Foreclosure-Gate: Will The SEC Ask, Whats That Smell?

02-08-2011 • NakedCapitalism.com/

It’s worth nothing that only the Financial Times seems to be carrying this story (yours truly did check on key word variants in Google News and came up empty-handed). They also deem it to be worthy of front page placement. This is only an isolated sighting, but one of the features of the runup to the financial crisis was an ongoing news disparity between the Financial Times and US business press, particularly the Wall Street Journal. The FT would pick up on stories that seemed important and were too often either completely ignored or reported by the American financial outlets only in in a selective manner. So if we see more bypassing of inconvenient news by the usual suspects in the US, take heed. What is particularly interesting is that the SEC seems to be targeting specifically the sort of abuses that we have chronicled at length on this blog: failure to convey mortgages to the securitization trusts in accordance with the pooling and servicing agreements (which were part of the offering documents); whether robosiging is inconsistent representations made to investors (this frankly is a novel angle, I’m impressed the SEC is considering it), as well as an issue that has gotten more attention in the media, that investors appear to have been mislead on a widespread basis about the quality of mortgages in late vintage subprime mortgage bonds.