Via: Shame The Banks
The registry of deeds is supposed to be a sleepy place where you go to record your mortgage or look up how much your neighbors paid for their homes.
But at the Southern Essex District Registry of Deeds in Salem, haymakers are being thrown in a bare knuckles brawl featuring Register John O’Brien in one corner and Bank of America Corp. and other large banks in the other.
In O’Brien’s mind, big U.S. banks created a bogeyman called the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems to dodge paying recording fees when a mortgage is assigned. Early estimates indicate Massachusetts taxpayers have been deprived of anywhere from $200 million to $400 million-plus in lost revenue. O’Brien says his office alone has lost more than $22 million, but he calls that a conservative estimate.
Did any o you see this article on the DIGITAL JOURNAL
Apr 15, 2011 by ? Bill Lindner –
Op-Ed: Senate Report details elaborate Wall Street Mortgage Fraud
By Bill Lindner.
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A report released by the U.S. Senate paints a scathing picture of ortgage fraud on Wall Street enabled by the malfeasance and blatant disregard for oversight by Federal agencies that regulated them.
A 650-page report (PDF), titled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,” released by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich) cites 5,800 internal documents and the private communications of bank executives, credit rating agencies, investors and regulators and details Wall Street’s fraudulent business practices and conflicts of interest that fueled the mortgage meltdown, undermined public trust in the U.S. markets in the months leading to the financial crisis, and reveals reckless activities that were ignored by the banks and their federal regulators.
As Washington has tried to ignore the massive Wall Street fraud — for which no one on Wall Street or their enablers has been put behind bars — responsible for the latest economic crisis in the hopes that it would go away, Senator Carl Levin, and Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla) blasted Wall Street after 2-year bipartisan investigation on the main culprits responsible for the crisis.
SNIP
“The report pulls back the curtain on shoddy, risky, deceptive practices” — often referred to as ‘shitty deals’ by Senator Levin — “on the part of a lot of major financial institutions. The overwhelming evidence is that those institutions deceived their clients and deceived the public, and they were aided and abetted by deferential regulators and credit ratings agencies who had conflicts of interest.”
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“In my judgment, Goldman clearly misled their clients and they misled the Congress,” Sen. Levin said.
The report reveals more information on the way Goldman Sachs touted investments to clients on one hand and bet against them on the other. Similar accusations against Goldman by the SEC led to a $550 million dollar settlement — of which $250 million was returned to investors, $300 million went to the U.S. Treasury, and
zero went to the defrauded homeowners –…
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From the report (PDF):
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/305680#ixzz1Jmw4xg79