Tag: banks

One nation, under fraud

An excellent article that not only sums up the relevant issues, but provides some stunning examples of how deep and pervasive the banking fraud is:

Tomorrow, a bank—not your bank, but any bank—could evict you from your home. Even if you didn’t know the bank was foreclosing. Even if your mortgage is paid off. Even if you never had a mortgage. Even if the bank doesn’t hold a single piece of paper that you signed. And major banks not only know this fact, but have spent millions of dollars to defend it in court. Why? The answer starts with a Jacksonville homeowner named Patrick Jeffs.

In 2007, Deutsche Bank sued Jeffs for his home, which is a necessary step in the process of foreclosing on a homeowner in the state of Florida. Curiously, despite the fact that he immediately hired a law firm to defend his property when he found out about the foreclosure, neither Jeffs nor his attorneys were at the trial. That’s because it had already happened. Deutsche won by default because Jeffs wasn’t able to travel backwards in time to attend, even though the trial featured a signed affidavit indicating that he had been served his court summons.

The only problem with the summons Jeffs supposedly received was that it had been conjured out of thin air.

In June of this year, a Florida court ruled that the document was fraudulent, as the person who was supposed to make sure Jeffs was served had mysteriously received a copy of the summons before the lawsuit had even been filed, and Jeffs never even saw the copy. The text of that ruling was posted on various financial news websites in September. The lawyers that Jeffs hired to defend his case say that fraud such as this is not uncommon. It’s a widespread problem, and it has cost countless families their homes.

“I think it’s safe to say that 95% of the foreclosure cases in Florida involve some form of fraud on the part of the bank,” David Goldman of Apple Law Firm, PLLC told The Daily Caller in a phone interview. “It’s probably closer to 99%. And the court system is helping them get away with it.”

…Banking officials happily told the Florida court system in 2009 that the documents had been shredded. At the time, lenders were trying to prevent some foreclosure rule changes, so they sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court. Among other things, the letter stated that it was standard practice to destroy mortgage papers once the mortgages were sold into MERS in order to avoid confusion. (“A” for effort on that front.) Something funny happens when tearing up a contract, and it might best be explained by a certain common phrase. That phrase is, “Tearing up a contract.” Unless very specific conditions are met, the contract becomes null. Void. Not worth the paper it is printed on.

It is now totally impossible and downright dishonest for anyone to attempt to somehow blame the ongoing collapse of the U.S. financial system on irresponsibly indebted homeowners or minor clerical errors on the part of low-level bank employees. Exposing the full extent of the fraud and placing the financial responsibilities where they belong will bring the housing system to a screeching halt, as indeed it must. But it is not a question of risking the breakdown of the system nor can the banks threaten to hold the system hostage because the system is already broken, having been fatally sabotaged by the mass mortgage transfer fraud (it’s far more than mere foreclosure fraud) of the mortgage banks.

Someone asked the other day if this explosive situation was really all about the short-sighted greed of bankers and if the bankers could really have been so incredibly stupid. To which the only answer is: yes, apparently. This is an object lesson in repeatedly looking the other way and NOT enforcing the rules; all that accomplishes is to teach the offending parties that they can up the ante on their offensive behavior.

Read the whole thing. It’s very informative and not a little eye-opening, even for confirmed cynics.

Bankrupting the big banks

The Great Foreclosure Fraud is not about clerical errors or defaulting homeowners. It never was. It’s about the way in which the U.S. banks selling mortgage-backed securities fraudulently ripped off the pension funds the taxpayer-owned GSEs, and the foreign banks.

In addition to Fannie and Freddie, there are millions… billions… trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities out there that are now very much in doubt. And the pension funds have been pushing for some time now for information about the securitizers, the big banks who bought the mortgages and put them in pools and sold the MBS, whether they should have to buy back the mortages for not meeting the contractual requirements. Those may have varied from contract to contract, but I guarantee that every one of them required that there be proper paperwork and a right to foreclose if the debts aren’t paid. If those banks have to buy back all that stuff, it’s a big liability….

There’s a pretty good chance that if they had to buy back a lot of those mortgages because they did not meet the contractual representations and warranties as it’s called, the mortgages were not what they were required to be and in almost every contract if they weren’t what they were required to be the back was required to buy them back, that’s probably more than they can buy back. We may be back where we were two years ago. There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday morning where someone said this is going to be so bad for the banks we might have to have another TARP. That ain’t gonna happen, not in this lifetime…. we certainly aren’t going to give the banks, or lend the banks, more money to get them back to solvency.
– Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC)

The reason the giant banks are desperately trying to avoid turning over the mortgage-backed security documents and resisting subpoenas is because they will be forced into bankruptcy as soon as any of the investors get their hands on them.

