Sense on Cents

While selected Wall Street banks and their cronies in Washington may want to downplay the depth and impact of the mortgage fraud embedded in our national foreclosure crisis, anyone with a modicum of ‘sense on cents’ knows that this fiasco has many players with their hands in the till. Our friends at The Center for Public Integrity recently highlighted the manner in which those in the legal profession have aided and abbeted this enormous fraud. Let’s navigate.

The role of lawyers in the foreclosure process has garnered less attention, but they play a big role, especially in those states that require banks to go to court to get a foreclosure order. (The same states where the lenders have suspended foreclosures). In these states, banks are required to produce a notarized affidavit of a loan officer and submit the mortgage documents. Those documents, though, are difficult to produce, thanks to the securitization craze.

As CNBC notes in this helpful primer to the foreclosure crisis, every time a mortgage changes hands, the new owners are supposed to receive an “assignment” of the mortgage notes from the buyers. For securitized loans, the mortgages are assigned to a specially created investment vehicle.

During the housing bubble, however, the notes and other critical documents were often either not properly transferred or simply not created. Other records vanished along with failed brokers and lenders. This means that lawyers charged with putting together the paper trail often have a tough job. Over the past few years, some have used shortcuts. (more…)