— The Associated Press has a good piece on the foreclosure scandal, reporting that the evidence of wrongdoing is even more widespread than previously reported:
The depositions paint a surreal picture of foreclosure experts who didn’t understand even the most elementary aspects of the mortgage or foreclosure process — even though they were entrusted as the records custodians of homeowners’ loans. In one deposition taken in Houston, a foreclosure supervisor with Litton Loan couldn’t define basic terms like promissory note, mortgagee, lien, receiver, jurisdiction, circuit court, plaintiff’s assignor or defendant. She testified that she didn’t know why a spouse might claim interest in a property, what the required conditions were for a bank to foreclose or who the holder of the mortgage note was. “I don’t know the ins and outs of the loan, I just sign documents,” she said at one point.
Until now, only a handful of depositions from robo-signers have come to light. But the sheer volume of the new depositions will make it more difficult for financial institutions to argue that robo-signing was an aberrant practice in a handful of rogue back offices.
And reporter Michelle Conlin does a good job batting down the banks’ spin that this is much ado about nothing:
Though some have chalked up the foreclosure debacle to an overblown case of paperwork bungling, the underlying legal issues are far more serious. Yes, swearing that you’ve reviewed documents you’ve never seen is a legal offense. But at the center of the foreclosure scandal looms something much larger: the question of who actually owns the loans and who has the right to foreclose upon them. The paperwork issues being raised by lawyers and attorneys generals have the potential to blight not just the titles of foreclosed properties but also those belonging to homeowners who have never missed a mortgage payment.
In April 1936, just an hour's drive up the road, the Moose River Gold Mine disaster unfolded in a way very much like the Chilean situation. Local radio coverage was linked to the US, Europe and around the world in one of the first demonstrations of the power of real time mass media. TV was reliving their glory days over the last couple of months.
On the topic that actually brought me to this post, over at Housing Doom blog Debi and I have been watching foreclosuregate with mounting concern. What really has my heart in the pit of my stomach is the article from early today "Mortgage Damage Spreads: Big Bank Stocks Hit Again as Modern Finance Collides With the Legal System," where WSJ real estate market ace Nick Timiraos et al make a pretty good case that if Wall Street isn't allowed to trample over nearly a millennium's worth of English heritage property title law the MBS bondholders will suffer a haircut big enough to destroy Western civilization. Sort of like the hostage taking scene in "Blazing Saddles," which would be funny if there weren't so much at stake.
Cheers, John McLeod, Halifax, Canada
#1 Posted by John M, CJR on Sat 16 Oct 2010 at 10:34 AM
1) The man and his wife stood there for the duration, both of them in hard-hats and safety jackets, fondly greeting each miner as he emerged with a few words, a handshake, and a hearty, back-slapping hug, personally greeting each family as they were escorted out to meet their miner, sang the national anthem with gusto and chanted fist-pumping Chi! Chi! Chi! Le! Le! Le! along with all of the rescue team, remaining in place until the last rescue worker again walked upon the surface of the earth, leaving his post only to provide updates and inspiration to the rest of the world at intermittent press conferences on the rescue site. That's some "political calculation."
2) I think that gut-twisting, noxious nihilism is a tic that affects most of the New York Times political writers. Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn are particularly prone to that kind of glib and cynical characterization of everything a politician does as "political calculation." Baker didn't normally write that way when he was with Washington Post. Maybe a top editor? Something in the coffee machine? A cultural tic? Dunno. It's awful.
3) A thousand journalists covering a news story, remarkable as it is, when twenty or thirty would have been fine, thanks.
As another journo once noted to me, that's like complaining that there's too many pizza joints. Each news outfit made their own decision on how to cover this event: how many journos, how many cameras, where to allocate the resources.
I can just imagine @Ryan and CJR rising up with jowls a-flapping in outrage if Chile had decided to limit the coverage and allow only twenty or thirty journos to cover this.
Or, if New York Times and CNN had decided, "Oh, well, AP and AFP will be there, why bother? Sure, it's a big international story, billions of people are watching, but we might get in the way."
#2 Posted by James, CJR on Sat 16 Oct 2010 at 04:39 PM