Battle Lines Forming in Clash Over Foreclosures

[groovedaddy]

About a month after Washington Mutual Bank made a multimillion-dollar mortgage loan on a mountain home near Santa Barbara, Calif., a crucial piece of paperwork disappeared.

But bank officials were unperturbed. After conducting a “due and diligent search,” an assistant vice president simply drew up an affidavit stating that the paperwork — a promissory note committing the borrower to repay the mortgage — could not be found, according to court documents.

The handling of that lost note in 2006 was hardly unusual. Mortgage documents of all sorts were treated in an almost lackadaisical way during the dizzying mortgage lending spree from 2005 through 2007, according to court documents, analysts and interviews.

Now those missing and possibly fraudulent documents are at the center of a potentially seismic legal clash that pits big lenders against homeowners and their advocates concerned that the lenders’ rush to foreclose flouts private property rights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/business/21standoff.html?th&emc=th

[KansDem]

1. If homeowners treated their mortgages "in an almost lackadaisical way"

...their credit scores suffer as well as their home finances.

Sorry, but I've no sympathy for these leaches. We signed the note; you keep the note until we pay off the mortgage. Then you give us the note and we burn it, usually with friends and family and drinks all around. That's been the practice for generations.

If you lose the note, you're fucked.

Savvy?

I'm not even going into what happens if we commit fraud...

[fasttense]

2. The banks act as if fraud is no big deal.

What about when 2 banks decide to foreclose on the same home? What about when banks start foreclosing on houses they don't have mortgages on? What about the title? Who will insure the title is free and clear when no one knows who owns the loan?

What about the county/state/federal taxes the banks failed to pay because they failed to file the proper paperwork? What about the back taxes?

Will you buy a house without a clear title? The housing market in the US has been destroyed.

The banks/Wall Street/Insurance corporations are picking off the last meat off the bones of the American Middle Class.

None of this will stop until normal Americans get out and protest like the French.

[Crazy Dave]

3. We consider ourselves to civilized to act like the French

Instead we prefer to elect people who promise to fix things for us :sarcasm:

[CanonRay]

4. The government acts as if fraud is no big deal

I expect it from the damn banks, they've been thieves for generations, but where's the Justice Department. They get away with fraud with impunity, and DOJ doesn't do shit.