The next crisis on the way - the foreclosure crisis

Posted by: pkmurphy 10 years, 4 months ago

(0 comments)

This is a big, big, big problem for the United States. If you don't know what I'm talking about, start by reading One nation, under fraud.

So goes the unprecedented wave of foreclosures that has swept across the country [the US] since the housing bubble popped. Mortgages have been bought, sold, and repackaged so many times through such an opaque process that banks have no idea who owns what. When they foreclose, they simply guess, making up the documents and information necessary to do so.

Once you've got your head around that, try:

• Rortybomb's Foreclosurse Fraud for dummies: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5!
• The enormous mortgate-bond scandal: Felix Salmon.
• The other shoe: John Quiggin.
• Mortgages Lost in the Cloud: BusinessWeek. Probably the grimmest piece, if only for this quote from Hernando de Soto:

"Somehow in the last 10 or 15 years, everything that was good record-keeping isn't telling the truth anymore," says de Soto, reached by phone while traveling in Copenhagen. "My feeling is this: Your recession is going to last. And it's going to last, and it's going to last, because essentially the trust has broken down."

I don't really have much to add to that.

• Tags:
• Foreclosure,
• crisis,
• housing,
• fraud

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