On September 26 I participated in a conference call hosted by the Washington D.C. investment firm Compass Point, on the topic of “Mortgage Finance Reform and Credit Risk Transfers.” Below is the text of my prepared remarks for that call.

The topic I’d like to address this morning is credit risk transfers, and the role they might play in a reformed mortgage finance system.

Today there are two competing approaches to resolving the conservatorships of Fannie and Freddie. The first is what Treasury and those I call the “Financial Establishment”—commercial and investment banks and their supporters—have sought from the day the conservatorships began: to wind Fannie and Freddie down, and have Congress replace them with some mechanism more to the liking of large primary market lenders. Over the past few years there have been a number of proposals for doing this: Corker-Warner, Johnson-Crapo, proposals from the Urban Institute and…

That’s billion with a B….

• Outsize punitive damages awards are often reduced by courts
• Bank found by jury to have mismanaged estate of Max Hopper

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How You Can Easily Research State Records For Evidence Of Unremediated LPS Robo-Signing Fraud*[1] 

By Eric Mains, Former FDIC Team Leader

Introduction

Many of the banks conducting foreclosures 2008-2013 relied on a few large foreclosure mills to litigate cases for them, and still do. For large banks, it made sense–consolidate your cases with specialized firms employing dozens of attorneys/paralegals, one-stop shop the process. Most of these firms from 2008-2013 used a version of Lender Processing Services (“LPS”) Desktop software program to create needed assignments for claimed holders of loans (Extra stress on the “claimed” part!). Some estimates put LPS’s dominance of the foreclosure software marketplace at 80% of the market during that period. LPS helped banks retain attorneys for foreclosures, and not surprisingly often chose large foreclosure mills to partner with- mills that often times had much in common with the infamous David Stern firm in Florida.

Stern’s…

As part of my consultation on a case involving PennyMac and Citi, I suggested a strategy (see below) using the procedural route of a Request for Admissions. If not answered, the requests are deemed admitted — which in most cases will completely undermine the foundation for any of the evidence proffered by the foreclosing party. If admitted, the same result applies. If denied, you have something to ask for in further discovery. If objections are filed then the lawyer must be prepared with cases, statutes and treatise authority to back up his claim that he/she is entitled to the information and that without it the trial will be a sham.

The usual response to a request for production is that they already gave you the paperwork — when you know and they know that isn’t what you were asking for. You hopefully asked for all documents in which there was…

Morgan Stanley plans to bring its mortgage origination business in-house, as the bank ramps up the business to create a bigger presence in the mortgage market.

According to the Reuters article by Olivia Oran, Morgan Stanley wants to bring the business in-house to improve customer service and generate more mortgages, citing two people familiar with the matter.

“Morgan Stanley executives hope that handling originations in-house will smooth out the process and give the bank a chance to market other products and services to wealthy clients,” the article stated.

Before bringing the business in-house, Morgan Stanley used PHH Corp. as a third-party provider for its originations.

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National Memo:

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is increasingly vocal in public about his newfound ethical concerns. He made a very public statement distancing himself from President Trump over Trump’s failure to condemn white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has also described himself as “pro-immigrant”: an opinion that is hard to square away against his roles as a financier, underwriter and bond-holder of private prison corporations like GEO Group and Core Civic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America). Both corporations oversee Immigrant Detention Centers throughout the U.S., many of which house undocumented migrants.

JPMorgan Chase’s investments in private prisons certainly make economic sense: the private prison industry is worth about $5 billion, and the election of Donald Trump has caused the profits of the sector to balloon further. Almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Justice rescinded the Obama administration’s order to phase out federal private prisons from the criminal justice…

To listen to Patricia Rodriguez discuss the latest foreclosure defense issues please visit the Neil Garfield Show here and here.

By Patricia Rodriguez, Esq.

Nothing in this article is meant to be construed as legal advice; there is no attorney-client relationship that is being created. This is for general education purposes only. 

After years of litigating against alleged lenders, investors, servicers, and foreclosure trustee’s we are starting to see a clear trend of the servicing rights being transferred upon receiving a complete loan modification application. What is an alleged lender – this is usually the party that claims to have funded the original loan or the originator.

The alleged investors are those who claim to have received an ownership interest in the loan through an assignment and endorsements or multiple assignments and endorsements. The foreclosure trustee in non-judicial foreclosure states such as California are entrusted with overseeing the foreclosure…

In what can only be regarded as a shocking development, the United States is suing the former head of subprime mortgage trading at Deutsche Bank over “systematically and intentionally” lying about the quality of subprime mortgages that backed nearly $1.5 billion in mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the crisis.

The lawsuit marks one of only a handful of times the government has gone after an individual for crisis-era mortgage fraud at the systemic level; an untold amount of MBS traders from this era still walk free.

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If you want to know why people in all political spectrums are angry enough to blow up stuff consider this: If any of us walked into Wells Fargo Bank and using stolen financial identities opened up a checking account, savings account, credit card account and maybe a few more credit card accounts, upon discovery, we would be accused of bank fraud and sentenced to years in prison.

Add to that total the following: an auto loan, a mortgage loan and creating an old-style “float” using newfangled EFT (eletronic funds transfer) bearing the name “shadow money” in a “shadow banking world.”

Those were all things that Wells Fargo continually committed for the last 20 years giving the false impression that its brand mattered, that they had more business than they really did, that they had mroe accounts —depository and loan accounts — than they really did and all based upon lies…

The two affiliates, Lehman Brothers U.K. Holdings (Delaware) Inc and Lehman Pass-Through Securities Inc, were put into bankruptcy as part of a deal that will generate $485 million cash for the Lehman estate, according to court documents.

The affiliates own residential mortgage-backed securities, real estate and stock in First Data Corp (>> First Data Corp), which helps process credit card transactions, among other assets, according to papers filed in the U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan. Affiliates of Brookfield Asset Management Inc of Canada (>> Brookfield Asset Management Inc) are buying stakes in the Lehman affiliates, which were put into bankruptcy to carry out the deal.

Administrators have spent years winding down Lehman’s holdings and have distributed around $147 billion to creditors, according to court records.

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