Fri 2010-10-08 21:45 EDT

NO. THERE'S NO LIFE AT MERS

Damian ``DinSFLA'' Figueroa

...MERS was founded by the mortgage industry. MERS tracks ``changes'' in the ownership of the beneficial and servicing interests of mortgage loans as they are bought and sold among MERS members or others. Simultaneously, MERS acts as the ``mortgagee'' of record in a ``nominee'' capacity (a form of agency) for the beneficial owners of these loans...More than 60 percent of all newly-originated mortgages are registered in MERS. Its mission is to register every mortgage loan in the United States on the MERS System. Since 1997, more than 65 million home mortgages have been assigned a Mortgage Identification Number (MIN) and have been registered on the MERS System...Since MERS is a privately owned data system and not public, all mortgages and assignments must be recorded in order to perfect a lien. Since they failed to record assignments when these loans often traded ownership several times before any assignment was created, the legal issue is apparent. MERS may have destroyed the public land records by breaking the chain of title to millions of homes...

Life; MER; s.

THE PRAGMATIC CAPITALIST Wed 2010-02-10 11:22 EST

AN INSIDER'S VIEW OF THE REAL ESTATE TRAIN WRECK

TPC

The first time I spoke with real estate entrepreneur Andy Miller was in late 2007, when I asked him to serve on the faculty of a Casey Research Summit...what most intrigued me about Andy was that he had been almost alone among his peer group in foreseeing the coming end of the real estate bubble, and in liquidating essentially all of his considerable portfolio of projects near the top...he remains deeply concerned about the outlook for real estate...the United States home mortgage market has been nationalized without anybody noticing...If government support goes away, and it will go away, where will that leave the home market? It leaves you with a catastrophe...eventually the bond market is going to gag on the government-sponsored paper...commercial properties are not performing and that values have gone down, although I've got to tell you, the denial is still widespread, particularly in the United States and on the part of lenders sitting on and servicing all these real estate portfolios...The current volume of defaults is already alarming. And the volume of commercial real estate defaults is growing every month...When you hit that breaking point, unless there's some alternative in place, it's going to be a very hideous picture for the bond market and the banking system...second quarter 2010 is a guess...the FDIC and the Treasury Department have decided that rather than see 1,000 or 2,000 banks go under and then create another RTC to sift through all the bad assets, they'll let the banking system warehouse the bad assets. Their plan is to leave the assets in place, and then, when the market changes, let the banks deal with them. Now, that's horribly destructive...it's exactly a Japanese-style solution...The entire U.S. residential mortgage market has in effect been nationalized, but there wasn't any act of Congress, no screaming and shouting, no headlines in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times...That's a template for what they could do with the commercial loan market.

insider's view; pragmatic capitalists; Real Estate Train Wreck.

Fri 2009-11-20 09:44 EST

Fannie and Freddie Fire Their Own Inspector General

Ryan Grim

There is no independent auditor overseeing the federal agency responsible for some $6 trillion in home mortgages, because the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel ruled that the agency's inspector general didn't have authority to operate, according to internal memos obtained by the Huffington Post. The ruling came in response to a request from the Federal Housing Finance Agency itself -- which means that a federal agency essentially succeeded in getting rid of its own inspector general.

Fannie; Freddie Fire; Inspector generally.

Thu 2009-11-19 10:26 EST

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash | McClatchy

Greg Gordon

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk...

Goldman Secretly Bet; McClatchy; U.S. housing crash.

The Baseline Scenario Thu 2009-10-08 16:52 EDT

The Problem with Securitization

James Kwak

The New York Times has a story on ``Paralysis in the Debt Markets'' which says, basically, that credit has dried up because of lack of demand for asset-backed securities. In English, that means that since no one wants to invest in securities that are made out of home mortgages, the people who originate mortgages have no place to sell the mortgages to, so they don't have any money to lend. And this is also true of commercial real estate, student loans, and so on. For example, ``A once-thriving private market in securities backed by home mortgages has collapsed, from $744 billion in 2005, at the peak of the housing boom, to $8 billion during the first half of this year.''...the private market may never recover. The boom in securitization was based on investors' willingness to believe what investment banks and credit rating agencies said about these securities.

Baseline Scenario; problem; securitizations.

Sun 2008-08-24 00:00 EDT

Here comes the downsizing of finance

by Martin Hutchinson (Prudent Bear); auction-rate securities (ARS); credit default swaps (CDS); ``CDS market creates many times as much risk as it hedges or transfers''; GSEs ``leveraged more than would have been possible without the governments quasi-guarantee, lobbied like to crazy to ensure they were not properly regulated and collapsed thankfully into the arms of the taxpayer as soon as ill winds began to blow...by their presence they turned the soundest product in financial markets, the home mortgage, into an obscene speculative casino, causing collateral damage of many times their own losses.'' ``much of the financial services innovation of the last generation was spurious and unsound, and needs to be done away with''

comes; downsizing; finance.