UPDATE: Citi delineates the three possible outcomes:

Levitin articulated three possible outcomes to the aforementioned issues and assigned an equal likelihood to each. In his best case scenario, these issues are deemed merely technical in nature and are successfully resolved but it takes at least year to do so and all foreclosures are delayed by at least a year. Levitin disputed the claim by banks that these issues can be resolved in a month or so and attributed the banks’ claims to “legal posturing.” In the medium case scenario, litigation ensues and it takes years to sort out these matters. In the worst case scenario, the aforementioned issues become a “systemic problem” which causes the mortgage market to grind to a halt as title insurers refuse to insure mortgages involving existing homes.

He left out the fact that in the medium scenario, all of the MBS-selling banks go bankrupt. Which is to say, the big four with their $7 trillion in assets, (45% of which I have estimated are worthless), at the very least.

WND column

A Den of Vipers and Thieves

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.”
– Andrew Jackson

The French famously say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. While the particular form that the latest banking fraud has taken is different – there were no option ARMs, mortgage-backed security tranches or electronic mortgage registration systems in the 1830s – the United States found itself similarly afflicted by the financial predations of a private central bank.

ADDENDUM TO THE COLUMN: Unsurprisingly, those freedom-loving Republicans and champions of the Rule of Law in the conservative media are following the grand tradition of presidential candidate John McCain by rushing to the wrong side of the issue and the defense of the impoverished bankers of Wall Street.

Talk about a financial scandal. A consumer borrows money to buy a house, doesn’t make the mortgage payments, and then loses the house in foreclosure—only to learn that the wrong guy at the bank signed the foreclosure paperwork. Can you imagine? The affidavit was supposed to be signed by the nameless, faceless employee in the back office who reviewed the file, not the other nameless, faceless employee who sits in the front.
– The Wall Street Journal

The No. 2 House Republican, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, said a national moratorium would remove the protections that lenders need. “You’re going to shut down the housing industry” with a national stoppage, Cantor said. “People have to take responsibility for themselves.”
– The Associated Press

This is pure banking propaganda. The idea that the foreclosure fraud is simply a little clerical error and that homeowners are attempting to capitalize on a minor issue of missing paperwork is a blatant and shameless lie. The mere fact of their focus on the borrowing parties rather than the banks is proof that they are intentionally evading the real issue. Karl Denninger, who has been on this for three years now, explains it more succinctly than anyone. “The issue is not about which paper-pusher signed documents. The issue is whether the origination and securitization of this paper in the first instance was fraudulent, and whether we now we have a Watergate-style coverup of what a gang of brigands did to steal literal trillions of dollars!” As he further elucidates, there are three primary parts to the problem; notice that the latter two have absolutely nothing to do with the borrowers that the Republican Cantor declares must “take responsibility for themselves”. But if a poor Hispanic family living in an overpriced house have to take responsibility for themselves, why don’t the bankers who are holding Cantor’s leash have to do likewise?

1. Borrowers overstated income, assets or both. In some cases they did so willingly and knowingly. In others loan officers changed numbers to “ram it through” the computer-operated approval systems, submitting files multiple times while doctoring figures. In the latter case perhaps the borrower knew, perhaps not – many people didn’t read the entire 100+ page stack of paper at closing. That’s dumb but it’s not criminal. Changing the figures or lying, on the other hand, is criminal.

2. Lenders stuffed paper they either knew was bad or had the ability and legal duty to verify the provenance of but intentionally did not into securities sold to investors. This has been disclosed in FCIC hearings and is no longer speculative, although as I noted in 2007 it had to be the case because it was the only way the deals that were being done could have possibly been done. This was an act of deception and in my opinion (along with many others, including plenty of attorneys) meets the legal definition of fraud.

3. The land title system in this nation was intentionally subverted and corrupted by both intentional act and intentional laziness, all driven by the motive of profit. Original paperwork was either shipped overseas or intentionally destroyed. In even more cases it was not conveyed as legally required by the trust documents. This has massively-corrupted the chain of title for perhaps as much as one third to one half of all residential housing units in this country and if not corrected will render these homes unmarketable in the future. This is the vastly unappreciated problem with what has been done to date.

