Making Money Scam

Sometimes the obvious isn't clear. We've covered the theft of homes via "hanging judges" in mortgage courts before. At the heart of this confusion (or scam, depending on whether you're a victim or a beneficiary), lies MERS, the virtual mortgage registry that's replaced the handling of mortgage ownership in this brave new slice-and-dice derivative world.

Matt Taibbi, who will have a new big piece about this in a coming issue of Rolling Stone, provides this handy metaphor for understanding what MERS actually is. Here's one slice:

Imagine, say, a family of twelve, two elderly parents in Iowa and ten adult children scattered in different states all over the country. Mom and Dad on the farm own one Ford F-150 that they owe $300 a month on. Every month, the truck gets passed to a different family member, who in turn becomes responsible for the monthly payment. But no matter who has the car and whose turn it is to come up with the $300, the truck stays in Dad's name and the money, in the end, comes to Ford Finance via Dad's checking account.

Looking at this as an individual and unique case, you wouldn't think there was much that was inherently wrong with this setup. Obviously the family arrangement violates the spirit of many laws and procedures [interesting list of spiritual violations here]. But again, looking at this as an individual case, not many people would say any of these "violations" were major moral transgressions, if they were really moral transgressions at all. After all, this is family!

But once you take this setup and institutionalize it, and employ it everywhere on a vast scale, it becomes seriously problematic. This is particularly true if, say, Pop begins allowing his kids to "rent" the car out to non-family members, so long as they kick a small fee upstairs. Say it's March and Pop gives the truck to son Jimmy in Toledo; in April Jimmy gives the truck to his buddy Rick in Akron, charging the $300 payment plus a $20 convenience fee. May: Jimmy gives the car to his girlfriend Trudy in Phoenix, telling her to wire $300 plus another $20 back to Pops in Iowa; she in turn lends the car to her occasional lesbian love interest Madison, who begins renting the car on a day-to-day basis in Tuba City as part of her family's Painted Desert Resort and Tourism business, etc. etc. And she's now kicking the fees back to Iowa.

Within a year Pop is buying fifty vehicles an hour and shuttling cars to new customers all over the country, collecting millions in fees every day; he becomes a billion-dollar corporate fixture, hiring the entire local Elks club to come with him to work as support staff.

So now, to take this already absurdly overwrought metaphor one final painful step further ...

I knew the Elks were involved. Tempted to click through? I am, and I've already read it.

And for fans of straight talk, he provides this handy summary in easy-to-memorize form. The problem in a nutshell:

In short, the mortgage industry considers MERS owner enough to foreclose on you, but not owner enough to be sued, or reasoned with, or even to provide basic customer service.

That's MERS. Thanks, Matt, for making the painfully obvious painfully clear.

Bankers.

GP

Jeff Gross/Getty Images

At this point the AFCA National Championship Trophy has already been awarded to Auburn via the Tigers' 22-19 win over Oregon in the BCS national title game Monday night in Arizona. But as we all know, there is still another unbeaten out there, and this year it is TCU.

TCU finished its 13-0 football season with a two-point win over Wisconsin in the "Granddaddy of Them All," the Rose Bowl, nearly 10 days ago.

The Horned Frogs joined a growing list of non-BCS teams to go unbeaten and not even get a chance to win or lose the title on an actual field.

Boise State did it last year.

The year prior it was Utah.

Neither team got its chance to prove its worth, though Utah did send Alabama smarting home after the stomping the Utes handed the Tide in that year's Sugar Bowl.

So is this year's unbeaten non-BCS squad any different than either 2009 Boise or 2008 Utah?

No, not really. But after seeing how the supposed top two teams in the nation looked Monday night, there should be a fight to give TCU a share of the title in the final AP poll.

Oregon looked shaky on both sides of the ball. Offensively the Ducks couldn't run the ball, and Darron Thomas was wildly inaccurate at times. On defense they did not stop the run, allowing well over 200 yards on the ground.

Source:http://removeripoffreports.net/

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