Citigroup coins crisis "Foreclosures gone wild!"

Zero Hedge founder, Tyler Durden, and his crew have been (as usual) on point with the unfolding foreclosure/mortgage/title fraud fiasco, and yesterday they brought us another report:

"Citigroup Call on Implications on Foreclosure: "Just the Tip of the Iceburg."

You know things are getting interesting when Citigroup hosts a conference call during which their expert guest speaker, associate law professor at Georgetown University Adam Levitin, calls the current visible ramifications of the foreclosure/mortgage/title fraud crisis "just the tip of the iceberg" and suggests major unseen problems to come, and then Citi, one the largest and "most respected" (ha!) banks in the world, issues its an official report on the crisis and the conference call which the bank decides to title along the lines of "Girls Gone Wild" with a Citi spin: "Foreclosures Gone Wild."

I kid you not.

Here's the document, "Foreclosures Gone Wild," available for our scribd'ing thanks to the Village Whisperer. The following are what I think are the most telling parts of the Citi document...with a little bit of my take added for good measure:

1.) Curse those "arcane" laws-- they're always getting in the way of our fraud!

Page 1: The underlying issues which have recentlyerupted involve the proper transfer of paperwork in the mortgage securitization process. Real estate law is “arcane” and requires that paperwork be physically transferred when mortgage ownership is transferred (“assigned”) from one party to another party. It appears that in many instances during the mortgage securitization process over the past few years, the paperwork was not properly transferred. If the paperwork was not transferred in the legally required manner, it raises questions not only about who owns the mortgages in question but also about the validity and tax exempt status of the trusts in which the mortgages reside. All of these issues also bear directly on the role played by the title insurance industry.

My comment: the reason why so many "instances" over the "past few years" when "paperwork was not properly transferred" were able to manifest is because of the bank-funded MERS front operation, which "appears" to have been basically attempting not only to circumvent those "arcane" laws, but actually to supersede them. MERS was hailed as a "replacement" to these damn pesky laws--and if it wasn't for those meddling judges, it'd have gotten away with it!

2.) Don't worry--everything is under control: we'll just pay people to commit perjury!

Page 1: Banks have attemptedto remedy the aforementioned problems by having employees sign affidavits that they have personal knowledge that the trust was once in possession of the necessary documents. Two problems have emerged with regards to these affidavits. First, several news stories have reported that the people signing these affidavits had no knowledge of the matters in question despite the fact that there were legally swearing that they did. Second, the affidavits may be irrelevant because the issue is not that the documents were lost but they were never properly transferred at each step of the aforementioned securitization process.

My comment: "Having employees sign affidavits" is a very interesting way to phrase the robo-signing debacle. From whom the orders came, we do not yet know. But we do have an admission from the operations supervisor at JPM's Chase Home Finance, Beth Ann Cottrell, who gave sworn deposition on May 19, that she and seven other JPM employees signed approximately 18,000 documents per month, and that they did this for several years. These so-called robo-signers often used wildly different signatures from one document to the next, and an unconfirmed report is floating around that another confirmed robo-signer Marshe Craine's signature is even on some of President Obama's mortgage paperwork. People are searching the internet for the names of these individuals, and inspecting their own mortgage/foreclosure documents. Indeed it is "just the tip of the iceberg."


3.) C’mon, America--who do you trust: us, the criminal consortium of banks hell-bent on extracting every last drop of wealth we can out of you, your house, your investments, and most especially, your government, or those damn pesky “arcane” laws of yours?! We repeat, in case you didn't hear us the first time, your laws are just stupid and "arcane," and are unnecessarily complicating the massive international fraud-based housing system we are attempting to implement, dammit!

Page 2: The underlying problems center around the proper transfer of paperwork. It is important to appreciate that real estate law is arcane and requires the physical transfer of documents when ownership changes hands. In industry parlance this transfer is known as “assignment.”
When a mortgage is securitized and placed in a mortgage pool, there are typically four parties involved. The mortgage bank or lender originates a mortgage and then sells it to a “sponsor” who in turn sells it to a “depositor” who then sells it to the “trust” which governs the pool. Importantly, as noted above, the original paperwork must be transferred at each step of the process.
It now appears that in many cases (1) the paperwork was not properly transferred and (2) it is unclear in many cases where the actual paperwork actually rests today.

