Who “abetted a fly-by-night, pump-and-dump, no-accountability model of structured mortgage finance”? An obscure corporation in Reston, Virginia. You probably should know more about the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS). It may own your house.
See:
“A foreclosure mess of their own design,” Andrew Leonard, Salon.
“Fight over who has legal right to foreclose makes mess worse,” Stephanie Armour, USA Today.
“Little-Known MERS Faces Big Challenges in Foreclosure Battle,” Matthias Rieker, Wall Street Journal blog.
“The Mortgage Machine Backfires,” Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times.
“Into the Mortgage Netherworld,” New York Times graphic.
“Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registration System’s Land Title Theory,” Christopher Lewis Peterson, University of Utah – S.J. Quinney College of Law, via SSRN.
MERSA: methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA, pronounced “mersa”).
Image (“American Dream, after Grant Wood”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Tags: finance, financial crisis, financial meltdown, foreclosure, foreclosures, MERS, mortgage, mortgage crisis, mortgages, Real Estate, speculation
NotionsCapital 
October 14, 2010 at 6:36 pm
UPDATE:
“Bank officials also said JPMorgan had previously stopped using the banking industry’s controversial electronic mortgage tracking system for foreclosures in 2007 and 2008. The bank still uses the system, known as MERS, for other loan purposes.
Lawyers in class-action lawsuits have argued that MERS — which allowed financial institutions to do away with paperwork in favor of electronic tracking — lacks the required paper trail to prove mortgage ownership.”
— “JPMorgan Chase Expands Review of Foreclosures,” AP via the New York Times.
January 28, 2011 at 7:00 am
[…] MERS = Mortgage MERSA? « NotionsCapital […]
March 7, 2011 at 8:50 pm
UPDATE:
“MERS? It May Have Swallowed Your Loan,” Michael Powell and Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times
November 27, 2011 at 12:42 am
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