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Jamie Selway's avatar

And what became of MERS? Part of the $ICE family -- https://www.icemortgagetechnology.com/products/mers -- since 2018. (See https://ir.theice.com/press/news-details/2018/Intercontinental-Exchange-Completes-Acquisition-of-MERS/.) Safe hands for the coming rumble in 2023-4?

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G7Doug's avatar

Joe's quote should be page one of every application for the purchase of derivative securities. Even when taking time off you bring substance Rudy, truly remarkable breadth and depth of information - you must have a staff much larger than MERS ever did!

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Rudy Havenstein's avatar

Thanks. It's just me.

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Steve Hemingway's avatar

I thought that housing finance in the UK was pretty bad, but the system in the US takes the biscuit!

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Melody Wright's avatar

Memories, memories, memories....the things we did to dig out of this were huge. They changed a lot about MERS, but not what it was at its core. And...lots of policies on attach and affix for the note and allonge, etc. What's (not) funny is that instead of the money going to the borrowers it went to the Independent Foreclosure Review (IFR) auditors - in our case, PwC. And then once the Fed finally realized all the money was actually going to go to the auditors of the Big 5 b/c they didn't find the fraud they thought (yes, of course those documents should not have been signed that way, but no borrower at my former company at least was incorrectly taken to foreclosure in terms of were they in arrears - of course can only speak to what was found when I was there). So a whole bunch of extra procedures were added, a whole bunch of check-the-box stuff, but nothing fundamentally changed....except of course FNMA and FHLMC require you originate in MERS. The auditors got rich, the former signers got harassed, and creak, creak, creak, the engine is starting up again in earnest. We will have the regulatory cycle again without a doubt...

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Lyndon Barreto's avatar

Maybe we'll get a series in years to come called MERSick, à la Dopesick!

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al m's avatar

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Aesop

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Mike's avatar

Rudy over the past two years I’ve been following you you made one thing perfectly clear to me…

Why some people thru all ages have had a certain level of disgust and even hatred towards banks and bankers. History is just a Loop.

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Tankster's avatar

Ha, Rudy you barely scratch the surface. I represent condo and homeowner associations. Those creations would foreclose and we would frequently call out the plaintiffs in the mortgage foreclosures because they neither held nor were properly assigned the right to foreclose. judges created the " rocket docket" to slam foreclosures through faster while many of them held tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in Stock in those companies that were behind MERS. There are still cases lingering that were brought by entities like the Merrill Lynch Income Trust Fund series 2008-3456789.Abbu7.

They didn't really have an assignment or an allonge. They just blew up people who had no lawyers, or lawyers too stupid to understand that the plaintiff did not hold the note or mortgage.

There's a reasonable possibility that anybody who took title as the result of a foreclosure has bad title subject to being challenged. The horror.....

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Rudy Havenstein's avatar

Oh for sure my post isn't comprehensive, and I wasn't in the trenches like you. It seems that the fraud was so massive that the powers that be couldn't allow justice to prevail.

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Walking Disease Vector's avatar

Is there anything in this country anymore that *isn’t* a fraud?

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Jim Davidson's avatar

All the senior executives of all the banks should be in prison. All the regulatory agency officials should be in prison. All the politicians should be in prison. None of them should be allowed to work in any capacity of trust. But, of course, none of them were ever even worried. The corrupt system is corrupt for their sakes.

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