11:11 pm, 11/15/7
Elaine Meinel Supkis
Astonishing news! A judge just ruled that the many hell hounds and pirates claiming they own the houses they supposedly loaned money to, don't have the deeds! This is too funny! The paper work we plow through when closing a property deal are quite clear. But thanks to the trashy tranche business, this whole thing has been chucked into murky dark pools and now NO ONE owns these houses! And more of these gullible, stupid, annoyingly horrible bankers are losing money. Deutsche Bank, who should have known better, is in the red. UBS is losing over $7 billion and this isn't the end, it is the BEGINNING. And we learn a new word: Zugzwang. Sounds appropriate, doesn't it?
Deutsche Bank Foreclosures Tossed Out of Ohio Federal Court - "They Own Nothing!"
Judge Christopher A. Boyko of the Eastern Ohio United States District Court, on October 31, 2007 dismissed 14 Deutsche Bank-filed foreclosures in a ruling based on lack of standing for not owning/holding the mortgage loan at the time the lawsuits were filed.Judge Boyko issued an order requiring the Plaintiffs in a number of pending foreclosure cases to file a copy of the executed Assignment demonstrating Plaintiff (Deutsche Bank) was the holder and owner of the Note and Mortgage as of the date the Complaint was filed, or the court would enter a dismissal.
This story started a month ago. Now the ramifications are springing into view like a lion jumps a herd of water buffalo wallowing in the mud. Breaking their necks, the lions drag them out of the muck and eat them, the vultures squatting nearby, watching with sharp eyes the unfolding feast. The many schemes and tricks our Congress and the top 5 major finance houses like Goldman Sachs have been cooking up are now history. All we have to do is have the banks trying to repo these houses produce the proper paperwork!
HAHAHA. This is SO Victorian! A classic scene in the gaslit theaters was the legendary evil banker sneering at the young lady, trying to force her into prostitution in order to stop the execution of a foreclosure only the hero tricks him out of possession of the deed. The deed has to be registered at the Town Halls and witnessed and signed and I have been at MANY closings on properties! And I'll tell you, my lawyers and I and my husband sit there and pore over every scrap of paper and there is great tension in the air as we hammer out every detail.
And I assure you all, nearly every time, someone slippery tried to cheat me! Amazingly!
For example, I was riding up the elevator in the tallest building in Brooklyn with two strange lawyers. One said to the other, 'I am going to a closing. I plan to hit the sellers for an extra $500 just for the hell of it.'
I followed him out of the elevator and we both headed to the same office. As he opened the door, he turned to see me grinning ear to ear. He turned pale and swallowed and then walked into the Den of Lions. There, I tore him and his clients apart with unbridled rage. He paid ME $500 or I would report him to the Bar! HAHAHA.
Another time, a lawyer claimed he didn't have time to do a proper search so he wanted, get this, $5000 from me! I asked for the contract and to his horror, began to rip it up. He paid the $5000 holding fee. One bank tried to rewrite the contract and dump old loans on a property they foreclosed on.
This led to a very loud encounter and a report from me to the State Attorney General. The city seized the property from the bank! HAHAHA again. So...I would just love to be the one representing homeowners demanding proper paperwork! After all, the entire point of the system was for a bunch of lawyers to sit at a table and hammer out every possible permutation of home ownership including how much oil is in the tanks, how much taxes have already been paid, inspection fees and insurance coverage. Dozens of pieces of paper fly around the table and everyone sits with pens and red ink pens, marking up stuff, rewriting clauses, adding exceptions, I have been in fights over how many light fixtures should be left behind and the removal of fixed parts of the property like a fish pool in the ground, for example. HUGE battles over seemingly tiny details. But one fights these for this is what homeowning is all about: your house is your castle.
I am so annoyed at the goofy lending system set up in the last 10 years, I want to see it crash for good. For it is a dangerous and ugly system that leads to chaos and homelessness as well as corrupting morals by creating excessive speculation and easy money for gambling on property assets. This is bad for any economy in the long run.
And so here we are: this is a train wreck from hell. IF there is NO WAY any of the big banks who expect to be the hell hounds and vultures picking at the carcasses of the US housing market, they will be whacked now and the tasty dead water buffalo will not be theirs! Indeed, they will be stalked and eaten! They are probably in a panic now and Congress, which is normally asleep at the wheel, will suddenly leap into action and pass laws changing the entire way we do property sales paperwork!
