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http://www.mersinc.org/about/shareholders.aspx
Look at this page and imagine you are an assigment editor of a newspaper or an investigative journalist.
1. Chase? Really? The guys who just announced they weren’t using MERS but it turns out they stopped using them 2 years ago even though they were shareholders in this privately held entity? So what did they know and why wasn’t the SEC and their shareholders notified of a potential issue? Or perhaps they were and it was buried? I’m asking the question.
2. BOA – trying to work out title issues with American Land Title, a co shareholder of this private MERS entity. Really? Does that pass a smell test?
Not to mention how weird it is that the title companies own an interest in the entity that is part and parcel of clouding titles since MERS never properly recorded the notes it was registering in its database – a fact you would think the title companies would have been the first to glom onto. Bears thinking about further.
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Heh. I’ve been wondering when that would come up. It’s easier to list which firm doesn’t own a chunk of MERS.
Actually, I was surprised at how few shareholders were listed on this site. It has some names you would expect and many that you wouldn’t (the title companies?) The list is not that long. Perhaps it is an incomplete list? It is privately held as far as I can see, I can see no public information about MERS or MERS stock.
Maybe these guys provided the intial capitalization and perhaps others bought stock later. I’m sure it will all come out since MERS and its shareholders have been named as defendants on some of the class action suits.
Based on some research I’ve been working on for a couple of years, I’m not surprised at all that the title firms are member-owners.
Not at all.
Well…I have some interesting info about the history of GMAC once Cereberus and Homecomings financial.
“The obsession of that team and all Cerberus teams – other than making lots and lots of money, of course – is risk. All downside risk is modeled, just as every move is thought out in a game of chess (another Feinberg enthusiasm). Cerberus buys companies that look extremely risky, assumes the worst will happen, and plans accordingly.” http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/03/news/companies/cerberus.fortune/index.htm
http://www.vicepresidentdanquayle.com/biography.html
I think this was part of a Republican strategy…that was huge.
Here’s more on Cerberus and it’s ties to the Republican power house.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerberus_Capital_Management
MERS has no shares:
MERS is a shell company within which the risk of being caught-out at their RICO-worthy acts was hidden.
As discussedat Naked Capitalism yesterday, any member has access to the MERS database and can assign mortgages as they please, without internal controls.
theft of mortgages from Fannie & Freddie: Banks whose servicers are servicing Fannie-owned mortgages are taking the liberty of assigning those mortgages to themselves when they default, and foreclosing. Then they sell these homes to HUD at inflated value, above the face value if the mortgage. This is TARP2, IMO.
I don’t know why the beginning of my last paragraph disappeared, but here it is:
There have been cases of theft of mortgages from Fannie & Freddie….
The Naked Capitalism link was literally hair raising. The following quote is made by Yves Smith as a reply to another poster in the comments. The information comes from the piece she linked to in her initial article
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1684729
Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registration System’s Land Title Theory
Christopher Lewis Peterson
University of Utah – S.J. Quinney College of Law
Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Journal, Forthcoming
Date posted: October 01, 2010
Mull that one over. The den of thieves stealing mortgages from each other!
The comments are fascinating – a lot of focus on how insecure the MERS system was – they make it sound like anyone could go in and assign any mortgage they liked to anyone.
Monster Horror Chiller Mortgage Theater.
I am doing exorcist heads.
They say great minds think alike.
Well,I don’t have nearly as great a mind as those here who have posted commentary, BUT yesterday I tried in vain to locate some info on the ownership of MERS- to no avail.
THANKS to all here for enlightenment.
Yes, I had already mulled it over when I combined the information from the Peterson paper with the numerous cases of wrongful foreclosures on homes, some using newly-robo-signed assignments from Fannie to the servicer bank.
It’s clear that the MERS database is the cookie jar from which the banks are wantonly stealing a huge amount of real estate, and then selling it in blocks to private equity firms (wavpeac writes about Cerberus) and hedge funds, according to Nomi Prins.
Barry Ritholtz is collecting examples of the wrongful foreclosures here.
In a way, one can step back and see that the entire subprime-NINJA era was merely the bait by which the banks gathered up the homes, deposited them into their cookie jar, waited for, or forced people into, default, and then seized upon them for their own profit. If the plan is to go back to landed gentry with huge estates and serfs, they couldn’t have devised a simpler scheme.
Here we go again with synchronicity, I just posted about Cereberus and Madoff on an EW thread-just now!
Cerberus Capital: Literally Blood-Sucking the Poor to Make Their… How one company made $1.8 billion by paying peanuts to human plasma donors, and then manipulated the market by restricting supply to the …
http://www.alternet.org/…/cerberus_capital:_literally_blood-sucking_the_poor_to_make_their_billions – Cached
Profiting from ruined American lives is nothing new to Cerberus. Cerberus is the same shady fund that bought Chrysler and GMAC in 2007 and drove them into the ground, blamed everything on unions (even after firing 30,000 Chrysler employees), and dumped the companies onto American taxpayers—but only after lining up tens of billions in taxpayer-funded bailout funds. Cerberus is led by some of the most aggressive “free market” Republicans of our time. The chairman of Cerberus is former Treasury Secretary John Snow, who oversaw the destruction of America’s economy while serving under Bush from 2003 to 2006, bragging during his tenure, “We are the envy of the world.”
