Our nation’s banking and financial sectors are entirely, horribly corrupt. Think Bernie Madoff then multiply his little con many times over. The corruption comes in so many different flavors from campaign contributions to de-fanged regulators to personal attacks on watchdogs and advocates. (Remember Patrick McHenry) But at the end of the day, the result is always the same…outsized and ill-gained profits made on the backs of others….while regulators and legislators just look the other way.
That all of this existed on a grand scale across the entire mortgage and real estate finance market is entirely without debate at this point in time. And the fact that our “leaders” were absolutely complicit in this crime spree is likewise beyond debate. And now you will all pay for all this for generations to come….as the demands for Fannie/Freddie backstops (among others) keep rolling in like tidal waves on an ocean…the size of the wave you see on the surface is dwarfed by the true size of the force moving underneath that you cannot see.
And the point that must apparently be made again and again and again is that if they were able to do this with our real estate finance where every single loan (theoretically at least) is grounded by a very real piece of property and a very real mortgage that is recorded in a very real county, just what are they able to do with stock and bond and retirement accounts which exist as nothing more than pixels on a screen, blips on a computer screen and occasionally a paper statement. (Remember Bernie made paper statements too)
And what does this mean for foreclosures…and the “recovery” of our financial system?
“What you are seeing is chaos in the entire financial system,” said Matthew Weidner, a St. Petersburg attorney who helped shed light on unethical acts by bankers and lawyers to speed foreclosure processing. “The robo-signing crisis is just a symptom of that. Banks have not yet figured out a way to undo the wrongs they caused by failing to follow their own underwriting guidelines and rules back in the boom.
“We’re dealing with a situation in which Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall and we can’t figure out how to put the pieces back together again,” Weidner said.