And this will be utterly irresponsible! The system should have NEVER BROKEN DOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE. I am filled with rage over this. The damn system was set up precisely for this reason! I keep things in a big fat file and my lawyer has a file too as well as the county government and my local village. Everyone has all the papers and we know who has what and why and in this case, I own my own property, full and clear.
But you can bet, the vultures who screwed around with the system so they could sneakily pop in USURY RATES on unsuspecting home buyers, will want a remedy that allows them to play this game forever. Just like we can't see into the Dark Pools where these mortgages are being held, so do they want to have NO PAPER CONTRACTS. How charming. They just lay claim like old prospectors with their mules, eh?
So with this decision, it appears confirmed that investors in the mortgage debacle may in fact own nothing---not even the bad loans they funded! It seems their right to the cash flow from the underlying properties does not extend to ownership of the properties themselves; thus clouding the recovery picture considerably.
The NYT article daintily tip toes around all this. I am including this article as a historic document.
The pooling of home loans into securities has been practiced for decades and helped propel real estate prices in recent years as investors sought the higher yields that such mortgage trusts could provide. Some $6.5 trillion of securitized mortgage debt was outstanding at the end of 2006.But as foreclosures have surged, the complex structure and disparate ownership of mortgage securities have made it harder for borrowers to work out troubled loans, in part because they cannot identify who holds the mortgage notes, consumer advocates say.
Now, the Ohio ruling indicates that the intricacies of the mortgage pools are starting to create problems for lenders as well. Lawyers for troubled homeowners are expected to seize upon the district judge’s opinion as a way to impede foreclosures across the country or force investors to settle with homeowners. And it may encourage judges in other courts to demand more documentation of ownership from lenders trying to foreclose.
Just 6 short months ago, we were chewing over the business about 'dark pools'. No one knew what was lurking in these dark lagoons, all of which are in pirate coves. I suggested that Pluto, the god of Death and Wealth rules there and they are now part of the Outer Darkness where up is down and inside is outside and wealth is poverty. In other words, there is nothing there. Nothing at all. Just numbers. Lots of numbers with zeros attached. And that is the ultimate magic. Some of these mortgages were sliced and tranched and shuffled to the point that they were reproduced SEVERAL TIMES so a $400,000 mortgage might end up being valued 3X over! Who owns this?
NO ONE! At least, no one holding the deed or whose names were put on the deed via some lawyer with a pen! HAHAHA. And there are nearly $7 trillion of this miserable, dark matter? Oh boy. This will collapse many big banks, of course. They can lose up to $1 trillion collectively and limp along with government help. But not $7 trillion. And if homeowners see others refusing to pay and keeping their homes, ALL of them will refuse to pay! Why pay a stranger who doesn't hold the deed, after all?
And I still remember the propaganda about these ABX tranches: they supposedly hedged against default and financial difficulties by 'spreading the risk' and 'forming pools.' But Miss Risky loves to skinny dip in dark pools and she is buddies with sharks and crocodiles. 'Don't pay attention to them,' she coos to the Lost Boys and Peter Pan.
“This is the miracle of not having securities mapped to the underlying loans,” said Josh Rosner, a specialist in mortgage securities at Graham-Fisher, an independent research firm in New York. “There is no industry repository for mortgage loans. I have heard of instances where the same loan is in two or three pools.”
Ah, here it is. The startling information that these con men and pirates popped the same loans into several pools and acted as if each one was the 'owner' of these things! This is what happens when people use time-honored paper systems to commit fraud rather than protect everyone's stake. The home buyer, the seller, the mortgage holder, the banks all have interests in these transactions. Ditto, insurance companies. For example, they don't like insuring properties that are sold to firebugs who want to make a killing by burning down the building! I have seen this in action! In NYC in the seventies, we worried about people buying a property and then torching it for insurance money!
The Wall Street Journal reported on its website Wednesday that "expectations are growing" that UBS (Charts) will take a charge of as much as $7.1 billion (eight billion Swiss francs) in the fourth quarter. The losses stem from complex investment vehicles that are tied to the home mortgage crisis and have fallen sharply in value in recent months.
*snip*
The newspaper also warned that there's more pain in store for some of the world's largest financial institutions. Barclay's , the British bank, will announce Thursday a write-down of about $2.9 billion, the Journal said, citing an anonymous source.Meanwhile, Citigroup , which has already disclosed more than $20 billion in losses, may take additional charges.
