This foreclosure crisis is chock-full of complications. The Washington Post reports that the system of pooling and selling mortgages around the world has caused widespread confusion about who owns the loans, raising questions about whether banks in some cases have the legal standing to forclose on homes, a state judge and consumer attorneys testified before Congress on Thursday. The article reported that New York State Supreme Court Justice Dana Winslow said that "standing has become such a pervasive issue" in the cases he sees "that I frequently use the term 'presumptive mortgagee' " to describe the entity trying to foreclose. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, also weighed in, calling attention to the importance of the matter, with an estimated 13 million homes scheduled for foreclosure before the crisis subsides. He called out the banks, many of which were the beneficiaries of the bailout, for failing to assist struggling homeowners.
We're still wondering why banks are allowed to run roughshod over consumers without being checked. They nearly bankrupted the world by giving out mortgages that people couldn't afford; got bailed out by the government; used some of the money for executive bonuses; pretended to work with people to avoid foreclosure, all the while planning to foreclose on them; destroyed people's credit ratings with bogus loan-modification programs that don't report payments to credit-reporting agencies or apply payments toward the actual mortgage; and took what little money consumers had and foreclosed on them anyway, adding ridiculous fees in the process. None of it sounds legal to us, but we're not lawyers — just able to call foul on the play when we see it. At this point we're calling out banks for consumer abuse and Congress for failing to do anything about it.
Read more at the Washington Post.