If the Republican leadership is dumb enough to attempt to defend this large-scale banking fraud against the interests of defaulting homeowners and responsible taxpayers alike, they’re going to risk throwing away the entire advantage that they have derived from two years of Obama’s political incompetence. This is the one thing they could do that would force the Tea Partiers to leave the Republican Party and transform into a genuine third party. And it’s not impossible; remember, it was a Republican who introduced HR3808 and it was the Republican leadership that was complicit in allowing it to pass on an unrecorded voice vote.

The media wakes up

The Washington Post finally notices that there might be a little problem in the housing market:

Senior Obama administration officials said Friday that a nationwide moratorium on foreclosure sales may be inevitable, despite their grave reservations about the impact a broad freeze would have on the nation’s housing market and economic recovery…. With foreclosed properties comprising one in every four homes sold in the United States, the spreading moratorium could disrupt real estate deals in progress, slow down the process of clearing the backlog of troubled home loans and prolong the economic recovery, analysts said.

A freeze would also strike at the financial sector, just two years after it suffered one of the worst crises in its history. One government official who has been in discussions with several big financial firms said the banks are bracing themselves for a wave of lawsuits from homeowners who are fighting to keep their homes and from investors who had bought mortgage loans on Wall Street. On Friday, while the Dow Jones industrial average crossed 11,000, most major bank stocks fell.

Translation: Senior Obama administration officials said Friday that a nationwide moratorium on foreclosure salesallowing the big insolvent banks to go bankrupt may be inevitable, despite their grave reservations about the impact a broad freezefailure to enact a second banking bailout would have on the nation’s housing market and economic recoverydepression.

Yesterday’s post about the 13.3% decline in bank credit didn’t really do proper justice to the seriousness of the situation. One also has to factor in the historical 8.4% annual increase in bank credit. This means that there is presently a $2.2 trillion gap between the current credit supply and the $8.477 trillion in credit that a nominally healthy economy would have at the end of 2010.

That is the gap that the massive increase in Federal outlays are attempting to fill. In other words, the magnitude of the problem isn’t defined by a 13.3% decline from where we were, but rather, the 25.8% shortfall from where we should be.

“Potential flaws”

It sounds so much nicer than “massive criminal fraud“

Potential flaws in foreclosure documents are threatening to throw the real estate industry into a full-blown crisis, as Bank of America on Friday became the first bank to stop sales of foreclosed homes in all 50 states. The move, along with another decision on foreclosures by PNC Financial Services Inc., adds to growing concerns that mortgage lenders have been evicting homeowners using flawed court papers.

If Obama isn’t completely insane, he’s going to shut down the recent attempt of the House and Senate to immediately make all of this grand theft housing ex post facto legal. I am no green shoots optimist, but this is much, much worse than even most confirmed economic pessimists had been expecting. If Washington doesn’t break with Wall Street soon and jail the guilty bankers, it won’t be long before they find themselves facing crowds of the size of the Beck rally storming the barricades. Nor is this foreclosure fraud the only blatant chicanery. Consider the decline in commercial bank credit since its peak in December 2008.

Notice the immense and unprecedented $452 billion leap in loans that supposedly took place in the last week of March.  And immediately, the decline continued at much the same rate it had shown before.  Now, here’s how TOTLL would look without this reported one-week borrowing orgy.

As of the latest Fed report, correctly adjusted TOTLL is now to $6.297 trillion, down from $7.294 trillion; that is a $993.6 billion collapse in credit.  13.63% of the commercial bank credit in the country has vanished, even without counting all of the defaulting and foreclosed properties that may not even belong to the banks trying to claim them.   Keep in mind that the most TOTLL had ever previously declined in a two-year period was -0.76% in 1974-75.   Here’s the punchline.

“Here are seven predictions concerning economic-related events I expect to see by December 31, 2010

5. Commercial bank loans and leases (TOTLL) will fall below $6.3 trillion.”

After the March 31 report, I was thinking that I’d have to call shenanigans in defense of that prediction, but given the likely fallout from the Great Foreclosure Fraud of 2010, it’s quite possible that TOTLL will fall below $6.3 trillion despite the “potential flaws” visible in the Fed’s statistical reporting.

UPDATE – Apparently Obama isn’t a complete moron. He has made it clear that he will not permit HR 3808 to go forward and cover the mass foreclosure fraud by the banks preparatory to yet another bailout.