The losses are piling up, aren't they? Once sober banks have turned into carny shows. They thought they could play funny money games and not be eaten at the end. And these massive losses that are most astonishing, these have other side effects. These banks will be sued by everyone and their neighbors. I think they should all be put in jail for wrecking not only whole neighborhoods but perhaps the global banking community! And the governments that allowed all this? I wish they could be punished, too. But they slip off the leash. Just like the biggest banks will. We will get raging inflation and the loss of our incomes and savings. And this will 'fix' this damn mess good, right?
Hell, yes. So I expect Congress to fix it so all the homeowners on the hook for life will get shafted and the banks will lose money but will be allowed to print money like crazy, causing inflation and we won't get any raises in our incomes because they will lie about this and tell us, there is no inflation, it is all our dark imaginations.
I posted this chart some time ago. Note how the Bank Insurance Reserve Ratio collapsed during the Bush I regime. This banking disaster was so vast, the government had to rebuild the entire system from scratch. This happened in 1933. So we went over 50 years without a complete collapse. Then it has been less than 20 years and we are going to have a WORSE collapse?
If we look at any financial charts whether it be Federal Debt, the Trade Deficit, the bank reserves insurance ratios, interest rates, inflation rates, whatever, it shows the same destruction. The same collapse of our systems. The same violent yo-yo events with thing getting more and more destabilized. The dollar's loss of value is just one of many such indicators of decline. For many years, as we fell apart, we were told by our rulers and the media, the US is fundamentally strong. This is a rank lie.
We can't fix things if we think we are just hunky dory. We must face the truth. Humans can't see themselves in a mirror of the mind. We can only see what we wish. It is all imaginary. Looking at harsh reality, we must decide to act like adults and take responsibility. This means no longer falling into banking schemes as old as the Tulip Bulb or South Sea Bubble.
Note two things about these big mega-banking houses: the buying and selling of their stocks shot way up after being much lower for many years. And they show a classic bubble trend. The more they relaxed banking rules and regulations, the more they went swimming in the Dark Pools in Pirate Lagoons, the higher their stocks soared. And now they are being eaten and the stocks are plunging to their previous lows, 10 years ago.
I must correc the article I wrote, it seems the media got their story line wrong.
Chinese Foreign Ministry Liu Jianchao said Thursday the cargo ship which struck a bridge tower in San Francisco has no business relations with China Ocean Shipping Corporation (COSCO).Media reports said that the cargo ship "Cosco Busan" struck the Bay Bridge in San Francisco of the United States on Wednesday last week, spilling gallons of oil into the bay.
Liu said there were Chinese crew members on the freighter which was run by a company of the Republic of Korea (ROK).
I was very troubled by all this. I tried to get to the bottom of the matter, even waited two days hoping to get better information. The Chinese didn't help, none of their previous stories were clear, either. So it was a Korean shipping company after all. What a tangled mess. Writing about the news as it happens can be hazardous. Sorry about that.
Muto, Fukui's Likely Heir, Says Japan May Suffer From U.S. Woes
Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Toshiro Muto said the U.S. housing recession and financial- market turmoil could hurt Japan's economy, making it ``difficult'' to decide when to raise interest rates.
*snip*
The central bank this week held the benchmark overnight lending rate at 0.5 percent, the lowest among major economies.Muto said expectations that borrowing costs will stay low for a long time regardless of improvements in the economy could cause fluctuations in growth and prices and encourage inefficient investment.
Time to visit the Bank of Japan! My favorite place! You got to love these guys. If nothing else, they are predicable and consistent. They see inflation, they see everything but since they are at the very center of the universe and are the wellspring for all wealth via their stupid 0.5% interest rates, well, they are going to keep this status quo going...FOR FUCKING EVER! Regardless how much the 'economy improves'! No matter how much inflation! These are 'fluctuations'. HAHAHA. Right! They love their interest rate game because it gives Japan a huge trade and banking advantage plus it is like fiscal heroin. The junkies in the US and Europe will return every night and beg for more hits. And it seems no one, absolutely no one is even slightly interested in stopping the madness. This evil, totally impossible and improbable rate will sit there at the very center of our economic universe and will drag everyone into a global depression as the relative value of all banking deals and currencies get dragged downwards. Note that Japan is reducing its domestic commerce.
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Economic Zugzwang is when there are no winning economic moves.
I forgot about this. In the game of Go, the point is to surround one's territory while not holding it via lots of stones. The blank spaces are the valuable parts of the territory. The US doesn't understand the zen of this sort of gaming which is why Asia is tearing our throats out in trade, diplomacy and everything imaginable.
