This arrogant! – (from Money Talks News) –
How many people didn’t get an attorney and thought they were safe because they made all their payments?
James Pilant
Category: White Collar Crime
Why False Affidavits Matter
I found this video today. It’s short and precise. I recommend you watch it. It explains (generally speaking) the affidavit’s importance in law.
Good Stuff!
Stay tuned. I spend hours a day reading about the foreclosure mess from major news sources, internet sites, legals sources and the foreign press.
I’ll keep you up to date.
James Pilant
More Evidence That Foreclosures Were Done Incorrectly – 55,000 Times!
Remember everybody including the White House says there is no systematic problem with the mortgage industry. Wells Fargo is apparently not cooperating with the narrative
Wells Fargo admitted Wednesday it made mistakes in the paperwork for thousands of foreclosure cases and promised to fix them.
The San Francisco-based bank said it plans to refile documents in 55,000 of the cases by mid-November. The company said not all those cases included errors but didn’t say how many thousands did.
Wells Fargo described the mistakes as technical and said it has no plans to halt the foreclosure process, though filing new paperwork will cause some delays.
“We don’t believe that there are instances in which the foreclosures would not have occurred otherwise,” said Teri Schrettenbrunner, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman. The documents are being refiled in the 23 states where a judge’s approval is needed to complete a foreclosure.
I guess there isn’t any real problem. Oh! and they think so too – (from further down in the article) –
On a conference call with investors this month, Stumpf said the bank is “confident that our practices, procedures and documentation” are accurate.
Well, that’s reassuring. Except for those, well, 55,000 mistakes, they’re accurate.
I teach. By their standards, not only did all my students pass with A’s, they passed and got full credit for all the classes meeting nearby. They may have passed courses in other dimensions and forms of reality.
I hate to tell them this, but 55,000 mistakes is a lot of mistakes! Further, it doesn’t make claims that A) “We don’t believe that there are instances in which the foreclosures would not have occurred otherwise,” and B) “the bank is confident that our practices, procedures and documentation are accurate,” sound very convincing.
It’s kind of like a married man being caught with another woman. He didn’t really cheat except for those 55,000 times. Both he and Wells Fargo want you to know that it isn’t that big a deal.
James Pilant
President Clueless!
The mortgage industry lies and cheats for two years and the President conveys his concerns.
He is worried about deadbeat homeowners.
I have to point out no matter how deadbeat a homeowner, he didn’t deliberately create a half million false affidavits. No matter how far behind in payments a homeowner might be, he didn’t foreclose on a property he didn’t own.
But the President isn’t worried about violations of the law, he’s worried that some homeowner will get aid he doesn’t deserve. That explains the byzantine labyrinth of paperwork required for the federal program, HAMP, (and why it doesn’t work).
“The biggest challenge is how do you make sure that you are helping those who really deserve help and if they get some temporary help can get back on their feet, make their payments and move forward and stay in their home versus either people who are speculators, own second homes that they really couldn’t afford because they’d gotten a subprime loan, and people who through no fault of their own just can’t afford their house anymore because of the change in housing values or their incomes don’t support it,” Obama said during a roundtable discussion with a handful of progressive bloggers at the White House.
“And we’re always trying to find that sweet spot to use as much of the money that we have available to us to help those who can be helped, without wasting that money on folks who don’t deserve help,” he continued. “And that’s a tough balance to strike.”
“The sweet spot,” Wow, do you get the impression that the only people allowed anywhere near him are bankers telling stories of deadbeat homeowners. I assume after they finish their litany about “personal responsibility, they then tell him how sad it is that the American people don’t appreciate his efforts.
I have been directly criticized for having the category, incredible stupidity, as one of my topics for search engines to pick up. It’s shrill. What else is appropriate here? Damn right it’s shrill.
I haven’t the slightest objection to being tough of wrongdoing on the part of the mortgage holders. But, good grief, the banks and foreclosure industry have been gaming the legal system, and refusing to act in good faith. Doesn’t he notice? Is he obligated by his Presidential oath to only worry about wrongdoing by non-banking entities?
Couldn’t he generate an unkind word for robo-affidavits? Just one unkind word?
He couldn’t even manage that.
Is the President right and fifty states’ Attorney Generals wrong?
Well, let’s look at the problem from a different angle – from CBS news –
Now there’s more evidence of just how blatantly the paperwork for that flood of foreclosures has been mishandled. Consider this: a stack of legal documents used to seize homes that don’t even identify the lender claiming to hold the mortgage.
