COME TO THE ANAHEIM 1/2 SEMINAR WEDNESDAY MORNING
It appears as though LIBOR is being thrown under the bus as a distraction from the much larger mortgage securitization scam. Both cases relied upon trust that was breached, money that was invented, figures that were fabricated, lying, cheating and inside trading to the detriment of the institutions that participated in one form or another. In both cases the ultimate victims on both sides of the transactions is the consumer.
Yet with LIBOR “suits are mounting,” (Wall Street Journal) investigations proliferating and a handy group of scapegoats far from the top of the scam may well be prosecuted.
The only difference seems to be that the size of the LIBOR scandal in terms of consequences to the institutions and consumers appears to be far less than the monumental scam foisted upon taxpayers all over the industrialized world, especially in the U.S.
To be certain the manipulation of the LIBOR rates was clearly an intentional act, but so was the insertion of the bankers naked nominees when residential loans were originated. In most cases, securitization was different in the commercial setting because it was more likely that more questions would be asked by higher priced, more sophisticated lawyers for the borrower.
The manipulation of LIBOR rates resulted in the wrong calculation of adjustable rate mortgages all over the world, making the notices of default, demand for payment and perhaps even the sales illegal. That is more in the nature of legal argument. The insertion of nominees controlled by the investment banks as payees, nominees, trustees, beneficiaries and mortgagees in lieu of the institutions that were actually providing the money and hiding the compensation that TILA requires to be disclosed, the steady practice of table funded loans which are deemed “predatory per se” under regulation Z, allowed intermediaries to pretend to be the lenders, the owners of the loans so they could trade with impunity. If they lost money, they threw the loss over the fence at the taxpayers and investment funds that bought bogus mortgage bonds. If they made money, they kept it.
The only difference is that the the amount of money involved in the non-existent securitization scheme that was so well “documented” was that it resulted in siphoning out the life blood of multiple nations and sending the world into a recession not seen in most of your lifetimes. AND the policy makers in Washington either were or are in bed with the perpetrators on this scheme, whereas the LIBOR scandal is being couched in terms where the traders were conspiring but the banks were unaware of their transgressions.
Let’s face it, if suddenly you have a trading department that is reporting profits geometrically and even exponentially higher than any other time in history, as CEO you would want to know why. Those trading profits did exactly that in both LIBOR and the mortgage securitization myth. One must ask why thousands of advertisements costing billions of dollars were on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines for loans at 5%. Put pencil to paper. If normal underwriting standards were used, and normal fees were applied to intermediaries who made the loan possible, there would be no room in the budget for such extravagance, much less the pornographic profits and bonuses reported on Wall Street. Why were armies of salesmen, including 10,000 convicted felons in Florida alone pushed into the market place as mortgage brokers or mortgage originators?
The intentional reporting of the wrong rates has an effect on all loans, past, present and future, but it requires yet more education of an already overloaded judiciary. So throwing a few traders under the bus and calling it a day is pretty much what is going to happen.
As it turns out though, the Banks have painted themselves into a corner on the securitization scam. What they securitized was paper, not money. The monetary transactions were left untouched by the documents, leaving the people who loaned the money through the scam vehicle known as a REMIC trust with no security for a bad loan.
Hence neither the documentation of an on-existent transaction between the parties named on the instrument, nor the manipulation of terms that were presented in one set to the investor-lenders and an entirely different set of terms presented to the borrower created valid contracts, much less perfected liens. But that didn’t matter to the intermediaries who were supposed to be acting as intermediaries — in the same way a check clears the bank — with no claim to the subject matter of the transaction.
They too manipulated rates by creating second tier yield spread premiums, and thus created spreads upon which they could withdraw money, pay for insurance, credit default swaps and other bets that the bad loans they wanted and received would fail, leaving the market in free-fall.
Predicting the market to to fall is like pushing a person off a cliff. You pretty much know that once the balance is lost the person is doomed. Doctoring up the applications with false income and false property appraisals did exactly that. It was a bet on a sure thing. Wall Street could rest comfortably in the knowledge that housing would ultimately fall to normal levels simply because there was nobody who could or would pay the premium they invested on the mortgage scam.
Now Wall Street is creating entities that will buy up “distressed”properties — a product of their own wrongdoing, using the money of the same people who owned the homes that were foreclosed — i.e., their pension and 401k retirement money. So they used your own money to fund a bad loan to you that they knew they could foreclose, and in between the time they originated the loan documents and the time of foreclosure they engaged in trading on your mortgage even though they had no part in funding or purchasing the loan.
My question to you is where is your outrage? When are you going to fight the bank control of Washington, the bank manipulation of judiciary by fabricating false, forged documentation that “looks right?” You can do it by voting against hose most closely tied to the Wall Street community, by fighting with the party claiming to be your mortgage lender/servicer, or both. If you don’t you are handing the Country over to the banks and leaving it to your children and grandchildren to suffer the consequences.
Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: borrowers, distressed properties, fraud, homeowners, insidekr trading, insider trading, intermediaries, Libor, nominees, securitization scam, taxpayers, VICTIMS, Wall Street | 29 Comments »
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