Zugzwang (German for "compulsion to move", IPA: [ˈtsuːk.tsvaŋ]) is a term used in combinatorial game theory and in various games to describe a situation where one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move - the player would like to pass and make no move. The fact that the player must make a move means that his position will be significantly weaker than the hypothetical one in which it is his opponent's turn to move. In combinatorial game theory, it specifically means that it directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss. The term is used less precisely in other games; e.g., the game theory definition is not necessarily used in chess
Zug is German for choo-choo train. Or anything that is pulled. Perhaps Zugzwang is more like 'pushing on a string' than a jeopardy situation. The problem with thinking about our situation as one of no choices is all wrong. There are choices. Every time it is the same choice: the investors, savers, retirees and workers all get to pay for banking and financial messes created by Goldman Sachs! Simple, isn't it?
Our Zugs will be Zwanged to hell. Wie Herrlich!
This is an example of a Zugged up Zwanged game of chess:
I'll explain: the Red Queen is Hillary Clinton. The White Queen is Elizabeth II of England. The White Bishop is the gay, cross dressing German Pope, Ratzinger. The other White Bishop is Tony Blair who is now leading the Crusades. Bush is the Red King hiding in the far corner. The White King is Goldman Sachs, hiding on a tax free island in the Caribbean. The Castle is Japan. The Red Castle that is moving into the front battles is China. And the pawns are all the OPEC nations. And the Knight is Putin, of course. And the Red Bishop is bin Laden. Note that one Tower is destroyed already. And so this gives us a good idea how zwangshaftig our mess is today. Anyone makes a move and the whole thing falls apart.
Too bad for us, the White Knight and the Red Guard Castle intend to make the next moves.
Culture of Life News Main Page
Why do you call the Pope a gay cross dresser?
Posted by: barbara hazleton | November 15, 2007 at 11:41 PM
She may be right, Elaine. The Pope is a fucking nazi who justifies the Holocaust (not the small against a lot of Jews, the really big one against us in the Americas)but he's not necessarily a cross-dresser. unless you're referring to a Wehrmacht uniform under the surplice.
Posted by: Al | November 15, 2007 at 11:59 PM
The article Elaine cited is just too sweet not to quote further:
Posted by: Frank | November 16, 2007 at 12:10 AM
Let me get this right: in the process of re-packaging and re-selling these loans the deeds of the loans went missing (or they don't know where they are), further some of them were used more than once, IOW a 100.000 $ property deed may have 200.000 $ or more of loans tied to it, is that right?
I wonder what the scale of this fraud is, I guess no-one knows. Not only the people who got loans were deadbeats, also the people issuing them were. And the central bankers who covers for them are.
I think there is a similar siuation in the stock market. Many people believe they own stocks, that sits with a brokerage, but they actually don't, because the brokerage has the stock certificates, they merely have a claim on the brokerage to the equivalent of the value of the stocks they hold. The brokerage may use those stock certificates (if they even bothered to buy the stocks, you ordered and paid for), and borrow money on them. If the brokerage goes bankrupt, first the lawyers get paid, then the state/government, then deed holders of physical property held by the brokerage, then investors in relation to size. Small investors risk loosing everything, you'll get nada of your life time savings. At least hold the physical paper of your holdings, not an IOU from the broker, better yet sell what you have now and buy toilet paper for your money, that will at least have some intrinsic value in the future.....
Posted by: Neuro Artist | November 16, 2007 at 06:09 AM
The past dozen popes were very restrained in their dress. This one loves to trot about in laces and fine fabrics with all sorts of gold trim and pretty do-dads. He is dressed as elaborately as a Victorian whore.
About the payments if someone defaults: the real ranking is very simple. The GOVERNMENT always gets paid off first. This is because power grows out of the barrel of a gun. So they get paid because otherwise they get physical. In the real world, the Mafia gets paid first for the same reason only it isn't legal.
Second is the bank. The holders of the first mortgage are first. The other liens are second. But right after the FIRST bank and second full-mortgage, in America, the EX-WIFE gets her cut! Trust me on this. Then everyone else gets it. The lawyers are nearly dead last. What they do is arrange things so they get paid somehow.
This is why it is VERY hard to find a good lawyer in these bankruptcies.
Posted by: Elaine Supkis | November 16, 2007 at 07:15 AM
Deutsche Bank AG — Headquarters — Frankfurt am Main, Germany. (From Wikipedia)
WHAT? Neighborhoods in America will all be owned by Germany and China, etc. America will all be OWNED by foreigners?
Time to stop worrying about the Mexican immigrants who will be renting communist Chinese-owned apartments!