My comments: Citigroup, repeating opinions, such as calling laws "arcane", do not magically make them fact.


4.) And how dare you people demand that we pay taxes! Taxes?! How are we
gonna completely enslave you to our evil fiat system if we have to pay taxes?!

Page 3: Most mortgage trusts were set up as REMICs (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits) which are special purpose vehicles used to pool mortgages. Under the IRS code, REMIC confers a special tax status in which the cash flows to the trust are not taxed. Investors in the trust pay taxes. The tax exempt nature is important. If the trusts were in fact to be taxed, the taxes would distort the yields required by investors.
To qualify as a REMIC under the IRS code and enjoy the beneficial tax treatment, the trust (1) must be passive and (2) cannot acquire any new assets 90 days following the trust’s creation. If, as described above, mortgage documents were never correctly passed through to the trust when it was established, then the trust may not actually own the underlying mortgages it purports to own. Although it is possible that this issue could be remedied by some legal maneuvering, doing so could violate the REMIC status since the trust would be acquiring assets long after the aforementioned 90 day period has expired. Such a violation in turn could trigger a sizeable tax burden for investors. Our speaker indicated that there are a handful of open questions on this front and that this is a legal gray area.

My comments: "...the trust may not actually own the underlying mortgages it purports to own," not to mention, it might not have any entitlement to the "underlying" asset, and if the asset was derived through fraud, those in the trust collecting through the fruits of fraud might themselves be liable for repayment. Just ask the Madoff "investors."


5.) Drat! We should have made our buddy Paulson force the taxpayers buy the title insurance companies—that's what we should have done! How dare they do this to us banks?! But its not too late---we'll show them. Call Timmy G!

Page 3: If a scenario emerges in which title companies are unwilling to issue title insurance, in those scenarios lenders may cease lending. When a home with a mortgage on it is sold, the mortgage must be released at closing by the current mortgage owner before a new mortgage with title insurance is issued. If it is not known with certainty who owns the mortgage in question, it cannot be released. If the title company is not satisfied that there is a good release on the old mortgage, it will refuse to insure the new mortgage.

My comment: we have now reached the "scenario" of title insurance companies refusing to issue title insurance, including the nation's largest title holding company, Old Republic, refusing Ally Bank (GMAC Mortgage) and JPMorgan. I'm sure title insurance companies are searching like mad for the titles they do insure, because many no doubt have fraudulent transfers on their hands, and in their books.


6.) So what we created MERS to help us commit fraud---you got a problem with that?

Page 4: MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) functions as a centralized electronic registry of mortgages and tracks ownership of mortgages. MERS allows mortgage ownership to change hands efficiently and relatively quickly since it is electronic and allows all parties to forgo making a filing in local land records. Indeed, MERS was designed to function as a substitute for local land records.

My comment: Well, hey, what's wrong with designing a bank-funded front corporation to "function as a substitute for local land records," aka "laws"? Get outta here--I do it all the time! Just last week I finalized my latest system, "TERS" or Truck Electronic Reigistration System, which allows me to state what my rig weighs and that my axles are legal, and blah blah blah, and hit the road, baby! Its been working like a charm for all those 79,000 lbs copper loads--I just state my empty wieght as 1,000lbs! Pretty cool, huh? Oh, and wait till you see my other invention CERS--Currency Electronic Registration System--that allows me to register my junk mail are vertiable currency. Yo, let me tell you what--substitutes for laws and records are waaaaaay better than the real thing!


7.) Oh, this Levitin guys is just another one of those lawyers who are so concerned about “laws.” Doesn’t he know that laws for people, not banks?

