Monday, January 6, 2014

Freebooters Stealing homes

I've talked a little of the financial crisis brought on by the freebooting behavior of pretty much all our banks. The writers Ravi Batra, coming from the left; and Kevin Phillips coming from the right and also from a historical view, both predicted the entire mess. And I've noticed that the frauds and swindles in this swindle bubble housing market have followed three stages:

1. In the first banks learned to securitize loans and resell them to investors. And they found they could make money from those sales up front. They didn't have to wait for folks to pay their monthly mortgage, they could turn them into securities. This led to what might have been a normal housing expansion as housing prices tracked locational prosperity or simple inflation being turned into a bubble as folks were encouraged to leverage purchases of homes on the expectation of selling those homes later, and the banks no longer worried about making money downstream, they could sell derivative contracts instead.

2. But then they began creating derivative contracts in a fraudulent manner, selling mortgages in a fraudulent manner, and leveraging their loans with additional derivative contracts. To the point where they often can't prove who owns the underlying loan and that made a second phase of fraud. They started preparing to pawn off the risk on their investors and home-buyers. Eventually their frauds collapsed, the companies that had been the fronts for these operations were "wound up" by the FDIC, but the banks were deemed "too big to fail" and no one frog-marched there. So there was a huge sucking sound as money was sucked out of intact businesses, workers -- and home owners.

3. This led to the third phase of the swindle when they started fraudulently foreclosing on mortgages they didn't own anymore -- because they'd already sold them several times. They did this by arbitrarily raising interest rates on variable mortgages, and by victimizing people who lost jobs due to their original perfidy.

The blog "Deadly Clear" goes into detail on this, and I'll be partially quoting:

In most cases they could rely on judges who didn't care if they still owned the note. As the author of a blog that explains this in much more detail than I care to go into writes:

When all is said and done the courts come back to the main premise, “Did you pay?”. That is so injudicious on so many levels. The deeper we get into securitization and contract law we soon realize (after dissection) there is one very basic question being ignored – “Is the Promissory Note even enforceable?”

Now since there is so much corruption in our courts a lot of courts are going to ignore this question. So if I owed a mortgage I'd feel safer just paying the darn thing off, but there are people who get into trouble because of bank fraud who are accused of being late or not paying when they in fact are, so if someone is in trouble with a loan it is worth fighting this.

Non-traditional mortgages and sub-prime mortgages are the culprits here. In many cases people were sold them fraudulently from the beginning, but even if they knew what they were getting into, most were lied to about Non Traditional Mortgages (I was sold one and they lied to me and it took me a few months to figure it out and I can be an idiot but fortunately i caught it early enough and had the resources to get out of it. But it turns out that many of these loans were illegally done in the first place.

Anyway the frauds were sloppy and so some folks in trouble may be able to prove that the banks have no business foreclosing on their home anyway. For more read:

http://deadlyclear.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/is-the-promissory-note-even-enforceable/
Also read these:
http://www.bairblog.com/
More on Ravi Batra:
Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Ravi+Batra&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3ARavi+Batra]
More on Kevin Phillips:
Amazon Profile and list of books: [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Kevin+Phillips&search-alias=books&text=Kevin+Phillips&sort=relevancerank]
Democracy Now Interview: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/28/former_gop_strategist_kevin_phillips_on
A Good Year for Revolution [http://www.amazon.com/1775-A-Good-Year-Revolution/dp/0670025127]
Review of "American Theocracy:"
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/author-phillips.html

Unfortunately the Judges must be honest enough to go along with the law for that to work.

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