Does anyone else think this is really F'ed up
Real Estate Investor · Geneva, IL · Member since 2010 · 82 posts · 29 votes
And Obama just vetoed a bill that would make it easier for banks to foreclose. Can anyone out there tell me a story about someone that has been paying there mortgage and was accidentally foreclosed on?????? Who is this protecting? Love the philosophy behind this.
http://www.illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/pressroom/2010_10/20101007b.html
On the news last night: Congress is trying to get a bill passed that will stop foreclosures. Now I can''t remember who said it; just rolled my eyes and went about my business. It would have either been on NBC News or The Nightly Business report because my local news never ever says anything anti-government.
Seems to me that stopping foreclosures amounts to illegal seizure of the bank's assets. Seize the house from the banks, gift it to the deadbeat who won't pay his mortgage.
Expect nothing less from your government!
How about this:
Man without Mortgage Loses Home in Foreclosure:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/man-without-mortgage-loses-home-in-foreclosure/
Ray in Ct.
You're wrong, it's a "POCKET VETO" it is not in place, it was caught at the White House According to the news, it was a Rebublican sponsored bill (generally anything that would be a big plus for banks and wall street will be from that side of the isle) , there was no public discussion and it passed with flying colors, the White House caught the deficiencies and how it would effect the situation and it is now dead.
Is AG Madigan up for reelection?
It is very easy for AG Madigan to make this move and ease the pressure on underwater homeowners ... for a short while.
The unintended consequence of this act is the additional burden and thus the additional costs placed on loan servicers and in turn on loan providers for making loans and collecting on what is owed. Since loan originators cannot tell for certain which loans will end up as slow pays or no pays, the originators will have to cover this additional cost through higher fees and/or higher rates on every loan.
Guess what? Every borrower pays for this move. But hey ... it wins votes.
the scariest words you can ever hear: "We are from the government and we are here to help"
I personally think this is exactly what we should want our government to do. Step into a situation where there is evidence that its citizens might not be getting treated fairly by powerful institutions.
There is certainly evidence that the process has problems and is ripe for errors. It would be pretty irresponsible to pass laws that speed up a process that already has problems. If you sense your steering isn't working exactly right, you don't hit the gas, you hit the brake. You don't wait til after the crash happens.
I think many mistakes are happening.but no one is keeping track of them and lenders are required to reveal them.
I'll bet many homeowners don't even know there was a mistake in their foreclosure. .
The problem stems from the tranches that the loans were split into. Most people think loans are bundled together and sold off in chunks. But the truth is that before they are bundled, each loan was often split into parts. Often one investor owns the cash flows and another investor owns the principal payment. So there are multiple owners of any given loan. So who has the right of foreclosure? And who has the right to accept short sales? And how are the losses split?
It is complicated stuff. How confident are you in your bank? Do you thiink they could make a mistake? Does a bank have any incentive to cut corners on the process? If the banks are unchecked in their ability to foreclose without proper documentation, what do you think the chances are that they will take advantage of that? Roughly 100%?
If they don't get it correct now, then it is another huge headache down the road as mistaken transfers are found. The title insurers are at risk too so they are pushing hard to slow down the foreclosures. So many municipalities are behind with recording documents that title companies are at much larger risk.
Just one story from Bloomberg below. Some states think they have thousands of these.
“This is the most important issue of the whole mortgage mess because families are being thrown out of their homes by people who may not have the right to do that,†said Glenn Russell, a Fall River, Massachusetts, real estate attorney who won a case last year that reversed a foreclosure because of faulty paperwork.
Mark and Tammy LaRace, his clients, were able to move back into their Cape Cod-style house in Springfield, Massachusetts, more than two years after they were evicted.
In February, Judge Keith Long of the Massachusetts Land Court reaffirmed his 2009 decision to return the house to the LaRaces. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., which initiated the suit in an attempt to clear the property’s title after it foreclosed on it, has appealed the decision. The case now is under consideration by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court.
That is a funny little quip. But it is actually much scarier when you are really in trouble and no one is coming to help.
Everyone loves to rip the government until they themselves are the ones who need help. Then they cry like little girls for govt help and handouts.
What you have written above IS NOT true either. Austin is very far left by Texas standards and I would bet half of the city doesn't want help from big government. Fires, controlling the borders, etc....yes...blanket, one-size-fits-all policies for the masses...no.
Who made you an authority on what EVERYBODY wants?
J Scott, my house DID burn down in Southern California and the local fire department came and put it out. My property tax bill stated "fire district" on it. I pay for the fire service, much like I pay for insurance. But when I pay my Federal Income Tax, it doesn't say "Lazy Welfare Recipient" on it.
And NO, I would not go to the police, I would go to my car, get my .357, and take care of it.
And as I figured, J Scott would come up with some pretty lame arguments. Sure, the banks can make a mistake on a foreclosure. But NO ONE should be allowed to live in a home if they break their word on paying the bank back.
Oh, on a final note, the government hasn't protected an INDIVIDUAL right of mine in a long time. As a matter of fact, they are TAKING more of my individual rights, and trying to take even more. Can't talk on a cell phone in the car but I can talk to my passenger. Have to pay extra sales tax, in Colorado, on candy now. And they want to fine me if I don't have health insurance. Get the government OUT of my life and back to what they are SUPPOSED to do, protect our borders, arrest and incarcerate law breakers, provide for interstate commerce, etc... It is NOT the government's job to feed the hungry, house the lazy and bail out corporations!
(OK J, come back with your Section 8 argument, I LOVE it!!)
Good luck with that! You lost your rights with the Patriot Act.
I prefer the Swiss model: Every household is armed.
The Amish model: Your house burns down. Community rebuilds it. This is a tough one these days but not impossible for the non-Amish.