Page 4: Although MERS was designed to enhance efficiency in the mortgage assignment process, Levitin argued it may not conform with the law. “Slowly but surely” courts are issuing decisions which “cast validity on the MERS process.” Although ~60% of mortgages list MERS as the “nominee” which owns the mortgage, a handful of recent court cases have ruled that MERS has no standing in foreclosure actions either because (1) physical paperwork must be transferred when a mortgage is assigned by one party to another or (2) MERS has no true economic interest in the mortgage in question since it collects no payments from the borrowers.

My comments: whooops.


8.) Whatever with your “laws:” we own the government, so we have you either way.
Page 4: Ultimately, if these issues do in fact escalate, the Administration may try to broker some sort of settlement. If such deal brokering does take place, Levitin believes that “some payment” will be exacted from the lenders and servicers. The Administration could bargain for more mortgage principal write downs.

My comment: in other words, the Administration could completely ignore the systemic fraud and outrageous criminal behavior of the banks, and placate the voters with a mortgage principal write down plan funded by other taxpayers, leaving the banks completely untouched for their several years-long fraud scheme, and further paving the path of the United States to certain doom. Of course, that is all to completely ignore that fact that the federal government has no jurisdiction over a particular state's mortgage filing rules, or its "arcane" law, but can only constitutionally intervene in cases of interstate transactions under the Commerce clause. But that's didn't stop the feds before, so why start now?

And exactly this is happening right now. The mysteriously well-greased Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act (HR 3808) slid through both the House and Senate without even making the news, and just in time for the Congressional recess. As for now, the president has pocket-vetoed the bill by refusing to sign it, which now sends the bill back to the House (I say "as for now" because you trust this president about as much as you could trust the last one). The bill is just a couple of pages long, and sounds benign at first:

HR 3808, Section 2:
Each Federal court shall recognize any lawful notarization made by a notary public licensed or commissioned under the laws of a State other than the State where the Federal court is located if--

(1) such notarization occurs in or affects interstate commerce; and

(2)(A) a seal of office, as symbol of the notary public’s authority, is used in the notarization; or...

As this sounds a lot like each State recognizing the others' driver's licenses (it is not, but it sounds like that). Of course, the federal government would never allow the same argument with guns or drugs, but this doesn't sound too bad. However, then you get to (2)(B), the very next line of the bill, and see exactly why this slid through the most pro-bankster Congress in decades like a bankster's newly sharped and nicely heated knife through a large, mindless, cowardly block of butter:

... (B) in the case of an electronic record, the seal information is securely attached to, or logically associated with, the electronic record so as to render the record tamper-resistant.

In other words, in States that have those pesky "arcane" laws that require physical transfer of the necessary documents, the rule of law in States that allow for robo-signing and non-judicial foreclosure will reign supreme. In other other words, States best shut up and listen to the banks and believe whatever they say especially if they can't prove it, and even if the States have the very signatory admitting that they lied, and even if the States have knowledge of the same notary "verifying" the words of the signatory even while the notary is looking at documents from the same signatory that have three different signatures. The notaries are not off the hook in this, either, as it appears many of them facilitated this operation (probably for the right price). The real name for the bill should have been the "Mortgage Document Fraud Immunity" bill.

So why do I call the lump of butter known as our Congress "cowardly," as well as "pro-bankster" and "mindless"? Why don't I name names? Well, you know I love naming names, but you see, we can't name names and we can't know which crooks voted for these crooks because the bill was passed in the House by a voice vote, and in the Senate by unanimous consent! That is as cowardly as it gets: the members of Congress apparently learned from TARP-stain, as pro-TARP congressman after pro-TARP congressman fails in the primaries and struggles for reelection, that flicking off the people and voting with the criminal elite isn't exactly good voting policy. So, instead of deciding not to flick off the people anymore, they'll just do it under the cowardly cover of a voice vote. That's why--its disgusting.

