http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=168845
Busted by the kids in class!
The "finer minds of government swilled garbage" as well as the "talking heads" of MSM need to take note here!
How pathetic is it that the "law school kids" can see the full illegality
of the MERS operation when our own elected officials are either to cowardly to openly admit it or either to stupid to see it.
Either way it's the blind leading the blind rather than representing their own constituents against the fraud of the mortgage banking industry.
Heads should be rolling at this point.
When the average American can understand an issue that their representatives are refusing to discuss, out of fear of reprisal that their campaign funds will be cut off by the banking industry, it's time to change the rules of donation as well as lobbying.
Money cannot be ever considered more important than "the People", and yet it obvious that the decision that our elected officials have made.
And threatens to crumble into dust....
Yes, this is a draft. But it is coming from a law school's scholarly paper mill - not exactly the sort of place you want to ignore. A few good cites will set the table for those willing to dig into what's really not that hard to understand...
In the mid-1990s mortgage bankers decided they did not want to pay recording fees for assigning mortgages anymore.11 This decision was driven by securitization—a process of pooling many mortgages into a trust and selling income from the trust to investors on Wall Street. Securitization, also sometimes called structured finance, usually required several successive mortgage assignments to different companies. To avoid paying county recording fees, mortgage bankers formed a plan to create one shell company that would pretend to own all the mortgages in the country—that way, the mortgage bankers would never have to record assignments since the same company would always “own” all the mortgages.12
What do you call an artifice designed to evade the payment of taxes - which these fees are?
They incorporated the shell company in Delaware and called it Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.13.14
Even though not a single state legislature or appellate court had authorized this change in the real property recording, investors interested in subprime and exotic mortgage backed securities were still willing to buy mortgages recorded through this new proxy system
What do you call selling something to someone that claims an ownership right as an inherent part of the bargain - indeed, it's the only consideration that is offered in exchange for money, yet the state legislatures have not ratified this as proper, and in fact the county and state legislatures say it is not?
Because the new system cut out payment of county recording fees it was significantly cheaper for intermediary mortgage companies and the investment banks that packaged mortgage securities. Acting on the impulse to maximize profits by avoiding payment of fees to county governments much of the national residential mortgage market shifted to the new proxy recording system in only a few years. Now about 60% of the nation’s residential mortgages are recorded in the name of MERS, Inc. rather than the bank, trust, or company that actually has a meaningful economic interest in the repayment of the debt.15 For the first time in the nation’s history, there is no longer an authoritative, public record of who owns land in each county.Oh yes there is. It's at the county, where it always was.
Both the MERS-as-an-agent and the MERS-as-an-actual mortgagee theories have significant legal problems. If MERS is merely an agent of the actual lender, it is extremely unclear that it has the authority to list itself as a mortgagee or deed of trust beneficiary under state land title recording acts. These statutes do not have provisions authorizing financial institutions to use the name of a shell company, nominee, or some other form of an agent instead of the actual owner of the interest in the land. After all the point of these statutes is to provide a transparent, reliable, record of actual—as opposed to nominal—land ownership.
