For the banks, the meat of the foreclosure crisis consists of these unopposed cases, for that's where the banks make their money; that's where they succeed in taking people's houses away from them. They almost always win those cases, no matter what's in the files.
What's sad is that most Americans who have an opinion about the foreclosure crisis either don't know or don't yet give a sh*t about all the fraud involved. They don't care that these mortgages wouldn't have been available in the first place if the banks hadn't found a way to sell toxic junk mortgage-backed securities to pension funds and insurance companies. They don't care that the Countrywides of the world pushed borrowers who qualified for safer fixed-income loans into far more dangerous adjustable-rate loans, because their brokers got bigger commissions for doing so. They don't care that in the rush to produce loans, people were sold houses that turned out to have flood damage or worse, and they certainly don't care that people were sold houses with inflated appraisals, which left them almost immediately underwater once housing prices started falling.
The way the banks tell it, it doesn't matter if they defrauded homeowners and investors and taxpayers alike to get these loans. All that matters is that a bunch of deadbeats aren't paying their f*cking bills. "If you didn't pay your mortgage, you shouldn't be in your house -- period," is how Walter Todd, portfolio manager at Greenwood Capital Associates, puts it. "People are getting upset about something that's just procedural."
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, is even more succinct in dismissing the struggling homeowners that he and the other megabanks scammed before tossing out onto the street. "We're not evicting people who deserve to stay in their house," Dimon says.
There are two things wrong with this argument
Well, more than two, actually, but let's just stick to the two big ones.
The first reason is: It simply isn't true. Many people who are being foreclosed on have actually paid their bills and followed all the instructions laid down by their banks. In some cases, a homeowner contacts the bank to say that he's having trouble paying his bill, and the bank offers him loan modification. But the bank tells him that in order to qualify for modification, he must first be delinquent on his mortgage. They actually tell people to stop paying their bills for three months.
The authorization gets recorded in what's known as the bank's "contact database," which records every phone call or other communication with a homeowner. But no mention of it is entered into the bank's "number history," which records only the payment record. So, when the number history notes that the homeowner has missed three payments in a row, it has no way of knowing that the homeowner was given permission to stop making payments! One computer generates a default letter while another computer automatically contacts the credit bureaus. At no time is there a human being looking at the entire picture.
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