So, now for president Obama has curtailed the Mortgage Document Fraud Immunity Act of 2010, but I remain suspicious. I have no evidence for the following speculation, but here it is anyway: I think Mr Levitin is right. I think the administration is holding out for some election-saving last minute "bargain" with the banks that presents the appearance of principal reduction, moves perhaps 25% of the currently underwater loan-owners just to the surface, restores the banks' balance sheets through a massive taxpayer funded infusion, and disables the now 50 State AG's investigating the fraud. In reality, the "bargain" will be a TARP 2 under cover of "principal reduction," and will result by another massive transfer of wealth from the American people to to elite--and immune--banks. The people moved from underwater to treading water and gasping for air will be able to continue to pay the banks for perhaps another 2 years, at which point they will run out of stream, sink under, and have their houses taken after all, and after having paid the fraud-infested bank, which probably doesn't even own the loan or the title, another 50% of their income.

Sorry to be so "Debbie-downer", but that's what happens when you ignore fraud and cover it over with "bargains." Its like watching snow fall over a dunghill: it doesn't get rid what's underneath.

MERS, Citibank, Ally named in civil RICO suit; Nation's largest title insurance company denies new title insurance polices to JPM, Ally sales

A civil Rackteering-influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) suit has been filed on behalf of Kentucky homeowners against Ally Bank, Citibank, and the major bank-created/funded title middleman front, Mortgage Electronic Registration Service (MERS). From Bloomberg:

"The suit claims that through MERS the banks are foreclosing on homes even when they don’t hold titles to the properties.

'Defendants have filed foreclosures throughout the state of Kentucky and the United States of America knowing that they were not the ‘owners’ or beneficiaries of the loan they filed foreclosure upon,” the homeowners wrote in their complaint filed Sept. 28 in federal court in Louisville, Kentucky.

The homeowners claim the defendants filed or caused to be filed mortgages with forged signatures, filed foreclosure actions months before they acquired any legal interest in the properties and falsely claimed to own notes executed with mortgages."

The title insurance crisis is taking hold as well. The nation's largest title insurance company, Old Republic Title Holding Company, announced that the company has ceased offers of title insurance to all Ally Bank and JPM foreclosure sales. Bank of America, which has already suspended foreclosures in the face of the 40 state AG investigation, is likely next.

If the nation's largest title insurance company is too scared to get near these toxic titles, who will? The plot gets thicker.

Exposure of MASSIVE foreclosure fraud continues, accelerates; Patterns of fraudulent mortgages emerge; Title insurance fraud ramifications balloon

This is a must-read article via Zero Hedge:

"The biggest fraud in the history of capital markets."

These days are looking more and more like August 2008, as this foreclosure/mortgage fraud crisis is getting more and more severe by the day. Bankster Report's favorite, Catherine Austin Fitts, has been saying since at least 1995 that many of the "houses" to which MBS are supposed to be value-linked don't exist, and never did. In 1995, she confronted a Clinton administration official with the fact that "the Administration was planning on issuing more mortgages than there were houses or residents," to which she was told "Shut up, this is none of your business."

It's our business now, and it's the business of at least 40 attorneys general and hundreds of fraud investigators.

The mortgage market, from the most fundamental perspective, is in fact based on fraud, because mortgages themselves in our financial system are based on non-existent money. But Ms Fitts (and me too) think that the fraud is much less "abstract," but literally involves not only non-existent money, but non-existant houses. This latest robo-signing debacle only more clearly exposes that no one--not regulators, not bankers, not the market, and not even market participants and the people buying this crap--are even concerned with the legitimacy of the documenting paperwork: this current, rapidly expanding foreclosure fraud crisis is the obvious result of the underlying mortgage fraud crisis. Investigators are finally working it backwards: when a good doctor sees certain symptons--that is, banks having using illegal practices during foreclosure proceedings--he can works it back to determine the specific disease causing these symptons--that is, the banks using illegal practices to get the mortgages in the first place!

