Category Archives: Credit markets

Florida Kangaroo Foreclosure Courts: More Evidence of Favoritism Towards Banks

Lisa Epstein of Foreclosure Hamlet sent an eye-opening letter from Christopher Meister, who ran for the sheriff of Lee County, Florida as an independent and lost. As much as I’ve read plenty of reports of dubious judicial behavior in Florida, I still find myself appalled when new stories crop up. The Meister letter provides specific […]

Countrywide Offers Not-Very-Convincing Explanation of Testimony on Its “Oops, We Still Have the Note” Snafu

It was predictable, as soon as the press took notice of a potentially very damaging bit of testimony by a Countrywide manager, that its parent, Bank of America, would do everything in its power to deny its validity. By way of brief background (see here, here, and here for more detail), a recent court decision […]

Guest Post: Two Cords of Wood – An Intimate Look at Unnecessary Foreclosure

By Thomas Cox, a retired bank lawyer in Portland, Maine who serves as the Volunteer Program Coordinator for the Maine Attorney’s Saving Homes (MASH) program, cross posted from New Deal 2.0 Back in September, I was asked to give some unusual advice to a client. This woman, a resident of rural Northwestern Maine, wanted to […]

Levitin on the Dire Implications of “Securitization Fail”

There is a great post by Adam Levitin at Credit Slips which discusses the implications of the fact that a recent court decision in Kemp v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. stated that Countrywide had not transferred the note (the borrower IOU) to the Bank of New York, trustee for the securitization trust. Perhaps more important, […]

Why MERS Needs to be Taken Out and Shot

Some readers may have been unhappy with my failure to comment on a Washington Post article late last week about a push by the mortgage registry service, MERS, to “legalize” its activities. Even though the article indicates that dollars are being thrown at lobbyists to sell the MERS version of reality in DC, their approach […]

Tom Adams: Failure to Transfer Notes a Serious Issue for Countrywide and Its Trustee

By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive On Sunday, the New York Times reported on a recent case known as Kemp vs. Countrywide. In it, the judge in his decision states that for the mortgage loan in question in the case, a Countrywide employee testified that the mortgage note had never been delivered […]

The British mess (II)

First, let’s have a quick trip down memory lane. The financial crisis got going properly in the UK in August 2007, with the ABCP seize-up leading to the run on Northern Rock in September. Congdon illustrates how dependent banks had become on wholesale funding: At June 2007 UK banks’ cash deposits at the Bank of […]

Countrywide Admits to Not Conveying Notes to Mortgage Securitization Trusts

Testimony in a New Jersey bankruptcy court case provides proof of the scenario we’ve depicted on this blog since September, namely, that subprime originators, starting sometime in the 2004-2005 timeframe, if not earlier, stopped conveying note (the borrower IOU) to mortgage securitization trust as stipulated in the pooling and servicing agreement. Professor Adam Levitin in […]

Foxes Now Minding Very Big Henhouse: Foreclosure Fraud Investigations Use Law Firm Deeply Involved with Major Servicer

I’ve taken a particular interest in GMAC because in the one consumer foreclosure case I ‘ve attended, back in May, I had the dubious pleasure of seeing a GMAC employee and an attorney for the local foreclosure mill, who was also put on the stand, perjure themselves. And this isn’t my interpretation; documentary evidence was […]

So Who Benefits From Protracted Foreclosures? Servicers!

One of the many themes being used to cultivate class warfare in foreclosure-land is the idea that people who are losing their homes are getting an unfair break. Many of them have learned that banks are moving very slowly on foreclosures and so they stay put until the sheriff evicts them. One culprit is crowded […]

Stockman Savages Buffett Op-Ed, Bailout Canards

One of the annoying and persistent Big Lies of the financial crisis is that the rescues were a really good thing because they saved the world as we know it. That argument is dubious for a host of reasons: the world as we know it is the very same one that went off a cliff, […]

Senate, House Hearings on Foreclosure Fraud Cast Doubt on Deadbeat Borrower Meme

On Thursday, the housing subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee held hearings on robo signing, documentation, and servicing issues. This session wasa companion to the Senate Banking Committee hearings on the same topic earlier in the week. There were some notable differences between the two forums. The House group overall was less well prepared; […]

Noose Closing on Ireland

We indicated yesterday that the Irish government had been in the process of trying to steer an inevitable rescue operation towards salvaging its bloated, cancerous banking system rather than a government bailout, which would not only further reduce national sovereignty but also saddle Erin with debt that could not be restructured. Stratfor describes how the […]