How Did the Banks Get Away With Pledging Mortgages to Multiple Buyers?

How Did the Banks Get Away With Pledging Mortgages to Multiple Buyers?
I’ve repeatedly documented that mortgages were pledged multiple times to different buyers. In response, some people (including one of the country’s top bankruptcy lawyers) have told me they don’t buy it.

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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2010

How Did the Banks Get Away With Pledging Mortgages to Multiple Buyers?

I've repeatedly documented that mortgages were pledged multiple times to different buyers. See this, this and this.

In response, some people (including one of the country's top bankruptcy lawyers) have told me they don't buy it.

Specifically, they ask such questions as:

• With a mortgage sold to two different entities, wouldn't the income from the mortgage be shown on the books of both entities?

• Was the interest/principal payments that were made by the homeowner before they stopped being divided between both entities? If so, wouldn't this have rung alarm bells immediately?

• If only one was getting it, why didn't the other entity immediately try to foreclose?

• If there was one servicer involved, was the servicer covering the difference between what was collected and the payments actually made? If so, how did the servicer do this and still remain in business?

• If two servicers were involved, why didn't this come out sooner or were both servicers hiding this fraud?

So I wrote to some of the leading experts on mortgage fraud - L. Randall Wray (economics professor), Christopher Whalen (banking expert with Institutional Risk Analytics), and William K. Black (professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis) - to seek their insight.

Chris Whalen told me:

All good points, but the short answer is that nobody may have noticed until now. The issue of substitution and other games played by servicers makes exact tracking of loans problematic. It should show up in the servicers reports and should be caught, but there are a lot of things that go on in loan servicing that nobody talks about. Until about 2006, the GSEs and banks would advance cash and would substitute, but not now. The noble practitioners you heard from are all sincere and want to believe in intelligent design.

Whalen explained:

Prior to FAS [i.e. Financial Accounting Standards] 166/167, a defaulted loan might sit in a FNM/FRE pool for up to a year before the default was removed from the trust. The issuer would then place a new loan into the pool or “substitute” for the old loan. No purchase event was booked. The investor would never know. In fact, the issuer would keep paying interest on the original principal amount in those days. Now under FAS 166/167, the issuer must immediately repurchase the defaulted loan and take the loss less estimated recovery. That is why the pace picked up this year when it comes to repurchase demands.

You should refer your dubious and very naive friends to the case of National Bank of Keystone, WV. One of the worst failures per $ of assets in FDIC history. The management hid a Ponzi scheme in the loan servicing area for five years. Paid interest to investors with their own principal. Two auditors missed the fraud and later were sued by the FDIC acting as receiver for the dead bank. And this was a small operation. The big five are an even worse mess. Remember, when the seller of a loan and the servicer are the same, anything can happen. And it usually does.

Professor Black told me:

Double pledges (as they're typically called, though one could pledge multiple times) are a well known fraud device. It is correct that one of the key purposes of adopting Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) was to reduce the risk and frequency of this form of fraud. So, double pledges in the modern era require both (A) fraud (on the part of the borrower or purchaser) and incompetence, indifference, or corruption on the part of the original secured lender or their agents if the borrower is the fraudster or the purchasers if they are the fraudsters.

The two potential sources of fraud: A fraudulent borrower could pledge the same home as security for multiple mortgage loans. Title checks, by the lender/title insurer are so easy to conduct and so vital to protect the lender that this form of fraud is vanishingly rare. Alternatively, and far more likely, the lender could sell the mortgage to multiple buyers. Those buyers could have far lower incentives to check on prior pledges and less ability to check for prior pledges. The entity selling a loan to multiple parties (A) has a compelling incentive to hide the prior pledge(s), (B) is financially sophisticated, and
therefore more capable of deception than a homeowner, and (C) can pick who to make the multiple sales to -- allowing them to select the most vulnerable targets for fraud.

Subpart (C) provides the logical transition to the second requisite for multiple pledge frauds -- vulnerable victims. The characteristics they would exhibit include (A) growing massively, (B) purchasing nonprime loans without fully underwriting the quality of the loans (and quality in this context inherently requires superb "paperwork"), (C) poor internal and external controls, and (D) opaque systems that make it extremely difficult to determine the beneficial owner and locate key mortgage documents that would reveal multiple sales. Unfortunately, these four characteristics were characteristic of many purchasers of nonprime mortgages. That is why I have long stated that the process was dominated by the financial sector equivalent of "don't ask; don't tell."

Bottom line: the elite bankers and the anti-regulators have been so unwilling to
find the truth that no one knows how bad these frauds became. Finding the facts
is essential and can and should be done by reviewing samples of the loans pledged or sold to Fannie and Freddie and the Fed.

And professor Wray told me that record-keeping by servicers was terrible, and pointed me to the following article from the Tampa Tribune:

Peter Bakowski, a 58-year-old former Tampa mortgage broker, has admitted orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that involved more than 30 investors and institutions and more than 150 deals, documents show.

***

Bakowski sold the mortgage assignments to multiple investors, promising high rates of return and using all the money he generated to "keep the scheme afloat," according to his plea agreement.

Millions Of Unemployed Americans Now Live As Paupers Even As Foreign Nations Use Sovereign Wealth Funds To Buy Up Huge Chunks Of American Infrastructure
Most Americans still do not understand just how bad the economic horror we are facing really is. Today, millions of Americans are living as paupers in the land that their foreathers built even as America’s infrastructure is literally being sold out from under their feet by corrupt politicians.

