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Notes to myself, possibly of interest to others.
-- Bill Northlich

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Foreclosuregate - Some righting of the masts

Lots of recent stuff on Foreclosuregate.  A big flap was started by David Kotok, via Ritholtz, who quoted a "friend" who said "if the chain of title of the note is broken, then the borrower no longer owes any money on the loan."  This went viral, but appears to be wrong.

Ritholtz today quotes another anonymous source to calm us all down:  "They are wrong with regards to the Note and chain of title. Actually, they couldn’t more wrong. The Note is just the IOU and gives the lender the right to collect any money lost. MERS has nothing to do with Notes only with mortgages. The mortgage is the controlling document that is used for the foreclosure and the ONLY document. The mortgage gets assigned from one lender to another and often the assignments didn’t get recorded and the last lender, who actually owned the mortgage, didn’t have the right to foreclosure. Therefore, they created MERS, which is a registration of the mortgage but not to a bank, but to MERS. MERS is the mortgage holder and the loans are assigned via registration number. Therefore, if XYZ sells a mortgage to ABC, MERS is notified that the lender’s MERS ID is changed from XYZ to ABC and there is no need for a recorded assignment and that alleviated a huge problem for unrecorded or lost assignment. The foreclosure is actually performed in the name of MERS. So I am not sure what the heck this guy is talking about. The issue with GMAC and other lenders has NOTHING to do with this. The issue is what they are calling “Robo-signers” which are individuals who signed affidavits stating that they had “personal knowledge” of the facts in a foreclosure case, when in fact they did not. http://www.forextv.com/forex-news-story/forex-why-did-the-mortgage-servicers-use-robo-signers Read this actual and in the paragraph that starts with Second, they will provide the support for my claims. Here are additional articles I searched for on the web. http://www.fiercefinance.com/story/robo-signer-wells-fargo-no-foreclosure-halt-yet/2010-10-14 and http://www.housingwire.com/2010/10/15/robo-signers-are-a-drop-in-the-bucket-to-mortgage-industrys-problems."

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