figured out where the bad loans are.”

Triaxx, for example, said it had found loans that probably involved inflated appraisals. Those appraisals led to mortgages far exceeding the values of the underlying properties. As a result, investors who thought they were buying mortgages that didn’t exceed 80 percent of the properties’ value were instead buying highly risky loans that totaled well over 100 percent of the value.

Triaxx identifies these loans by analyzing 50 property sales in the same vicinity during the same period that the original mortgage was given. Then it compares the specific mortgage to 10 others that are most similar. The comparable transactions must involve the same type of property — a single-family home, for example — of roughly the same size. They must also be within a 5.5-mile radius. If the appraisal appears excessive, the system flags it.

Phony appraisals in its ResCap loans likely resulted in $1.29 billion in breaches, Triaxx told the court. Triaxx cited 50 possible cases; one involved a mortgage written in November 2006 on a home in Miami. It was a 1,036-square-foot single-family residence, and was appraised at $495,000. That appraisal supported a $396,000 mortgage, reflecting a relatively conservative 80 percent loan-to-value ratio.

But an analysis of 10 similar sales around that time suggested that the property was actually worth about $279,000. If that was indeed the case, that $396,000 mortgage represented a 142 percent loan-to-value ratio.

Perhaps the home had gold-plated bathroom fixtures and diamond-encrusted appliances. Probably not.

Triaxx’s system also points to loans on properties that were not owner-occupied, a breach of what investors were told would be in the pool when they bought it, Triaxx’s filing said. Such misrepresentations in loans underwritten by ResCap amounted to $352 million, Triaxx said.

The technology also kicks out mortgages on which borrowers failed to make even their first payments, loans that should never have wound up in the pools to begin with.

Although Triaxx is using its technology to try to recover losses, that system could also help investors looking to buy privately issued mortgage securities. After all, investors’ inability to analyze the loans in these pools during the mania led to enormous losses in the collapse. Now, deeply mistrustful of such securities, investors have pretty much abandoned the market.

Lenders and packagers of mortgage securities will undoubtedly fight the use of any technology like Triaxx’s to identify questionable loans. That battle will be interesting to watch. But investors should certainly welcome anything that brings transparency to this dysfunctional market.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: appraisal fraud, free house, GRETCHEN MORGENSON, ICP Capital, investment pools, lender, LTV, NYTimes, Payee, payment, perfected mortgage lien, REMIC, SECURED PARTY, SPV, Triaxx, underwriting fraud | 11 Comments »