Sunday, November 14, 2010

US Real Estate Bust & Fraud Depositions

Here's a video of a woman who signed as Vice President of City Residential Lending at 5:30 into this clip...



Here is an article in Huffington Post that goes into all the sordid details:
In more than two hours of video footage recently uploaded to YouTube, three alleged "robo signers" describe how they approved thousands of mortgage documents a day without reading them.

Robo-signing is the latest ugly turn in the ongoing mortgage mess. Banks and loan servicers appear to have illegally processed countless documents in the rush to foreclose. The scandal has spawned a host a host of lawsuits, including a Federal racketeering lawsuit brought against Bank of America and a wave of investigations by 50 state attorneys general.
The banks paid off legislators in the late 1990s to roll back the protections put in place during the Great Depression to prevent the kind of frauds which created that financial disaster. The banks continued to push to remove legal protections under Bush when as the "deregulator in chief" he encouraged removed protections, then the 2008 financial panic hit and the banks got bailed out, after getting $700 billion in tax payer dollars, the banks bought legislators to ensure that new financial regulations would be toothless, and while doing that they corruptly started foreclosing on properties as the above video clip shows.

Here is a set of 10 video clips put up on YouTube by the Forrest Law Firm with depositions from "robo signers" describing the fraud that as "little people" they were forced into so that the banks could ignore property laws and simply do what they pleased with the mortgage holders.

I remember the "holier than thou" finger wagging from the US financial community during the 1997 Asian meltdown. The US claimed that "crony capitalism" was rampant in Asia and explained the backwardness of these economies and the resulting financial panic and devastating recession. Well... the birds have come home to roost. There is crony capitalism on an enormous scale in the US. It not only devastated the economy in the panic of 2008, it continues to rear its ugly head in the foreclosure nightmare of 2010, and who knows what is next. The pathetic Obama "financial reforms" aren't even a decent band-aid.

Here is an interview between two industry insiders that lets all the dirty laundry "hang out"...



This issue of fraud by banks isn't a "little thing". Just look at these numbers:
“Home seizures in the U.S. fell 9 percent in October from the previous month, the biggest decline in a year, as attorneys general began a nationwide probe into lender foreclosure practices, according to RealtyTrac Inc.

The number of properties taken back by banks fell to 93,236 last month from a record 102,134 in September, the Irvine, California-based data seller said today in a report. Foreclosure filings, which also include default and auction notices, fell 4 percent from the previous month to 332,172 and were little changed from a year earlier. One in 389 households got a filing.

Top legal officers in all 50 states began a coordinated inquiry on Oct. 13 into whether banks and loan servicers used false documents and signatures on hundreds of thousands of foreclosures in a process known as “robo-signing.” The probe is on a “fast track” and may lead to multiple settlements, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, the leader of the investigation, said in an interview this week.”

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