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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called on major lenders to halt foreclosures across the country Friday following Bank of America's announcement it was stopping proceedings until it finishes reviewing possible paperwork problems.

Reid, who had sent a letter to major banks asking them to suspend foreclosures in Nevada, extended his concern to include all 50 states.

"I thank Bank of America for doing the right thing by suspending actions on foreclosures while this investigation runs its course," said Reid. "I urge other major mortgage servicers to consider expanding the area where they have halted foreclosures to all 50 states as well."

He emphasized, "My primary focus is to protect Nevada homeowners who have been hardest hit by foreclosures in the most recent economic downturn."

Reid is the latest Democratic leader to join a growing chorus of lawmakers and state attorneys general who have called for greater scrutiny of the foreclosure process and a nationwide moratorium. Homeowner advocates say that lenders have used dubious paperwork to expedite the eviction of homeowners behind on their payments.

Pressure on the banks continues to grow on Capitol Hill, where Senate Banking chairman Chris Dodd (D-Ct.) said Friday the committee will hold hearings investigating the foreclosure paperwork morass on Nov 16.

Bank of America said Friday it is halting all foreclosure sales and foreclosure proceedings nationwide while it reviews the documents being used to justify homeowner evictions.

It is the first bank to put a moratorium on foreclosures in all 50 states. Previously, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and others were only pausing foreclosures in states where a court has to participate in foreclosure proceedings.

"Bank of America has extended our review of foreclosure documents to all fifty states," the bank said in a statement. "We will stop foreclosure sales until our assessment has been satisfactorily completed. Our ongoing assessment shows the basis for foreclosure decisions are accurate. We continue to serve the interests of our customers, investors and communities. Providing solutions for distressed homeowners remains our primary focus."

MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST ABOUT THE TURMOIL IN THE FORECLOSURE SYSTEM:

Full Coverage: Foreclosure system in chaos

Senior Obama administration officials said Friday that a nationwide moratorium on foreclosure sales may be inevitable, despite their grave reservations about the impact a broad freeze would have on the nation's housing market and economic recovery.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-economy/2010/10/bank_of_ame
rica_halting_all_fo.html

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FORECLOSUREGATE AND OBAMA'S 'POCKET VETO'
Ellen Brown, October 7th, 2010
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/foreclosuregate.php

Amid a snowballing foreclosure fraud crisis, President Obama today blocked legislation that critics say could have made it more difficult for homeowners to challenge foreclosure proceedings against them.

The bill, titled The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2009, passed the Senate with unanimous consent and with no scrutiny by the DC media. In a maneuver known as a "pocket veto," President Obama indirectly vetoed the legislation by declining to sign the bill passed by Congress while legislators are on recess.

The swift passage and the President's subsequent veto of this bill come on the heels of an announcement that Wall Street banks are voluntarily suspending foreclosure proceedings in 23 states.

By most reports, it would appear that the voluntary suspension of foreclosures is underway to review simple, careless procedural errors. Errors which the conscientious banks are hastening to correct. Even Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times characterizes the problem as “flawed paperwork.”

But those errors go far deeper than mere sloppiness. They are concealing a massive fraud.

They cannot be corrected with legitimate paperwork, and that was the reason the servicers had to hire “foreclosure mills” to fabricate the documents.

These errors involve perjury and forgery -- fabricating documents that never existed and swearing to the accuracy of facts not known.

Karl Denninger at MarketTicker is calling it “Foreclosuregate.”

Diana Ollick of CNBC calls it “the RoboSigning Scandal.” On Monday, Ollick reported rumors that the government is planning a 90-day foreclosure moratorium to deal with the problem.

Three large mortgage issuers – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and GMAC -- have voluntarily suspended thousands of foreclosures, and a number of calls have been made for investigations.

Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray announced on Wednesday that he is filing suit against Ally Financial and GMAC for civil penalties up to $25,000 per violation for fraud in hundreds of foreclosure suits.

These problems cannot be swept under the rug as mere technicalities. They go to the heart of the securitization process itself. The snowball has just started to roll.