Presidential Memorandum–H.R. 3808

It is necessary to have further deliberations about the possible unintended impact of H.R. 3808, the “Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010,” on consumer protections, including those for mortgages, before the bill can be finalized. Accordingly, I am withholding my approval of this bill. (The Pocket Veto Case, 279 U.S. 655 (1929)).

The authors of this bill no doubt had the best intentions in mind when trying to remove impediments to interstate commerce. My Administration will work with them and other leaders in Congress to explore the best ways to achieve this goal going forward.

To leave no doubt that the bill is being vetoed, in addition to withholding my signature, I am returning H.R. 3808 to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, along with this Memorandum of Disapproval.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,
October 8, 2010.

Interesting that such a firestorm blew up fast enough to force Obama to show his hand in public this way. This is a very serious situation; it’s arguably more serious than when Paulson was threatening Congress with the image of tanks in the streets and martial law.

Foreclosuregate is the big one

At least, the biggest fraud exposed to date. And I have no doubt there will be more. Notice that as I concluded in yesterday’s column, it is the states, not the Feds, who are leading the charge on this:

The Texas Attorney General’s office called for a halt on all foreclosures today amid widespread scrutiny over the way foreclosures are processed nationwide. Notices to suspend foreclosures were sent to 27 loan servicers doing business in Texas, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co

Here’s hoping that they follow up with the appropriate prosecutions. Not only of the bankers, but their regulatory enablers such as Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner as well.

UPDATE: In which we are given a lesson in how the defenders of the banks are going to play this one:

“Judge Jack S. Cox of the 15th Judicial Circuit ruled that Attorney General Bill McCollum lacked standing to file his subpoena against Shapiro & Fishman law firm of Boca Raton, effectively blocking an investigation of that firm’s foreclosure practices.”

Notice what was ruled here – a Judge ruled that consumer protection laws do not apply if the person defrauding you is an attorney.

The Law of Rule is at work again. It’s become increasingly apparent how the courts are utilizing that “no standing” concept in order to throw out damaging lawsuits that threaten the favored classes. No doubt some court will discover that the laws don’t apply if the corporation defrauding you is a bank.

WND column

An Ugly Autumn

For more than two years, I have been tracking the fraud being committed on an ongoing basis by America’s largest banks. As I described in a June column titled “The bank-failure recovery,” all of America’s largest banks have been inaccurately reporting the value of their assets. Based on the information revealed by the FDIC regarding the 129 bank failures this year, it is safe to conclude that around 45 percent of the value of the financial assets reported by the banks are, in fact, completely worthless.

UPDATE: Karl Denninger has a lot more details on the burgeoning banking scandal I described in today’s column:

REMICS were newly invented in 1987 as a tax avoidance measure by Investment Banks. To file as a REMIC, and in order to avoid one hundred percent (100%) taxation by the IRS and the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet, an MBS REMIC could not engage in any prohibited action. The “Trustee” can not own the assets of the REMIC. A REMIC Trustee could never claim it owned a mortgage loan. Hence, it can never be the owner of a mortgage loan.

57. Additionally, and important to the issues presented with this particular action, is the fact that in order to keep its tax status and to fund the “Trust” and legally collect money from investors, who bought into the REMIC, the “Trustee” or the more properly named, Custodian of the REMIC, had to have possession of ALL the original blue ink Promissory Notes and original allonges and assignments of the Notes, showing a complete paper chain of title.

58. Most importantly for this action, the “Trustee”/Custodian MUST have the mortgages recorded in the investors name as the beneficiaries of a MBS in the year the MBS “closed.” Every mortgage in the MBS should have been publicly recorded in the Kentucky County where the property was located with a mortgage in the name similar to “2006 ABC REMIC Trust on behalf of the beneficiaries of the 2006 ABC REMIC Trust.” The mortgages in the referenced example would all have had to been publicly recorded in the year 2006.

59. As previously pointed out, the ¡°Trusts¡± were never set up or registered as Trusts. The Promissory Notes were never obtained and the mortgages never obtained or recorded.

60. The “Trust” engaged in a plethora of “prohibited activities” and sold the investors certificates and Bonds with phantom mortgage backed assets. There are now nationwide, numerous Class actions filed by the beneficiaries (the owners/investors) of the “Trusts” against the entities who sold the investments as REMICS based on a bogus prospectus.