Snow bragged again in 2007 after Cerberus acquired Chrysler, “Over 25 years ago, when Chrysler faced bankruptcy, it turned to the United States government for assistance. Today, Chrysler again faces new financial challenges. But it is private investment stepping in to inject much-needed support.” A year later, Snow was running around Washington begging and screaming for government handouts.
Cerberus Capital: Literally Blood-Sucking the Poor to Make Their …
Jan 9, 2010 … How one company made $1.8 billion by paying peanuts to human plasma donors, and then manipulated the market by restricting supply to the …
http://www.alternet.org/…/cerberus_capital:_literally_blood-sucking_the_poor_to_make_their_billions – Cached – Similar
By what mechanism does a bankster foreclose?
First there’s the mortgage loan with Local Bank A, say.
Then Local Bank A passes the mortgage over to Service Company B.
Service Company B then passes the mortgage to Security Company C, which securitizes the mortgage and passes on bits and pieces to Hedge Funds D and E. In turn, Derivative Company F takes out credit default swaps it shares with Default Company G.
Who owns the freakin mortgage to come foreclose upon? The “owners” are spread all over the globe.
wasn’t it Ceberus that was holding out on signing off on the GM Bailout ??
According to Wiki:
In December 2008, Cerberus subsequently informed GMAC’s bondholders that the financial services company may have to file for bankruptcy if a bond-exchange plan is not approved. The company had previously said it may fail in its quest to become a bank holding company because it lacks adequate capital.[4]
In January 2009,Ezra Merkin resigned from his chairmanship as a condition by the U.S. government.[14] Five days earlier, the Federal Reserve granted GMAC bank holding company status, so it could get access to the bailout money.[15] On December 29, 2008, the U.S. Treasury gave GMAC $5 billion from its $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Cerberus’s investments in Chrysler and GMAC totaled about 7 percent of its assets under management.[5]At the end of May, 2009, Cerberus scaled back their ownership as a condition of the lender becoming a bank-holding company, when the bulk of GM’s existing ownership stake in GMAC was placed into a trust, overseen by a trustee appointed by the Treasury, to be gradually dispersed. Cerberus distributed the majority of its stake in GMAC to its investors.[16]
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) gave GMAC access to the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program that allows companies to borrow money at lower interest rates. The initiative was created in October, 2008 to help banks borrow money by promising to repay investors if the banks defaulted. The U.S. Government also waived a rule that would restrict the amount of loans that GMAC could make to Chrysler’s customers and dealers because both firms are owned in part by Cerberus Capital Management.[17]
Cerberus Capital Management – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. is one of the largest private equity investment firms in the United States. The firm is based in New York City, …
History – Broken deal for United Rentals – Notable acquisitions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerberus_Capital_Management – Cached – Similar
Your efforts in providing links in your comments are appreciated.
Something is wrong with the links above- they do not work.
I’d like to offer a few suggestions so that the links will work.
There are two ways to get a working link in an fdl comment:
1. Use the little link icon (3 chain links) above- OR
2. Provide all the url (address), the words(s) that are intended to be the highlighted ‘link’ in the comment that viewers will see, and a few extra letters and characters, that make it all happen. This can be done by typing them in instead of using the link icon (which does this).
I suggest the use of #2 to start with; this is one way to do that and
make it work.
Before doing so- lets see what a working link looks like BEFORE the comment is either previewed or submitted.
A.In the blank “Leave your response” form type HERE IS MY LINK.
B.Highlight HERE IS MY LINK by left click and roll over.
C.Then left click the link icon.
D. In the ‘please enter the url box that appears add “seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/76685″ without the quotes, then click OK.
E. Look at the extra characters that have been added to HERE IS MY LINK they are what make it a link ( which works if the url (address) is valid and complete).
When either “Preview” or “Submit Comment” is clicked the extra characters go away. When “Submit Comment” it becomes a working link. In this case it will be a working link to this Seminal diary.
Working links may be placed in a comment by dragging and dropping the complete url of the page one wishes to link to into the “Leave your response” form. It is then necessary to add the extra characters exactly as seen in the previous demonstration and HERE IS MY LINK or whatever phrase that readers are intended to see as the highlighted hotlink in the posted comment.
I hope this helps.
Thank you,qweryous.
I am afraid that I have been so busy working on my thinking,that my linking has suffered.
Mea culpa.
And look who donated millions in funding to Katrina survivors!! The complaints about what happened to them are heart wrenching.
http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/banking-lending-credit-services/5053696-1.html