Instead the words “bogus assignee” fill the space where the lender’s name should be. In foreclosure after foreclosure, the lender’s address is listed only as x’s, such as xxxxxxx. In some cases the documents identify the lender as “bad bene.”
“They have foreclosed in the name of ‘bad bene,’ for bad beneficiary,” says attorney Robert Hager.
Hager, who represents homeowners fighting foreclosure, says the paperwork also appears to bear bogus signatures.
“This is how arrogant they are with regard to taking homes,” he says.
How arrogant, indeed.
They might be less arrogant if held accountable.
James Pilant
Drumroll: Bank of America reviews several hundred foreclosure cases and finds…. (via Rortybomb)
Further evidence is coming in that the banks’ and the Obama Administration’s assurances of no systematic abuse in the foreclosure process are just nonsense.
Here’s some more evidence.
By the way, the web site Rortybomb seems to really have their stuff together. If I were you I’d give it a regular look.
James Pilant
via Rortybomb
“We Can Either Have a Rational Resolution to the Foreclosure Crisis or We Can Preserve the Capital Structure of the Banks. We Can’t Do Both” (via Foreclosureblues)
Foreclosureblues is a web site devoting to defending homeowners. I like this web site. This is a fighting web site filled with a desire for justice and fair dealing. Here is there take on today’s congressional hearings.
James Pilant
via Foreclosureblues
Banks Muscle Up For Fight With States’ Attorney Generals!
Bank of America is loading up big guns for the coming battle over its mortgage practices. It has picked up former Virginia Attorney General Richard Cullen and Brian Boyle, formerly of the Justice Department.
Richard Cullen, chairman of the McGuireWoods law firm and Virginia attorney general from 1997-1998, is one of the lawyers representing the nation’s largest mortgage servicer. Cullen has already been communicating with the offices of various state attorneys general, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
Here’s more from further down in the same article –
Cullen served on President George W. Bush’s legal team during the Florida vote recount after the 2000 presidential election. He also represented Republican Tom DeLay in a recent federal probe that did not result in any charges being filed against the former U.S. House of Representatives majority leader.
Through a spokesman Cullen declined to comment on Bank of America. The company also did not answer questions on Wednesday.
Bank of America has also turned to a former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration to represent it in dealings with state attorneys general.
Brian Boyle, formerly principal deputy assistant U.S. attorney general, participated in a conference call between the bank and representatives from the Florida attorney general’s office, a spokeswoman for the office said.
It’s a pity that the Americans who were the victims of these practices will have to fight without picking up this kind of firepower.
But there is such a thing as justice and if these practices are as nefarious as they appear to me.
Justice will come.
James Pilant
The Definition Of Success Depends On Whether Or Not You Work For The Treasury Department
That doesn’t strike me as a success. If the intention was to keep people in their homes, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
“The most specific of TARP’s Main Street goals, “preserving homeownership,” has so far fallen woefully short, with TARP’s portion of the Administration’s mortgage modification program yielding only 207,000 (out of a total of 467,000) ongoing permanent modifications since TARP’s inception, a number that stands in stark contrast to the 5.5 million homes receiving foreclosure filings and more than 1.7 million homes that have been lost to foreclosure since January 2009.”
That little quote is from the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP). He has some more to say though –
“SIGTARP, along with the other TARP oversight bodies (GAO and the Congressional Oversight Panel), has long argued that Treasury should adopt meaningful benchmarks and goals for HAMP – permanent modifications that offer secure, sustainable relief to the program’s intended beneficiaries. Remarkably, Treasury has steadfastly rejected these recommendations, and now finds itself defending a program that is failing to meet TARP’s goal of “perserving homeownership”. As a result, a program that began with much promise must be counted among those that risk generating public anger and mistrust.”
But it gets better – at a meeting with administration officials for bloggers – Well, read the following –
On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”. Treasury officials are not cruel people. I’m sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those.
You see, HAMP is designed to help the banks not the homeowners. It enabled the banks to manage their foreclosures during a period in which it would have been difficult to keep up the pace.
So, success is defined as making sure the banks are successful.
Gives you a warm feeling doesn’t it?
James Pilant
The Vast Majority Of Foreclosures Were Done Correctly?
We have been told over and over again during the last few weeks that the vast majority of foreclosures were done correctly. The White House and the various cabinet departments have echoed this claim.