You Can’t Recover What Doesn’t Exist
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has uncovered a price list from a company called DocX that specializes in “document recovery solutions.” DocX is the technology platform used by Lender Processing Services to manage a national network of foreclosure mills. The price list includes such things as “Create Missing Intervening Assignment,” $35; “Cure Defective Assignment,” $12.95; “Recreate Entire Collateral File,” $95. Notes Smith:

[C]reating . . . means fabricating documents out of whole cloth, and look at the extent of the offerings. The collateral file is ALL the documents the trustee (or the custodian as an agent of the trustee) needs to have pursuant to its obligations under the pooling and servicing agreement on behalf of the mortgage backed security holder. This means most importantly the original of the note (the borrower IOU), copies of the mortgage (the lien on the property), the securitization agreement, and title insurance.

How do you recreate the original note if you don’t have it? And all for a flat fee, regardless of the particular facts or the supposed difficulty of digging them up.

All of the mortgages in question were “securitized” – turned into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and sold off to investors. MBS are typically pooled through a type of “special purpose vehicle” called a Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit or “REMIC”, which has strict requirements defined under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code (the Tax Reform Act of 1986). The REMIC holds the mortgages in trust and issues securities representing an undivided interest in them.

Denninger explains that mortgages are pooled into REMIC Trusts as a tax avoidance measure, and that to qualify, the properties must be properly conveyed to the trustee of the REMIC in the year the MBS is set up, with all the paperwork necessary to show a complete chain of title. For some reason, however, that was not done; and there is no legitimate way to create those conveyances now, because the time limit allowed under the Tax Code has passed.

The question is, why weren’t they done properly in the first place? Was it just haste and sloppiness as alleged? Or was there some reason that these mortgages could NOT be assigned when the MBS were formed?

Denninger argues that it would not have been difficult to do it right from the beginning. His theory is that documents were “lost” to avoid an audit, which would have revealed to investors that they had been sold a bill of goods -- a package of toxic subprime loans very prone to default.

The Tranche Problem

Here is another possible explanation, constructed from an illuminating CNBC clip dated June 29, 2007. In it, Steve Liesman describes how Wall Street turned bundles of subprime mortgages into triple-A investments, using the device called “tranches.” It’s easier to follow if you watch the clip (here), but this is an excerpt:

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How do you create a subprime derivative? . . . You take a bunch of mortgages . . . and put them into one big thing. We call it a Mortgage Backed Security. Say it’s $50 million worth. . . . Now you take a bunch of these Mortgage Backed Securities and you put them into one very big thing. . . . The one thing about all these guys here [in the one very big thing] is that they’re all subprime borrowers, their credit is bad or there’s something about them that doesn’t make it prime. . . .

Watch, we’re going to make some triple A paper out of this. . . Now we have a $1 billion vehicle here. We’re going to slice it up into five different pieces. Call them tranches. . . . The key is, they’re not divided by “Jane’s is here” and “Joe’s is here.” Jane is actually in all five pieces here. Because what we’re doing is, the BBB tranche, they’re going to take the first losses for whoever is in the pool, all the way up to about 8% of the losses. What we’re saying is, you’ve got losses in the thing, I’m going to take them and in return you’re going to pay me a relatively high interest rate. . . . All the way up to triple A, where 24% of the losses are below that. Twenty-four percent have to go bad before they see any losses. Here’s the magic as far as Wall Street’s concerned. We have taken subprime paper and created GE quality paper out of it. We have a triple A tranche here.

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click for detailed links and full report:
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/foreclosuregate.php

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Accurate, DT, but irrelevant.

Not only do I not bother with most of PN's posts (which means I no doubt miss some of the kernels of actually valid information within them), I do so not just because his views are so biased and over the top as to not be worth paying attention to, but also because he goes on forever and it's not worth wasting my time to see if any of what he posts IS valid.

But the point is, DT, that he doesn't CARE, in my opinion, about actually informing people. The fact that he seeks out the most ridiculously insane material to post and the title of his posts, and posts it all to the point of slathering any thread he starts or joins, shows all he wants is to do exactly that, to cover the place with his own outlandish views and spew his hatred of everything in volume. So what you posted is irrelevant; he doesn't want to actually "inform" anyone in the first place.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

Their rule was somehting like this: if you want to reach 90% of the audience, you have to say it in <250 words, if it's over 2000 words, you will only reach 10% of the people.

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