Mortgage Crisis: The Six Trillion Dollar Problem

When I was an investigative reporter at the networks, the first question we would ask when trying to decide if we wanted to do a story was: How many? How many people have been hurt by a defective product? How many defective products of a certain kind were in use? How many dollars will it take to fix the problem? In the case of the recent mortgage crisis – “Foreclosuregate,” the question of how many has been answered.It has been widely reported that there are a little more than 60 million home mortgages in the Mortgage Electronic Registry System (MERS). If every one of the 60 million mortgages are worth $100,000, that would mean a total of at least $6 trillion in home mortgages that are electronically filed. In MERS, there is no physical written record of a “Promissory Note.” In almost all states, you need that original “Note” to prove ownership of a home. That means in almost every single state, the banks cannot legally foreclose on your home without this document. Some say the loan documents were lost on purpose because the bankers did not want their massive fraud to see the light of day. Whether or not the “Notes” were lost on purpose or accident, the fact is the original “Notes” are nowhere to be found. That is what the “Robo Signing” part of the story is all about. It has been widely reported that “foreclosure mills” were creating massive amounts of counterfeit Promissory Notes so banks could legally foreclose on homeowners.

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