Mortgage Electronic Registration Services (MERS) is the chink in the armor the big banks did not see. It is the place where all of the players came together to do business. It is the crucible in which the entire mortgage scandal brewed.
Who is MERS?
What do they do?
Why should you care?
Because of MERS, you are spending your mortgage money on .... nothing.
The perception you are laboring under may not be the truth of your reality.
If you have MERS on your Mortgage, you are not buying your house, you are renting it.
Everyone knows the debt under which we all slave is destroying families and wealth. But here is what you don’t know. There are some fundamentals at play which have significant consequences for all mortgage holders - those who are current, those who are delinquent, those who are in foreclosure; those who have been foreclosed upon. What follows is a very simple explanation of a very complicated situation.
The banks, in their infinite pursuit of fractions of pennies of profit, changed the way they looked at the mortgage market from a large aggregation of individual homes to a cash flow pipeline. When you make this change, you realize you can slice and dice the cash flow pipeline into products and create ready markets for those products.
No one knows who owns a given barrel of oil in a pipeline. The oil companies pay to put their products into the pipeline and their customers pay to pull products out of the pipeline, but while it is in the pipeline, no one owns any single given barrel of oil. It just sort of ... is. This is what happened when mortgages were securitized using the MERS system. No one owns your mortgage.
The banks pooled groups of mortgages into Structured Investment Vehicles (SIV’s) and cut the cash flow from those mortgages into tranches selling those tranches to qualified investors such as Mutual Funds, Pension Funds, Offshore Banks, Sovereign Wealth Funds and wealthy individuals. Each owned a “piece” of the SIV’s cash flow but not the underlying assets.
In order to facilitate the hoped for rapid changes in ownership, the banks had to streamline (circumvent) the well established registry of court house real property records. To do this, the former C.E.O.’s of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Indy Mac, Countrywide, Stewart Title Insurance and the American Land Title Association created MERSCorp in the mid 1990’s.
MERS is a straw man who stands in place for an unknowable person from an investment trust in the title records at county courthouses all across the country. This closed the loop establishing the pipeline and enabled the ready market in securitized debt obligations. But in the process, by using MERS as a stand in at the courthouse, the banks separated the debt from the deed leaving an unenforceable piece of paper and because ownership is obliterated, a very muddied title.
Everything was fine until money from the mortgages stopped flowing. That was when disaster struck. Cash flow in the pipeline diminished because of the high rate of foreclosures and the banks who created this mess started looking for places to hang losses. Eventually, they turned to the taxpayer to unwind these complicated schemes of insurance payments, risk swaps and other forms of gambling with the bank bailouts of 2008 & 2009.
During all of this, a small group of informed homeowners took advantage of the structure of the pipeline to defend foreclosure on a group of houses in Ohio. The homeowners challenged the standing of Deutches Bank to foreclose on anything. They demanded the foreclosing party prove they had perfected interest in the title. Deutches Bank couldn’t, and the foreclosure stopped. This became known as the “Produce the Note” foreclosure defense.
What does this mean to those who are delinquent or are being foreclosed upon by groups including MERS?
It means there is a way to fight back. The only person who can foreclose on a mortgage is the person who holds the deed and the debt. Since the mortgage has been separated from the deed and the ownership has been obliterated, who can stand in front of the court and foreclose? The answer, ultimately, is no one and indeed, this strategy is being used all across the country to stop the foreclosure process dead in its track.
What does this mean to those who have been foreclosed upon by groups which includes MERS?
It means they can go back to the courts and demand the foreclosure be rescinded and ownership of the property returned. This will undo and threaten to undo all foreclosure sales that have taken place in the last three years.
What does this mean to those who are current yet have MERS on their mortgage?
Well, if no person owns the underlying mortgage in order to foreclose, is there anyone who can deliver clear title once the mortgage obligation is complete? The answer appears to be …. no, there is not, there is no one which means there are over 60 MM homeowners who are buying into … nothing. They are just paying expensive rent.
Think about that a moment.
No one knows who owns what. The mortgage and the deed are separated. The chain of ownership has been broken. No one is in a position to foreclose. No one is in a position to assign. No one is in a position to deliver clear title once the mortgage is paid. No one knows who owns what at this very moment and more importantly, no one knows who owned or worse, still owns what at this very moment. There is no clear chain of title.
Why do you continue to pay into the system when you know you are buying nothing?
This website is dedicated to unraveling this multi trillion dollar fraud. We provide information, links to court cases, and suggestions on ways to proceed to protect yourself from this monster called MERS. We are not attorneys so please do not write to us looking for legal advice. We are an informational resource only.