61. In the above scenario, even if the attorney for the servicer who is foreclosing on behalf of the Trustee (who is in turn acting for the securitized trust) produces a copy of a note, or even an alleged original, the mortgage loan was not conveyed into the trust under the requirements of the prospectus for the trust or the REMIC requirements of the IRS.

62. As applied to the Class Members in this action, the end result would be that the required MBS asset, or any part thereof (mortgage note or security interest), would not have been legally transferred to the trust to allow the trust to ever even be considered a “holder” of a mortgage loan. Neither the “Trust” or the Servicer would ever be entitled to bring a foreclosure or declaratory action. The Trust will never have standing or be a real party in interest. They will never be the proper party to appear before the Court.

63. The transfer of mortgage loans into the trust after the “cut off date” (in the example 2006), destroys the trust’s REMIC tax exempt status, and these “Trusts” (and potentially the financial entities who created them) would owe millions of dollars to the IRS and the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet as the income would be taxed at of one hundred percent (100%).

This is really big and is likely to dwarf the Lehman Bros. collapse in terms of its consequent effects. While the federal government’s response is almost surely going to be an attempt to forgive all of the tax income owed and wave off all of the criminal violations, the desperate states whose laws were violated aren’t going to be easily persuaded to go along with the whitewashing and give up all of that legitimate tax income.

The madness of the monetarists

Citi’s chief economist takes the concept of financial insanity to new heights:

To restore monetary policy effectiveness in a low interest rate environment when confronted with deflationary or contractionary shocks, it is necessary to get rid of the zlb completely. This can be done in three ways: abolishing currency, taxing currency and ending the fixed exchange rate between currency and bank reserves with the Fed. All three are unorthodox. The third is unorthodox and innovative. All three are conceptually simple. The first and third are administratively easy to implement.

The first method does away with currency completely. This has the additional benefit of inconveniencing the main users of currency—operators in the grey, black and outright criminal economies. Adequate substitutes for the legitimate uses of currency, on which positive or negative interest could be paid, are available.

The second approach, proposed by Gesell, is to tax currency by making it subject to an expiration date. Currency would have to be “stamped” periodically by the Fed to keep it current. When done so, interest (positive or negative) is received or paid.

The third method ends the fixed exchange rate (set at one) between dollar deposits with the Fed (reserves) and dollar bills. There could be a currency reform first. All existing dollar bills and coin would be converted by a certain date and at a fixed exchange rate into a new currency called, say, the rallod. Reserves at the Fed would continue to be denominated in dollars. As long as the Federal Funds target rate is positive or zero, the Fed would maintain the fixed exchange rate between the dollar and the rallod.

This helps explain why gold prices have remained so strong despite declining debt and the deflationary environment. The one scenario that makes sense for the price of gold to continue to rise despite deflation (an increase in the value of money due to a decrease in the available supply of it) is if the “store of value” aspect of that money is increasingly under threat. Gold prices rising during deflation indicates that the increasing value of gold as denominated in non-gold goods and services is rising faster than the increasing value of money is rising against them, which is basically what we have been observing for the last two years.

All three of these Citi-endorsed suggestions go significantly beyond the Helicopter Ben’s conventional Keynesian lunacy. It wouldn’t only destroy the global economy, but as Mike Shedlock points out, it wouldn’t even accomplish the increase in credit that the banks are attempting to create in the first place. Implementing any of these three measures, but especially the first, would be rather like burning down the house to collect on fire insurance when you haven’t bothered with the minor step of taking out an insurance policy on the place first.

So this proposal to abolish currency should eliminate any last vestiges of doubt that the banks are a) insane with greed, b) incompetent, and c) totally uninterested in the well-being of the rest of the country. It seems increasingly obvious that abolishing the banking industry would be a much better idea.

Another banking bailout

In AFGHANISTAN?

As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan’s biggest bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a major shareholder in beleaguered Kabul Bank called on Thursday for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.

“America should do something,” said Karzai in a telephone interview, suggesting that the U.S. Treasury Department guarantee the funds of Kabul Bank’s clients, who number about a million and have more than a billion dollars on deposits with the bank.

Kabul Bank handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers. It has scores of branches across Afghanistan and holds the accounts of key Afghan government agencies. The collapse of the bank would likely spread panic throughout the country’s fledgling financial sector and wipe out nine years of effort by the United States to establish a sound Afghan banking system, seen as essential to the establishment of a functioning economy.

Good luck selling that one to the American people. Even the most rabid neocons won’t want to touch it. It’s insanity squared.