I have discussed in previous writings and even in some videos many months ago about what we now know regarding the mortgage industry (not that it is a frigging mess, that we ‘all' know). Instead I am referring to how mortgages have been sold, packaged with others, sold again, split up amongst different pools and sold again and on and on. Your mortgage with a bank is nothing more than a piece of paper (and sometimes there is no paper!) that is traded, sold, and capitalized on by the banks leveraging against your home by such high amounts that even some loan sharks are envious of the banks.
Now that foreclosures are hitting our economy in record numbers some are actually now questioning ‘where is my mortgage'?
You say this is silly, you send your monthly check to CitiBank (C), Bank of America (BAC), Wells Fargo (WFC) or whatever bank. You think that just because you pay ‘them' they actually have a mortgage note in a vault somewhere within their building. Nowadays chances are that the people you are paying may actually have no idea at all where your mortgage is. It may have been sold to a different institution. And in some cases the paperwork trail is so incomplete or vague (or even missing altogether) that determining where someones mortgage actually is may need CSI-Miami to track it down through intensive forsensic investigations.
This brings me to the case recently reported in the New York Times concerning a forclosure process where a laywer asked the mortgage company to ‘produce the mortgage', in other words prove they had the right to foreclose on the property. And you know what? They had no clue where it was. The judge threw out the case and said that if a financial institution can't locate a mortgage (proving they have a financial interest in the property) then they have no right to initate a foreclosure process.
(...)some judges are starting to scrutinize the rules-don't-matter methods used by lenders and their lawyers in the recent foreclosure wave. On occasion, lenders are even getting slapped around a bit.One surprising smackdown occurred on Oct. 9 in federal bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York. Ruling that a lender, PHH Mortgage, hadn't proved its claim to a delinquent borrower's home in White Plains, Judge Robert D. Drain wiped out a $461,263 mortgage debt on the property.