In the great depression/collapse if you still have phone service you can dial all you want and nobody will come.
On the news last night: Congress is trying to get a bill passed that will stop foreclosures. Now I can''t remember who said it; just rolled my eyes and went about my business. It would have either been on NBC News or The Nightly Business report because my local news never ever says anything anti-government.
Seems to me that stopping foreclosures amounts to illegal seizure of the bank's assets. Seize the house from the banks, gift it to the deadbeat who won't pay his mortgage.
Good luck having a conversation with someone who thinks the police and fire department are the same as the federal government.
today I went to my local goverment office to get a permit for a new house I'm closing on. there were 8 people in the office. No one got up to help me. One person yelled from her desk. I was told that only Susan could help me with my request. Mind you, I've done this process probably a couple dozen times and could do it myself if needed. they said I needed to come back Monday because Susan wasn't in the office.
This is what you get from the government. If you choose to depend on them and pay them to run your life, keep voting left wing crazies in office.
That's what the article was about...not about the government forcing banks to stop foreclosing. According to the article, assuming the banks can prove that "the affidavits and foreclosure documents [they are filing] are trustworthy", there's no issue. But, if they can't prove their following the law, why should they be allowed to continue their illegal practices?
Eric, the securitization of debt does not make foreclosures harder. CDOs are instruments backed by the underlying collateral of the mortgage and the mortgage itself remains as a valid and whole transaction and can be foreclosed upon easily. You are right that dividing the spoils would require some work but that is really not related to the foreclosure but to the division of the proceeds from the foreclosure sale.
J Scott, the comparison to criminals is somewhat incorrect because criminal acts are intentional whereas the banks seem to just be doing occasional screwups. I bid a lot at trustee sales and do find an error here and there but the media has made this a much bigger thing than it actually is. Very few transactions actually have screwups and when they do, it is usually a "technical" error rather than kicking someone out of their home when they have in fact been paying their mortgage properly.
I think we also need to understand that there are no completely error-free activities. If you do a million foreclosures, you are going to have some errors. It doesn't make sense to stop all human activity based on the rationale that they have a non-zero error rate. In fact, if the foreclosures were carried out by the politicians and the government, the error rate would be many times as high as it is.
"...after they admitted they were filing false documents in foreclosure proceedings."
Based on the way it's written, that sounds fully intentional to me...
Again, it could be poorly worded or even incorrect; if it turns out these are innocent mistakes, that (might) change things...
Obviously I find the whole "I want small govt" thing laughable. Sure, everyone would love that in a dream world. It is simply not realistic. That is why there is no country of significant size in the whole world that has this small govt, low tax model. There are plenty with low taxes, but the govt gets all their money from owning the resources of the country and they control their citizens.
It is simply a model that has never worked anywhere. In history, any place that did not have a strong govt either became a failed state or anarchy.
We can disagree on policy. Just please don't claim I am making statements that I am not.
Not sure what any of this has to do with the OP. Do you believe that the govt should be passing laws to help speed the FC process in light of the news that banks are cutting corners?
There definitely are countries with small and effective governments. Just because you are not familiar with them does not mean that they do not exist or that they cannot exist. Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan come to mind when I think of small and efficient governments. In the western hemisphere, you have Costa Rica. Even Malaysia has a small and effective government although I do not care for some of its policies. Japan used to have a small government when its economy was doing well.
The way I see it, countries with small and effective governments have high GDP growth. Over time, they become wealthier and their people become complacent and lazy and demand more and more stuff from the government. This causes the government to become bloated and inefficient and economic growth rapidly slows down. This will cause some people to see a correlation between affluence and big government without realizing that the former is the cause of the latter and not the other way around.
Mike,
We are obviously on different ends of the political spectrum and I'd love to debate these supposed individual rights that are being taken from you. (what does sales tax have to do with your rights?)
But I refrain.
I couldn't agree with you more when you say you shouldn't have to pay if someone defaults on their mortgage, etc. I think the entitlement attitude is outrageous. I have much more of an old school mentality like you do. I would go to the govt as a very last resort, if then.
My point is that people are hypocritical about it. People rarely walk the walk as you say you do. We know the libs will line up for govt help but in reality the tea partiers do too. That is my complaint about them. The same people who scream for the govt to get out of their lives scream bloody murder if you try to cut medicare or increase retirement age. Everyone in the Gulf is screaming for help due to the flood, not just libs. Why aren't they just sucking it up like you did. Are they turning down unemployment benefits when the going gets tough. All these conservative governors make a big to do about govt waste and say they want to turn away stimulus money. But they don't. They take it. There are numerous examples of conservatives taking full advantage and more of govt help and going against their strongly held "principles".
The vast majority of people are simply demanding that the govt "make them whole" as a result of every flood or every crime or every terrorist attack or every recession or every slip on the sidewalk. Of course, this is ridiculous but they do it. That is why govt (Dem or Rep) never gets smaller. The people demand bigger, even if they claim to be against it. The govt gives people what they demand.
I refuse to get into political debates as they just get too heated and all it does is piss everyone off who cares.
That said, I would have to disagree with this statement:
Most of these places are tiny and can't be replicated at our size for one.
For another, it is not simply being small and efficient that the tea partiers want.
They want small, efficient and low tax. And they want tons of freedoms. Carry guns, little business regulation complete personal freedom. Etc.
None of these places fit that. Many of them are incredibly repressive and many are high tax. Try chewing gum in Singapore!
Costa Rica is the only one that might come close to fitting the criteria though it has fewer people than the Chicagoland area. But let's take a look at it for fun. They abolished the army and have govt universal health care just as 2 examples. I am all for that! Do you think the Repubs would really like that??
Small is fine, but it is not all they want.