This is all very odd. Since, the foreclosure documents were in hundreds of thousands of cases not even looked at, how would the banks or the Obama Administration know how many were done correctly?
They can’t. It’s impossible for them to have such knowledge.
Why would they say so? I suppose it’s a matter of faith, a belief that these huge institutions are run by competent, moral people. Faith is not a good substitute for factual data.
Well, new information is coming in. I have predicted that this kind of data would be coming in and here is the first.
From the New York Daily News –
Thousands of foreclosures across the city are in question because paperwork used to justify the seizure of homes is riddled with flaws, a Daily News probe has found.
Banks have suspended some 4,450 foreclosures in all five boroughs because of paperwork problems like missing and inaccurate documents, dubious signatures and banks trying to foreclose on mortgages they don’t even own.
So, 4,450 botched mortgage foreclosures have been found in five boroughs. That hardly squares with the idea that virtually all foreclosures were done correctly.
Here’s what one of the judges said, (again from the article) – Schack told The News he expects to see more paperwork snafus. “It’s like an onion we keep peeling,” he said. “It seems to be layers and layers of problems.”
Do you believe that the vast majority of foreclosures were done correctly?
I expect much more data to come out and it will not be to the foreclosure industry’s benefit. Nor will the Obama administration escape blame for its ridiculous unsupported claims about the crisis.
James Pilant
HAMP (Home Affordability Modification Program) Disastrous!
What a shock!
The Administration’s signature program to help homeowners is not working.
The banks get a 700 billion dollar bailout with no questions asked and the homeowner goes through mountains of paperwork and winds up getting nailed for late payments and fees they didn’t even incur!
The Obama administration’s signature anti-foreclosure effort, unveiled in 2009 with the promise of helping three to four million homeowners modify their mortgages, is such a failure that it now risks “generating public anger and mistrust,” according to a federal audit released Monday.
Far from helping at-risk homeowners, the Home Affordable Modification Program has actually made some homeowners worse off, according to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program — also known as the Wall Street bailout. The Treasury Department set aside $50 billion from TARP, plus another $25 billion from taxpayer-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to give mortgage servicers thousand-dollar incentives to reduce monthly mortgage payments by modifying eligible homeowners’ loans. But more people have been bounced from the program than have been helped by it.
People who apply for modifications via HAMP sometimes “end up unnecessarily depleting their dwindling savings in an ultimately futile effort to obtain the sustainable relief promised by the program guidelines,” the report notes, putting the imprimatur of the federal government on a claim long made by housing experts and homeowner advocates. “Others, who may have somehow found ways to continue to make their mortgage payments, have been drawn into failed trial modifications that have left them with more principal outstanding on their loans, less home equity (or a position further ‘underwater’), and worse credit scores.
“Perhaps worst of all,” it continues, “even in circumstances where they never missed a payment, they may face back payments, penalties, and even late fees that suddenly become due on their ‘modified’ mortgages and that they are unable to pay, thus resulting in the very loss of their homes that HAMP is meant to prevent.”
But don’t worry. The administration has a defense.
Treasury officials are adamant that not only is the program helping those homeowners who remain in it, but it also has helped those homeowners who have been bounced. In fact, those homeowners who ultimately fell out of the program benefited from the equivalent of a “free tax cut” while they were in the program because over that period, they were paying less on their mortgage than was otherwise required. And, officials say, this came without cost to the taxpayer.
That’s right. Even if it didn’t work out for you and we threw you out of the program like yesterday’s garbage (You still lose your home.), you got a “free tax cut.” That makes it all better.
Let’s be clear. There is no amount of evidence, no lack of effectiveness or intelligence, that the current administration does not believe cannot be washed away by good public relations.
I don’t get it. Why even bother to create this program? It’s about ten percent of what the banks got. So, already you knew immediately, average Americans are at best an afterthought.
I supposed it’s better to demonstrate over time you generally loath the American people, than to tell them immediately?
“Oh, you say,” James, “You’re overreacting, the President is constrained from helping these people. It’s the political system.”
No, it’s not. These people are the real victims of an orgy of speculation and they only thing they’ve been getting for two years, is a continuous, mile thick, wall of lectures on personal responsibility.
The President has within in his authority, dozens, hundreds of actions he could take to help these people out, and those things are not being done. At the very least, the mortgage industry could have been held to the simple legal procedures necessary for a proper foreclosure and this administration was not only unable to do that, they see no crisis now.
Where are out political choices?
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.