Nearly 650,000 borrowers to receive more money from Independent Foreclosure Review

Huffington Post:

Trump’s campaign on Monday pulled down his old tax plan from his website, and replaced it with the text of his Detroit speech. The original plan would have capped income taxes at 25 percent and long-term capital gains and dividends at 20 percent, while adding $12 trillion to the national debt.

In its place, Trump offered the same basic ideas, with some slightly shifted details. More details, he said, would be provided “in the coming weeks.”

He also offered some of his usual refrains: Trump lamented that the country had strayed from an “America First” policy; bemoaned that skyscrapers had been built in Beijing and refugees had been accepted into the U.S.; and called the unemployment rate a hoax.

“All of our policies should be geared towards keeping wealth inside the United States,” he said.

Trump is struggling in the polls after spending the last several days insulting…

States long imposed fees to record documents in land records.

The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems loan registry system, created in the mid-1990s, meant lenders no longer needed to record security interest assignments in county land records each time they transferred a promissory note.

As a result, many counties sued MERS to force MERS members to record future security interest assignments and recover fees they claimed were “lost” because MERS members stopped recording assignments. MERS won the large majority of these cases.

[Note: Read HousingWire’s extensive chronicle of MERS proceedings, 600+ pieces of content, by clicking here.]

Connecticut tried a different tack to recover these alleged “lost” fees:  it amended the state’s land records statute to impose higher fees on mortgages for loans registered with MERS.  MERS filed suit to challenge the constitutionality of the statue, but in a February 2016 decision captioned MERSCORP Holdings, Inc. v. Malloy, the…

Many who follow the depredations of large corporations share a feeling that U.S. criminal law and its enforcers too often fail to hold these institutions accountable. Writers ranging from U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in New York to muckraking journalist Matt Taibbi have complained of the paucity of convictions for financial crime.

Now comes Samuel Buell, a law professor at Duke University, whose new book, Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age, explains why the white-collar criminal justice system comes up short. Despite being thin on proposed reforms, this new offering deserves attention from anyone concerned with the topic.

The author brings two excellent credentials to his task: a breezy writing style and deep prosecutorial experience. He led the U.S. Justice Department’s Enron Corp. Task Force and earlier worked on the prosecution of notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger. When it comes to errant corporations, Buell writes, the government runs into a structural problem: As a…

The amount of money stashed overseas by U.S. multinationals has exploded in recent years, doubling between 2008 and 2014 to more than $2 trillion.

For some perspective on the numbers, cost-estimating website HowMuch.net crunched the most recent data and created a telling interactive chart.

Topping the list: Apple AAPL, +1.52% and its massive $181.1 billion overseas stash, a $70 billion increase from the prior year. That total corresponds to $59.2 billion in deferred taxes, which is enough to cover more than two-thirds of the federal budget for education, training and employment, according to the 2014 numbers compiled by Citizens for Tax Justice last October.

Elsewhere, General Electric’s GE, +0.35%  taxes could take care of almost 5% of our Social Security costs, while taxes from Microsoft MSFT, +0.99% had it kept its money in the U.S., could have covered a fifth of all federal spending on veteran’s benefits.

Read:Dodging tax…

Levitin makes an important distinctions between “enforcing” the PSA and REFERRING to the PSA to show that the loan never made it into the trust. If the loan never made it into the trust, then the trust is not a proper party. It means that the trustee has no rights or authority in connection with the loan. It means that the servicer is making false claims that it is authorized to collect or enforce the debt. It means that the attorneys for the banks and servicers are proffering false evidence to the detriment of both the borrower and the creditor.

Note that people who have really done the research continually come back to the UCC, which is adopted in all 50 states as statutory law — Article 3 as to the enforcement of the note and Article 9, as to enforcement of the mortgage. If the rule of law were…

Top row, left to right: David Malpass, Howard Lorber, Harold Hamm; Bottom row, left to right: Steve Mnuchin, Tom Barrack, John Paulson

This is Trump’s economic team that he chose. And yes, Steven Mnuchin who benefitted from the housing crisis is on the list. Enough said.

Donald Trump has released the names of his economic advisers, a list heavy with Wall Street and real estate industry figures, but short of actual economists.

The names include several people from the world of hedge fund and private equity firms, including Steven Feinberg, chief executive and co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management; Thomas J. Barrack, chief executive of Colony Capital Management; and John Paulson, president of a hedge fund company bearing his name.

One major oil industry executive is on the list: Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, who made a fortune in Bakken Shale formation and is said by Forbes to be worth…

There is a trend nationwide where judges are ruling that broken chains of title are not relevant.

The UCC is one of the least favored courses in law school. Judges hate it because they didn’t pay attention during class. But it’s the law. So the courts are ruling by the seat of their pants instead of following the law. Banks like it for now but be careful what you wish for — these rulings are undermining the marketplace for negotiable instruments.

Eventually lenders and factoring companies are going to come face to face with the “law” they have created through the courts — the UCC doesn’t mean anything and there are no protections against a party with a broken chain pursing a competing claim. The end result is that they will start lending or trading in negotiable instruments or even non-negotiable instruments. That could stop the economy dead in its…

Begun as the government’s response to the foreclosure crisis, the Treasury Department’s Home Affordable Modification Program wasn’t supposed to last forever.

The Dec. 31 end of the foreclosure relief program, which offered a more affordable payment by adjusting interest rates, extending the loan term, and reducing or forbearing principal, will leave a gap that the government is trying to fill.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, is proposing consumer protection principles to guide mortgage servicers, investors, government housing agencies and policymakers as they develop foreclosure-relief solutions to replace what is better known by its acronym HAMP.

The Home Affordable Refinance Program, known as HARP, which was designed to help homeowners who’ve seen a drop in home values refinance with better mortgage terms, also expires Dec. 31.

Read on.