On the eve of Senate Banking Committee hearings into mortgage securitizations and the release of a Congressional Oversight Panel report covering the same terrain, the mortgage securitization industry has a full bore pushback underway. A story in the New York Times bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant. Remember the sympathetic New York […]
Read more...We’ve described in various posts how evidence is growing that the participants in mortgage securitizations sometime early in this century appear to have ignored the requirements of a variety of laws and their own contracts. We believe the most serious and difficult to remedy problem results when the parties involved in the creation of a […]
Read more...We’re a little puzzled at the attention a Florida robo-signing case has garnered. A plaintiff tried arguing that robo signing alone constituted a reason to dismiss a foreclosure. That’s such a stretch that it is no wonder a judge decided against the borrower argument. Mind you, we think robo signing is serious because it is […]
Read more...Banks are going to qiuite some lengths to avoid doing principal mods. I’d love to know how Bank of America will book this loan versus the it one currently has. Lawyers for borrowers have been pushing principal mods when the bank is having trouble proving standing and is suddenly very willing to negotiate. But deals […]
Read more...If you were to believe the banks, the concern over foreclosure “improprieties” is way overdone. They claim that the robo signers really weren’t doing anything seriously wrong, the banks just need to redo some paperwork, and everything else about foreclosures is just fine. Yet Bank of America, having made the implausible claim that it had […]
Read more...Tom Adams pointed to an article in American Banker by Kate Berry which discusses how mortgage securitization trustees are increasingly coming under scrutiny in the foreclosure crisis. By way of background, the trustee is the party responsible for securing the assets (the borrower promissory IOUs, liens, and various other documents related to the securitization). The […]
Read more...Yves here. This post by Linda Beale, who was involved in the tax angles of securitizations in her prior life on Wall Street, first appeared on Angry Bear and on her blog, A Taxing Matter. It’s a very helpful addition to the discussion of the foreclosure crisis. Because it is also a bit technical at […]
Read more...We’ve been astonished at the continued poor reporting on the overhyped mortgage putback possible future action by Pimco, the Fed, Blackrock and others against Bank of America. Everyone seems so mesmerized by the names and the incorrect dollar size attached (the possible action relates to $47 billion of bonds, but the potential liability is much […]
Read more...We’ve noted that title insurers have been refusing to eat the risk in foreclosure sales when they can’t verify the chain of title from local records. Of course, the idea that title insurance was ever really intended to be insurance in the first place is questionable: the title insurers only step up when they can […]
Read more...ProPublica reports that the SEC has taken interest in Magnetar’s role in a JP Morgan underwritten CDO. We discussed Magntar at length in our book ECONNED, which broke that story six weeks before ProPublica launched its report, and remains the definitive account of how those transactions were structured. (Our continuing beef with the ProPublica account […]
Read more...An article in the Wall Street Journal about Bank of America’s says a great deal about the woes afflicting Bank of America, thanks to its enthusiastic embrace of Countrywide, both the biggest subprime lender and the biggest subprime servicer. The irony is that one of the reasons BofA coveted a criminal enterprise like Countrywide (they […]
Read more...Several regular readers were kind enough to send congratulatory e-mails on our New York Times op-ed, which appears in the Sunday edition. I hope you enjoy it. The text follows: In Congressional hearings last week, Obama administration officials acknowledged that uncertainty over foreclosures could delay the recovery of the housing market. The implications for the […]
Read more...Joe Nocera has a very hopeful piece at the New York Times on the potential scope and impact of the investigation by all 50 state attorneys general into the robo signing scandal. Nocera stresses that the leader of this effort, Tom Miller of Iowa, and a core group of assistant AGs with long standing working […]
Read more...I’ve harbored the sneaking suspicion that JP Morgan Chase is the worst behaved of the big US retail banks, based on a couple of experiences with them a bit more than two years ago. Not to bore readers with details, but basically, bank staff lied to me persistently regarding the terms of various products. Of […]
Read more...Reader MBSGuy wrote to express his disgust with the mortgage industry’s efforts to pretend that nothing is rotten in Denmark. His object of contempt was an article in Bloomberg which dutifully recited the current talking points. The flacks have clearly been working full time: the headline, “Mortgage Industry Bristles at ‘Robin Hood’ Foreclosure Theories,” is […]
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