The events of this last month, thanks to judges and lawyers courageous enough to challenge the banks as well as some whistleblowers from the banks themselves, are making it clear that the largest US banks have absolutely no qualms about submitting fraudulent documents, suborning their employees to commit perjury, and outright circumventing the law. As Bloomberg reports today, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Ally Bank (the post-TARP name of GMAC) have admitted submitting fraudulent documents in hundreds of thousands of court cases. Would it be such a big jump to simply fabricate some mortgages, securitize them, and submit some nice, new, shiny tranches of "AAA" MBS to the market? If the banks are committing such crimes today in this "new age of increased regulation," how much more would they have been tempted to do when regulation was "more lax"?

From the above Bloomberg article:

"In a lawsuit filed on behalf of Kentucky homeowners last week, plaintiffs claimed banks, MERS [the Virginia-based Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, which handles mortgage transfers between member banks] and loan servicers filed mortgages with forged signatures, submitted foreclosure actions months before they acquired any legal interest in the properties and falsely claimed to own notes executed with mortgages."

If true, all of the above are serious cases of mortgage and foreclosure fraud, and perhaps more complexly, title fraud and title insurance fraud. For example: JPM forecloses on a house it claims to own because the current occupant is not making mortgage payments. JPM and the occupant go through the court proceeding, and despite the occupants protestations that JPM is not following the law, the occupant can't prove his claims and JPM doesn't admit to having done anything wrong, and so the judge grants JPM possession of the house. The occupant, who had purchased title insurance along with his now-doomed mortgage, loses the house. JPM resells the house to a new person and also sells that person a matching loan. The new occupant is current on payments, and himself has title insurance. The non-paying occupant has been removed, JPM was able to recover losses, and a new occupant is in the home: the system has "worked." Right?

He he he .... One year later (ie: today), JPM is sued by the attorney general of the State for fraud after the AG discovers patterns of document fraud and falsified court documents and gather testimony from JPM employee who state that they were told to robo-sign documents, which both the employees and supervisors knew was illegal, but did anyway. JPM admits that it "may" have used robo-signers for the documents, and perhaps even forged a few signatures, and is "having trouble" producing the title in some of the foreclosures cases in the AG's State. The original occupant sees this story about JPM--the bank that he claimed was up to something fishy during the foreclosure proceedings---and calls a lawyer. He asks a simple question: "Mr Lawyer, does my title insurance cover fraud?" The lawyer says, obviously, "Of course. Why?"

Meanwhile, the second occupant is still faithfully paying JPM for his loan, and hasn't missed a payment. Of course, he might be paying JPM, but JPM doesn't really own the title anymore, because JPM has pledged it as collateral for some other loans from another bank, and has also securitized the original loan into several tranches of "AAA" MBS and sold them. MERS is holding the title as the middleman between the banks. The lawyer for the first occupant of the house calls the AG to report his client's case. The AG adds the case to his successful fraud suit against JPM, and JPM is found guilty of filing fraudulent documents and falsifying court records.

Upon the conviction, the lawyer calls his client's (the original occupant) title insurance company. Like all insurance companies, ABC Title Co is just another financial institution, and the company has been not only watching the JPM cases closely, but has been suffering itself due to the rulings. As an insurer against fraud, ABC Title is now finding itself liable for thousands of payouts to the mortgage holders that JPM fraudulently foreclosed upon. ABC Title can't keep up, of course, and so ABC itself sues JPM. Meanwhile, the original occupant is also fighting to recover the title itself, which JPM has fronted as collateral and which is in the supposedly in the possession of the MERS middleman, and which another person entirely--the second occupant--has an seperate independent title insurance claim on. So, there are two individuals with two different insurance claims on the same title, a title that is pledged as collateral to a second bank, a third party title holder who has no idea who really owns the title, and a group of MBS holders expecting their money from JPM, which JPM is expecting from the second occupant! See what a mess fraud makes!

How does a judge settle this--and how do the title insurance companies survive (never mind the people)? They don't: there is not enough to go around. If JPM committed fraud, and the first occupant had title insurance for fraudulent claims against the property, then the title company owes the first occupant compensation. If JPM committed fraud that impacted the title company, then JPM owes the title company compensation, too. And then there's the guy who bought title insurance on a title that had a latent fraud claims against it and that happens to be the title for the house he's living in and financing. This is not even to mention anything about the second bank which is now legally entitled to the title as collateral if JPM itself starts missing payments to the second bank! This why analysts are calling the foreclosure fraud mess a "hydra": there are too many different faces on one single house, and one of the ugliest faces is the title insurance problem.

