The issue with the recent robo-signing scandal is that clear title could disappear in the American mortgage market. Part of the outrage is that U.S. banks have been foreclosing on mortgages which they don’t even own. Part of the reality is that the convoluted process of securitisation means banks may not be able to prove at all they actually do own the mortgages.

Already large unions in the U.S are encouraging borrowers to challenge banks to prove they won your mortgage. They’ve set up a website asking the question, “Where’s your note?”

You can see where this is headed. No one in America wants to own a failure. The banks want to foreclose on homes and sell them and avoid taking losses. Borrowers (some of them, and some of them rightly) want to avoid paying a debt for an asset that’s worth less. No one wants to be responsible anymore because the most lucrative and least painful route is to abandon responsibility and your word.

This is a serious breakdown in one of the most basic elements of a functioning market: contract (doing what you said you’d do). People at every level appear to have cheated and lied during the housing boom. The borrowers who lied on their loan applications…the mortgage originators who made the loan without any documentation of work or income…the securitiser who packaged it up and sold it to investors…the ratings agency that rated the debt investment-grade…the insurance companies who sold default insurance against the bonds multiple times…and the government that encouraged home-ownership and subsidised the fraud with an implied guarantee on the bonds of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that bought a lot of the garbage bonds.