Foreclosure-Gate: The MERS Edifice Is Being Eaten From Within

03-06-2011 • Market-ticker.org

The results were not encouraging. “Fewer than 30 percent of the mortgages had an accurate record in MERS,” Mr. White says. “I kind of assumed that MERS at least kept an accurate list of current ownership. They don’t. MERS is going to make solving the foreclosure problem vastly more expensive.” Ah, so this may be why the banks keep arguing they should be able to "attest" to owning a note instead of actually proving it: The documentary record doesn't show that actually have the right to foreclose, and if it was produced they'd be screwed. This in turn might result in massive lawsuits by the certificate-holders charging fraud in the inducement as the notes were never delivered and recorded even in the MERS system, say much less in county land records. In other words it appears the certificate-holders bought an empty box that was sold to them as containing good paper. At heart, Judge Schack is scratching at the notion that MERS is a legal fiction. If MERS owned nothing, how could it bounce mortgages around for more than a decade? And how could it file millions of foreclosure motions? These cases, Judge Schack wrote in February 2009, “force the court to determine if MERS, as nominee, acted with the utmost good faith and loyalty in the performance of its duties.” The answer, he strongly suggested, was no. When will the American Public stand and demand - not request, demand - that these artifices be torn down and the truth be laid bare on the table? If that truth blows up major financial institutions then so be it. We're way beyond where we should be accepting these sorts of excuses and games simply to protect bankster bonuses and broken business models. We cannot recover in our economy until the truth is laid bare on the table and the bad debt, such as it is, is forced out into the open and the people who hold are forced to recognize their losses. If this results in some of those people having legitimate fraud claims against major financial institutions then so be it. If that, in turn, results in the detonation of those institutions, then so be it. We must have the truth, and a cleared market, before our economy can recover.