MERS gone Mainstream…
MERS, the Mortgage Holder You Might Not Know
MERS? It May Have Swallowed Your Loan
By MICHAEL POWELL and GRETCHEN MORGENSON
FOR more than a decade, the American real estate market resembled an overstuffed novel, which is to say, it was an engrossing piece of fiction.
Mortgage brokers hip deep in profits handed out no-doc mortgages to people with fictional incomes. Wall Street shopped bundles of those loans to investors, no matter how unappetizing the details. And federal regulators gave sleepy nods.
That world largely collapsed under the weight of its improbabilities in 2008.
But a piece of that world survives on Library Street in Reston, Va., where an obscure business, the MERS Corporation, claims to hold title to roughly half of all the home mortgages in the nation — an astonishing 60 million loans.
Never heard of MERS? That’s fine with the mortgage banking industry—as MERS is starting to overheat and sputter. If its many detractors are correct, this private corporation, with a full-time staff of fewer than 50 employees, could turn out to be a very public problem for the mortgage industry.
Check out the rest of this article here…
~
Wow, Paul Bognanno the interim CEO was released of his duties this week and now there is another interim CEO – someone from the Mortgage Bankers Association
http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/backgrounder-a-closer-look-at-mers-the-industrys-controversial-mortgage-cle
“Where’s the police when you need them?” How many times have you heard or said that refrain??? Because it’s the truth…the police always show up AFTER the act and then the innocent spend time and money trying to prove the guilty party GUILTY!
And that is where we are today in the case of this country’s financial collapse and the building of a company called MERS. Where was the SEC, where was the OCC, where were the FEDS…HECK where was just about ANY government agency??? Absolutely no government entity was on board ‘overseeing’ anyone in the covert operation of MERS. Now MERS appears to be the biggest culprit in the downslide of American trust (as it relates to banking and our government overseers at their worse).
MERS is just a company…a ‘shell’ of a company in fact…I ask you to contemplate the WHO, WHY, WHERE, WHEN and WHAT’s of this picture…remember the 5 W’s you learned in elementary school…well it still works to find the truth…Follow the 5 W’s to the beginning and clearly the ‘story’ of this crime will be the ‘bed-fellows’ that created MERS…the 5 W’s…Yep, where are the police when you need them!
Also… with the 5 Ws, “follow the money.”
I represent the borrower in a case involving the validity of MERS mortgages that the Connecticut Supreme Court recently said it would decide, instead of the Connecticut Appellate Court. The argument is that the purpose of a mortgage is to give a creditor the right to foreclose if the loan is not paid. Under Connecticut law, only the owner of the debt has the right to foreclose the mortgage (that’s actually the other issue to be decided on appeal). Because MERS never owns the debt, it never has a right to foreclose. As a result, the borrower never really gave MERS any mortgage interest because MERS cannot ever do anything with the interest. If the Supreme Court agrees, all MERS mortgages in Connecticut could be rendered void. The loan itself would remain but it would be unsecured. I am hopeful that the Supreme Court will hear the case before it recesses for the summer.
TY!
this is so typical! I have been in my own private foreclosure battle, and MERS is listed as Mortgagee on my Note….not sure what this means for me in Alabama, exactly.
If anyone wants to read another GREAT piece of work, please go to http://www.livinglies.com and look up a post called Class Action Suit started in Alabama. that piece of writing is mine, it’s my mortgage servicer nightmare with bac home loans servicing. I would love nothing more than to take these guys to the cleaners. If Americans don’t start standing up and fighting for the very things we’ve worked our entire lives to obtain (our homes), then we will continue to be walked all over and be the victims of unethical and immoral business practices. STAND UP AND FIGHT FOR WHAT’S YOURS!
JUST FABULOUS:)
A fabulous article that just about sums it up. Bravo to the NY times !!!!
TY 4 INFO:)