On Facebook, the excellent Shelley Erickson from Washington state just posted this bombshell article from MS Fraud:  “State AGs settle with LPS for $113 million; only nobody knew”.  It’s the latest proof that there are no original promissory notes in existence which a bank can use to foreclose or sue for a money judgment, even though those practices continue unabated.  Here’s the bombshell part:

In the 2007 (pre-crisis) certified Texas Supreme Court transcript of the “Meeting on Foreclosure Rules”, Michael Barrett (now deceased), of the Texas foreclosure-mill Barrett-Burke, Castle, Daffin & Frappier, admits that the mandated paperwork required to lawfully execute a foreclosure simply does not exist in 90% of the cases: 

“So finding a document that says, “I am the owner and holder, and I thereby grant to the servicer the right to foreclose in my name” is an impossibility in 90 percent of the cases.” (transcript page 27, line 16) 

The remedy for when, as Mr. Barrett confirmed “There really isn’t such a document” (Page 27, line 8), was revealed by Judge Bruce Priddy (See State of Texas v. Judge Priddy D-1-GV-08-002311) when he added: 

“They just create one for the most part sometimes, and the servicer signs it themselves saying that it’s been transferred to whatever entity they name as applicant”. (page 28, line 10) 

First American Title added: 

“Well, the other problem — Judge, this is Tim Redding. The other problem that I see — and, Tommy, you and I talk about it regularly – that we have a bunch of servicers that are corporations or trusts attempting to foreclose on behalf of other trusts using a power of attorney, and I don’t think that’s really proper. I mean, we all kind of turn a blind eye to it, but I think that’s an issue that’s out there that somebody could use to potentially attack a foreclosure.”  (p. 33, line 5)

So that’s strike one…

Strike two
Shelley pointed out that she has the transcript of a Washington state senate hearing at which Stu Halsan of the Washington Land Title Association said the following:

“You’re not gonna be able to change what Wall Street did with those securitizations of all these things.  And if you start requiring the original note that has been gone through I don’t know how many hands–but the collection is being done by a servicing company that we know–if you require that original note, none of you [i.e., the senators] will ever be able to sell your property.  You just won’t.”

Read all about that at Deadly Clear…

Strike three

Then of course, there was the letter from the Florida Mortgage Banker’s Association to the Florida Supreme Court which admitted quite openly that the original promissory notes were destroyed as a matter of standard, routine practice:

The reason “many firms file lost note counts as a standard alternative pleading in the complaint” is because the physical document [i.e., the original note] was deliberately eliminated to avoid confusion immediately upon its conversion to an electronic file. See State Street Bank and Trust Company v. Lord, 851 So. 2d 790 (Fla. 4th DCA 2003). Electronic storage is almost universally acknowledged as safer, more efficient and less expensive than maintaining the originals in hard copy, which bears the concomitant costs of physical indexing, archiving and maintaining security. It is a standard in the industry [presumably not just in Florida, then] and becoming the benchmark of modern efficiency across the spectrum of commerce—including the court system.

Given all this, how can any judge anywhere let these banks continue to illegally foreclose? It’s exasperating, it’s crazy-making. We truly live in the Wild West, and one can completely understand Karl Denninger’s outrage that is leading him (and apparently others, according to the comments) to quit the entire illegal scheme altogether:

In 2007 I began writing The Market Ticker due to the outrageous conduct of various branches in the Administration and portions of the Capital Markets.  Endemic fraud in the financial system that had generated unbridled and outrageous credit creation threatened the collapse of our entire economic system.

The consequence of this should have been thousands of indictments, prosecutions and imprisonments — of banking executives, of members of Congress, of various executive branch officers in various agencies and more.  The banking system should have been forced to match assets to liabilities and either put up the margin to back their bets or liquidate them — and if that forced them out of business and collapsed asset prices by 90%, so be it.

Instead our government took the easy way out.  It doubled down on the fraudulent models of the past.