ARE YOU A VICTIM OF WELLS FARGO'S PAIN?: NEIL GARFIELD EXPLAINS (SUCCINCTLY) HOW A BANK CAN SIMULTANEOUSLY CHEAT EVERY ENTITY PARTY TO A SINGLE MORTGAGE AGREEMENT.

Monday, February 17, 2014

NEIL GARFIELD EXPLAINS (SUCCINCTLY) HOW A BANK CAN SIMULTANEOUSLY CHEAT EVERY ENTITY PARTY TO A SINGLE MORTGAGE AGREEMENT.

Wells Fargo has a pretty building
in Albuquerque, NM.
That is all I am going to say.

Downtown Albuquerque, NM, just after sunset. Features the Compass Bank building (purple), the Bank of America building, the Wells Fargo building, and the New Courthouse, plus a Carl's Jr. restaurant. Cropped a little black sky off the top in Photoshop, but the colors are as the G9 took them. This is easily my #2 Most Viewed Pic. It reached 300 Views on Dec. 23, 2007. It is also my #3 Most Interesting Pic. Congratulations! On 4 Feb 2008, it reached 500 Views! On March 6, 600! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Banks Still Out Cheating
Their Customers
and Everyone Else

cheating (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Neil Garfield

It is easy to think of the mortgage meltdown as a period of time in which the banks went wild. Unfortunately that period of time never ended. They are still doing it. The level of sophistication it takes to do the kinds of things that banks have been doing for the last 20 years is probably beyond the knowledge and experience of any of the regulators. In addition, it is beyond the knowledge and experience of most consumers, lawyers and judges; in fact as to non-regulators, bank behavior makes no sense. After having seen the results of what are euphemistically called subprime mortgages, Wells Fargo is plunging back in and obviously expecting to make a profit. Apparently the quasi governmental entities that issue guarantees on certain mortgages will allow these subprime mortgages. Wells Fargo says it now understands the parameters under which the guarantors (Fannie and Freddie) will approve those mortgages without a risk that Wells Fargo will be required to buy them back.

That is kind of a mouthful. We have thousands of transactions that are being conducted that directly affect the ownership and balance of various types of loans including mortgage loans. The picture presented in court is that the ownership and status of each loan is stable enough for representations to be made. But the truth is that the professional witnesses hired by the bank’s foreclosure actions only present a slice of the life of a loan. They neither know nor do they inquire about the rest of the information. For example, they come to court with a a report showing the borrower’s record of payments to the servicer but they do not show servicer’s record of payments to the creditor. By definition they are saying that they only know part of the financial record and that consists of a made for trial report on the borrower’s activities. It does not show what happened to the payments made by the borrower and does not show payments made by others — like loss sharing with the FDIC, servicer advances, insurance, and other actual payments that were made.

These payments are not allocated to any specific loan account because that would reduce the amount claimed as due from the borrower to the creditor — as it should. And the intermediaries and conduits who are making claims against the borrower have no intention of paying the actual creditors (the investors) any more than they absolutely have to. So you have these intermediaries claiming to be real parties in interest or claiming to represent the real parties in interest when in fact they are representing themselves.

They cheat the investor by not disclosing payments received from insurance and FDIC loss sharing. They cheat the borrower by not disclosing those payments that reduce the count receivable and therefore the account payable. They cheat the borrower again when they fail to show “servicer advances” which are payments received by the alleged trust beneficiaries regardless of whether or not the borrower submits monthly payments. (That is, there can’t be a default in payments to the “trust” because the pass through beneficiaries are getting paid. Thus if there is any liability of the borrower it would be to intermediaries who made those servicer payments by way of a new liability created with each such payment and which is NOT secured by any mortgage because the borrower never entered into any deal with the servicer or investment bank — the real source of servicer advances).

Then they cheat the investor again by forcing a case into a foreclosure sale when the borrower was perfectly prepared, willing and able to enter into a settlement agreement that would have paid the rest are far more than the proceeds of a foreclosure sale and final liquidation. Their object is to maximize the loss of the investor and maximize the loss of the borrower to the detriment of both and solely for the benefit of the intermediary or conduit that is pulling the strings and handling the money. And they are still doing it.

The banks have become so brazen that they are manipulating currency markets in addition to the debt markets. While we haven’t seen any reports about activities in the equity markets, there is no reason to doubt that their illegal activities are not present in equity transactions. For the judicial system to assume that the Banks are telling the truth or presenting an accurate picture of the transaction activity relating to a particular loan is just plain absurd now. The presumption in court should be what it used to be, at a minimum. Before the era of securitization, most judges scrutinized the documentation to make sure that everything was in order. Today most judges will say that everything is in order because they are pieces of paper in front of them, regardless of whether any of those pieces of paper represents an accurate rendition of the facts related to the loan in dispute. Most judges in most cases are rubber-stamping judgments for intermediaries and thus are vehicles for the intermediaries and conduits to continue cheating and stealing from investors and borrowers.

The latest example is the control exercised by the large banks over currency trading. Regulators are clueless. The banks are no longer even concerned with the appearance of propriety. They are cheating the system, the society, the government and of course the people with impunity. They are continuing to pay or promote their stocks as healthy investment opportunities. Perhaps they are right. If they continue to be impervious to prosecution for violating every written and unwritten rule and law then their stock is bound to rise both in price and in price-to-earnings ratio. They now have enough money which they have diverted out of the economy of this country and other countries that they can create fictitious transactions showing proprietary trading profits for the next 20 years.

This is exactly what I predicted six years ago. They are feeding the money back into the system and laundering it through the appearance of proprietary trading. It is an old trick. But they have enough money now to make their earnings go up every year indefinitely. On the other hand, if the regulators and investigators actually study the activities of the banks and start to bring enforcement actions and prosecutions, maybe some of that money that was taken from our economy can be recovered, and the financial statements of those banks will be revealed and smoke and mirrors. Then maybe their stock won’t look so good. Right now everyone is betting that they will get away with it.

New forex lawsuit parses data to make case

Yesterday, 03:13 PM ET · JPM

There have been a number of suits against the global banks over claims of forex manipulation, but this latest by the City of Philadelphia Board of Pensions and Retirement is the first to include research highlighting unusual movements in major currencies.
Using data compiled by Fideres, the plaintiffs analyzed daily trading right around the 4 PM fix of currency prices … curiously, anomalous price movements became rarer and less pronounced after the initial reports of rigging surfaced last summer.
Morgan Stanley has spent some time looking at euro/dollar spikes at 4 PM and also concluded they were unrelated to economic events. Instead of collusion though, Morgan pins the blame on computerized trading programs.
The seven banks sued by Philadelphia which is seeking damages as high as $10B: Barclays (BCS), Citigroup (C), Deutsche Bank (DB), HSBC, JPMorgan (JPM), RBS, and UBS.