Insurance nerds like to point out that insurance coverage is a pre-requisite to a wide range of activities, from starting a business to practicing medicine to driving a car. In this sense, insurers often serve as gatekeepers to fundamental social ... Read full article
Over the past couple of years, the Massachusetts Attorney General's office has reached settlements with a number of major banks regarding mortgage securitization. These settlements has received very little notice in the press, but I think they ... Read full article
Yves Smith has a provocatively entitled post about the BoA MBS settlement. Yves appropriately excoriates Bill Clinton for saying some plain old stupid things about the settlement (namely that it is going to have a meaningful impact on principal reduction ... Read full article
The $8.5B dollar figure of the Bank of America settlement with a cohort of MBS investors has gotten all the attention, but I think there's a bunch of more interesting things going on than the price tag. Still, it's hard not to talk about the ... Read full article
Yves Smith has an interesting post up on Naked Capitalism about Florida Governor Rick Scott suggesting that Florida could switch from judicial to nonjudicial foreclosures as a way to solve its foreclosure overload. ... Read full article
My post on allonges generated quite a bit of response, on and off the blog. But here's what's troubling me--if allonges are being fabricated ex post, who is doing it? The servicer? The default management shop (e.g., LPS)? The network firm (sort ... Read full article
I have generally been willing to give mortgage servicers, servicer support shops (like LPS), and foreclosure attorneys the benefit of the doubt when it comes to documentation irregularities (to put it mildly) in foreclosures. ... Read full article
The U.S. mortgage servicing industry is in deep doo-doo. To foreclose on a mortgage, you must own the note and the mortgage. That's a lot of paperwork to keep track of, especially when you're trying to package as many mortgage loans into as many ... Read full article
Professor Curtis Bridgeman (FSU College of Law) has an article on The Morality of Jingle Mail: Moral Myths About Strategic Default . I have a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the article, but it's got a lot of very good, clear analysis ... Read full article
And so it begins. We're about to witness the main event in financial institution internecine warefare: investment funds (MBS buyers) vs. banks (MBS sellers). ... Read full article
