The Nexus of Fabricated Mortgage Loan Assignments and Unlawful Home Foreclosures.

Abstract

Who has the legal right to foreclose on your home? More importantly, who doesn’t? Unlawful foreclosures are not just financial crimes against individuals and families. At the eviction stage, they are crimes perpetrated together with the threat of violence. Five years after the 2008 economic implosion, it is clear to anyone with a shred of sensibility that many financial regulators have become Wall Street commodities to be bought and sold. If that were not the case, by now there would have been hundreds, if not thousands of arrests, convictions and imprisonments; just as there were in the aftermath of the Savings and Loan debacle in the early 1990’s. Twenty years hence, our leaders are benign at best and complicit at worst. This is a legal issue that has haunted the foreclosure crisis since it began in 2008. During the 1990s, U.S banking interests launched an all-out campaign to repeal many of the federal banking regulations which were enacted by Congress in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929. Bit by bit, those regulations were stripped away until finally, in 1999, Congress repealed what was arguably the single most important financial regulation born out of that financial crisis: The Glass-Steagall Act. This deregulation allowed the rapid return to the same casino-like behavior that characterized the financial industry in the 1920s. Although many foreclosures are legitimate, a large percentage of them which were started since 2008 involved fake or forged documentation, the most egregious of which are recorded mortgage assignments involving private label securitized trusts created between 2004 and early 2007. In 2013, such unlawful foreclosures continue to occur daily, on a massive scale, in every State of the Union.

Keywords: Foreclosure, securitization, mortgage, MERS, Glass-Steagall, Ponzi Scheme, OCC, Independent Foreclosure Review, Mortgage Backed Securities, Elizabeth Warren, Graham-Leach-Bliley, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Matt Taibbi

JEL Classification: A14, A23, B25, D23, D63, K11, K42