Matt Taibbi has a blog post up about a recent ruling in Kansas regarding foreclosure on mortgages. MERS is a middleman in the mortgage trading business, it would buy mortgages from banks and participate in bundling mortgages for the securities market. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that MERS had no standing to foreclose on a house, since it didn’t hold the note and wasn’t a signatory on the original contract. What I wonder is this – did the lending banks just get screwed by their own greed? I hope that judges in other states will look at this decision more closely.
A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages. That is the number of American mortgages currently reported to be held by MERS. Over half of all new U.S. residential mortgage loans are registered with MERS and recorded in its name. Holdings of the Kansas Supreme Court are not binding on the rest of the country, but they are dicta of which other courts take note; and the reasoning behind the decision is sound.
via Landmark Decision: Massive Relief for Homeowners and Trouble for the Banks.
This is a potentially gigantic story. It seems that a court has ruled that about half of the mortgage market has been run as a criminal enterprise for years, which would invalidate any potential forelosure proceedings for about, oh, 60 million mortgages. The court ruled that the electronic transfer system used by the private company MERS — a clearing system for mortgages, similar to a depository, that is used for about half the mortgage market — is fundamentally unreliable, and any mortgage sold and/or transferred through MERS can’t be foreclosed upon, at least not in Kansas.