“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”1
Excerpt:
While MERS may be named as the actual mortgagee or its equivalent on the security instrument, in substance its role is that of a nominee or agent.23 The language in the mortgage generally states: “‘MERS’ is Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. MERS is a separate corporation that is acting solely as nominee for Lender and Lender’s successors and assigns. MERS is the mortgagee under this Security Instrument.”24 Here then begins the magic that is MERS—the dual claim that it is both a principal (mortgagee) and nominee/agent of the lender/factual mortgagee.25 MERS undertakes these roles but never lends money and never gives value for the mortgage, nor does it benefit from the proceeds of foreclosure and/or collection actions.26 Were MERS’s involvement in the mortgage market insignificant, it might not pose much of a legal problem;however, MERS appears to be involved in sixty million loans—roughly half of all U.S. home mortgages.27 The legal role MERS attempts to fill and MERS’s argument as to standing is: 1) provide a mortgage clearinghouse and eliminate recording obligations by having MERS itself act as mortgagee of record;28 2) allow the promissory note evidencing the debt to be transferred freely among MERS members ad infinitum; and 3) when default occurs, act as the nominee of the current note holder and mortgagee of record (rejoining the two interests) even though the current “lender” did not appoint MERS as mortgagee and may never have had the right to do so. Ultimately, the argument is something akin to a merger argument where MERS claims that the severed interests, that of security interest and note, are recombined in MERS at a later date even though it received those interests from separate entities. As others have pointed out, MERS is attempting to derive powers as an agent greater than the sum of the powers of its principals.29
Michael Burry, the former head of Scion Capital LLC who predicted the housing market’s plunge, talks with Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman about his investments in agricultural land, real estate and gold.
Michael Lewis made him famous in his book “The Big Short”.
(This is an excerpt. Source: Bloomberg)
“I believe that agricultural land, productive agricultural land with water on site, will be very valuable in the future. And I’ve put a good amount of money into that. So I’m investing in alternative investments as well as stocks.”
“I think there is some value in real estate. You have to buy it right. It’s not in general, that’s the problem. I think that there are an awful lot of people out there looking to buy these distressed properties out there and so you need to find special situations. That is how I’ve invested from the beginning. I’m looking for these special situations, these unique ideas and that’s true in real estate too.”
“In my situation I’d rather go long on housing itself, real estate itself. Depending on how you structure it, in the real market, in the physical market, you can get some pretty good deals and I’ve done some of that too.”
“Paulson is big in gold and that is something is interesting to me and given how I see the world playing out. Other than that, I’m just saying, other than gold I haven’t really bought into the other…
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