Millions Of Unemployed Americans Now Live As Paupers Even As Foreign Nations Use Sovereign Wealth Funds To Buy Up Huge Chunks Of American Infrastructure

Most Americans still do not understand just how bad the economic horror we are facing really is. Today, millions of Americans are living as paupers in the land that their foreathers built even as America's infrastructure is literally being sold out from under their feet by corrupt politicians. The "official" unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months, and today it takes the average unemployed American about 35 weeks to find a job. However, the "official" unemployment rate is misleading, because it does not include workers that have quit looking for work or that have had their hours cut back to part-time. According to 60 Minutes, when you add those "discouraged workers" and "underemployed workers" into the equation the actual rate is about 17 percent, and in the state of California the actual rate is about 22 percent. Meanwhile, foreign nations are using sovereign wealth funds to buy up staggering amounts of U.S. infrastructure. America is quite literally for sale in 2010. All across the United States, highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters are being gobbled up by foreign powers. We have shipped massive amounts of wealth and jobs to other nations, and now those very same countries are turning around and buying huge amounts of U.S. infrastructure with the gigantic piles of dollars that they have accumulated.

Widespread long-term chronic unemployment was something that America was never supposed to see again. Our leaders promised us that the U.S. financial system was so strong that we would never have another "Great Depression" in our lifetimes. But then the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Unprecedented numbers of Americans started losing their jobs and the U.S. Congress did something that it had never done before. Congress decided to extend unemployment benefits all the way out to 99 weeks.

Doing that has cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $100 billion dollars to this point, but we were promised that it was a "temporary" fix and that it would give displaced U.S. workers a chance to find new jobs.

Surely any industrious American worker could get another job within 99 weeks, right?

Wrong.

Today, there are at least 1.5 milion "99ers" - those Americans that have completely exhausted all 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and that still do not have jobs.

Sadly, as bad as that number sounds, it is likely to keep growing. Today, over one-third of all unemployed Americans have already been unemployed for at least one year. If this trend continues, we are going to end up with millions of "99ers".

60 Minutes recently did a report on some of these "99ers". Many of them are very highly educated and very highly qualified. If you have not seen this 60 Minutes report yet, you have got to take few minutes to sit down and watch it. This video is so shocking that many of you will have your jaws on the floor by the time you finish watching it....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CwpdGyIY2fQ

So is there much reason for these "99ers" to be optimistic?

No, not really.

In fact, there are some indications that unemployment in America is actually getting worse. Gallup's measure of unemployment, which is not adjusted for "seasonal factors", exhibited a sharp increase in the month of September. According to Gallup, unemployment has increased from 8.9% in July to 9.3% in August and to 10.1% in September.

In addition, the seasonally-adjusted "Alternate Unemployment Rate" compiledby Shadow Government Statistics also indicates that unemployment in the U.S. is going up once again. The Alternate Unemployment Rate calculated by SGS reflects estimated "long-term discouraged workers", which the U.S. government stopped keeping track of back in 1994....

But it is not just the massive number of Americans that are completely unemployed that we need to be concerned about. The truth is that more Americans than at any other time in recent history are working part-time jobs because that is all they can find. The number of Americans working part-time jobs "for economic reasons" is now the highest it has been in at least five decades.

Meanwhile, sovereign wealth funds from nations such as Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait, Libya, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are buying up highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters from coast to coast.

So exactly what is a sovereign wealth fund?

Well, just think of it as a huge mountain of state-owned money that roams about the countryside looking for assets to gobble up.

In a recent piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described some of the U.S. infrastructure assets that these sovereign wealth funds are buying up....

A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

It turns out that U.S. politicians have figured out that they can help solve their budget problems by selling off or leasing out pieces of infrastructure. Foreign nations with money to burn have been glad to come in and start buying a lot of this infrastructure up. Today, it is estimated that the rest of the world currently owns several trillion dollars more of America than America owns of the rest of the world. Later on in his article, Taibbi noted that the trend toward selling off pieces of infrastructure only seems to be accelerating....

At this writing Nashville and Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can think of that isn't nailed down and some things that are — for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.

Sadly, both the number and the value of major acquisitions made by sovereign wealth funds approximately doubled during the first half of 2010.

Instead of being the "land of the free", we are rapidly becoming the "land that has been leased out to foreign nations".

So where in the world did these sovereign wealth funds get all this money?

Well, they got it from us of course.

Every single month, the United States buys massive amounts of oil from the Middle East and massive amounts of cheap plastic crap from China. The rest of the world buys a bunch of stuff from us too, but not nearly as much as we buy from the rest of the world.

So every single month tens of billions of dollars that used to belong to the American people ends up in the hands of foreigners. Now some of that money is returning to this country and is being used to buy up our infrastructure.

Many of these highways and toll roads that are being sold off had already been completely paid for. Can you imagine the frustration of the taxpayers in many of these areas when they realize that a road that they have already completely paid for with their tax dollars has been sold out from underneath them?

Another place that all these U.S. dollars held by foreigners is going is into U.S. Treasuries. In fact, the federal government very much encourages this. After all, we have to finance our exploding debt somehow.

In essence, first we made some folks in the Middle East and in Asia incredibly wealthy, and now we are asking them to please lend that money back to us so that we can continue living far beyond our means.

Today, the national debt of the United States is rapidly approaching 14 trillion dollars. An increasing percentage of this debt is owned by foreigners.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we are rapidly becoming enslaved to the rest of the world.