We know that we have people in houses paying mortgages to banks who claim to own the loan or the title, but cannot prove either. We also know that we have former loan-owners who are now home-owners because no mortgage company or creditor could produce the title in court. We also know that Bank of America has "foreclosed" on houses which the bank doesn't even own. The opposite of this--that side that I think will be exposed especially through title fraud/title insurance fraud--are the creditors with claims to houses that don't exist, and banks with "assets" on their balance sheets based on ghost houses that even a ghost could live in. We know that there is more debt than money on the planet, and more money than real assets, as the derivatives market is a $1.5 QUADRILLION "market" of promises and exposures, or...

$1,500,000,000,000,000 of promises that will never be fulfilled.

Fifteen thousand Trillion promises. We can't even imagine these numbers. How people can look at a number like that and claim that the global economy is "fixed" and what happened in September 2008 was a once-in-a-lifetime market crash is totally beyond me. Two years after being saved by the master heister Mr Paulson, we have banks admitting that they basically used taxpayer money to fund their massive mortgage fraud operations. Of course, we "conspiracy theorists" knew that there was incessant fraud all along which is exactly why Mr Paulson heisted America to save the banks in the first place. But now this is mainstream news, and attorneys general in 40 States are investigating banks, and the Wells Fargo, Ally (GMAC), JPM, and PNC have all suspended foreclosures until further notice. Its not a "conspiracy theory" anymore.

So, to recap: two years ago, the American taxpayer was heisted by a consortium of banksters, including master heister Mr Hank Goldman Sachs Paulson, which dropped the DJIA by 777 point in a single day, and threatened Congress with martial law lest it authorize a $700 Billion transfer of wealth from the people of the United States to the banksters' group of fraud-laced, immoral, corrupt banks that are themselves so incapable of operating responsibly that without such a transfer they would have gone bankrupt within weeks. The weak, corrupt Congress authorized the restriction-free transfer, and within two days of the bill becoming law, master hiester Paulson completely abandoned the "we must buy the toxic assets!" that lie he had previously concocted and vigorously repeated for the purposes of fear-mongering the entire planet into believing that an absolutely certain "complete global economic meltdown" would ensue if we didn't "buy the toxic assets." Once he had the money in hand, this mantra was abandoned, and suddenly Mr Paulson revealed an entirely new plan to, literally, deliver the money directly to the banks and hope they pay some of it back--the very banks that cannot even handle their own money responsibly nor that of their clients. Fast-forward two years, and these same banks are now admitting to massive and systemic foreclosure fraud, even to the point of forging signature, falsifying court documents, and intentionally and knowingly breaking the law.

But that's not all--because guess what? If these banks get financially hit because of this, the American taxpayer is going to be the one to pay. Not because of any new program that might be concocted to "save" them lest the Moon explode, but because of one that already exists: remember the FDIC's Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program? Its the one were you get to back about half a TRILLION dollars in private bank paper? Yeah---what happens if JPM ($39.6 Billion in TLGP paper) and BofA ($44.5 Billion) get crimped for cash again due to their multi-year foreclosure fraud operation and the ramification? Who covers the payments to $95 Billion-worth of their creditors?

Who? We do, of course.

So--so much for that "crime doesn't pay" business, kids. Actually, crime really does pay, and pays really, really, really, really well if you do it in an Armani suit. I'm talking BILLIONS "well"---TRILLIONS "well." Plus, there's a great medical plan, solid benefits, and you might even get to visit the White House.

JPM's Jamie Dimond and Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein did!

PHOTO: Getty Images,
"Wall Street Backs Barack Obama's Toxic Asset Plan",
UK Telegraph. Editorial and news use.

And they will be back.