Posted by: blues | November 16, 2007 at 09:14 AM
I believe the way the lawyers get paid is by billing the client monthly and getting paid monthly during the proceedings and this is in writing before the lawyer even agrees to take the case. Otherwise, you are right, they would end up with nothing.
Then what happens is the investors who end up with nothing sue the lawyers after the case ends to recover all monies paid to them and of course the lawyers defend themselves and even plan ahead to do so.
We, the citizens and noncitizens, get to pay for the judges, court officers, court buildings and other public facilities that these litigants use to settle their private disputes that have nothing to do with us.
Then, when we go to court, we are treated like dirt because we do not belong to a corporation or government agency or bigshot lawfirm. The court still expects us to pay for everything, though.
I believe this is what being a peasant is all about.
Posted by: DeVaul | November 16, 2007 at 10:03 AM
You both hit the nails on the head. :(
Posted by: Elaine Supkis | November 16, 2007 at 11:31 AM
Were the home owners paying, or not paying, Deutsche Bank for their mortgages? What about all the other foreclosures, past, present and future, where the homeowners have just left(or will leave as they can't afford lawyers)the property because of foreclosures and gone to live under a bridge or whatever? Were those foreclosures legal, do you think?
Can these foreclosed properties no one wants to buy, be sold legally to some other sucker? How could they be if the "mortgage holder" can't prove ownership of the mortgage? How could they have been foreclosed in the first place by some entity like Deutche Bank? Were the foreclosure filings "rubber stamped" by the courts without investigation?
As usual, I don't get it. I don't even understand why anyone would buy someone else's mortgage expecting to make money when life always intervenes when you're making other plans (paraphrasing).
Thanks to anyone who'll explain this to me in terms I can more readily understand, or is there a primer on all this mess you'd recommend?
Posted by: Ignorant Old Lady | November 16, 2007 at 01:38 PM
Dear Ignorant Old Lady,
You are what they fear the most. A person who asks questions and wants answers. The truth is, there is no primer for this mess. I and all the other writers online trying to figure out this mess are constantly astonished by the depth of it all, the mountains of stupidity and venality and of course, outright criminal conspiracies.
We just slog along in this mess, trying to stay ahead of it all.
Posted by: Elaine Supkis | November 16, 2007 at 06:13 PM
Thanks, Elaine. How about Inquiring, Ignorant Old Lady Who Wants Answers (IIOLWWA)? Too long, huh?
I inquired of NC's two Repugnant Senators, Burr and Dole, if they were financing their wars with borrowed money and how did that work and who did we owe the money to, and if that was what was meant by "deficit" spending? I do sometimes think I'm funny.
A female person from Burr's office called and left a message telling me to go to the Congressional Budget web site that would explain everything. Yeah, sure I will, girlie.
Dole sent me a snail mail explaining why we are in Iraq and should stay there and how important it was, and how she was against Bush in some areas, and for Bush in others. She did not mention money at all. Didn't even want to touch the paper after I read it. Long letter, too. So, I emailed her again thanking her for her letter, but I had asked about the money for the wars, and would she please explain the money.
Our district's Repugnant Dimocrat Rep, Mike McIntyre, didn't answer my question either.
What's an old lady to do? Keep asking, I think, as I'm sure to at least annoy their staff from time to time, as intended, and that's gotta count for something.
I'll have a follow-up for Burr in that I don't understand the budget data and how come we have a $9 trillion debt, and whatever I can throw in there because I don't expect real answers from any of these jerks.
Despicable people, all.
Posted by: Ignorant Old Lady | November 16, 2007 at 08:07 PM
Dear Ignorant Old Lady,
First, may I pour you a cup of tea? It pleases me no end that you actually asked your 'representatives' in our government about money. They usually ask YOU for money.
They need money all the time and spend many hours soliciting bribes.
The Japanese have bought $650 billion in US bonds and the communist Chinese who plan to destroy our military bought over $400 billion in these bonds. The Arab kingdoms that were the same kingdoms that those terrorists on 9/11 came from, hold another $300 billion of these bonds. They are the ones who are making us pay them interest so we can go to war and make oil deliveries from the oil kings safe so they can ship it to Japan and China.
And we get to hold the bag. Isn't that a neat trick? I just wrote a fairy tale about all this, 'The Good Ship Even Keel.'
Posted by: Elaine Supkis | November 16, 2007 at 08:27 PM
The following clip from Glumbert narrated by George Carlin pretty much says it all...
http://www.glumbert.com/media/wakeupamerica
Posted by: Carlos | November 17, 2007 at 02:35 AM