On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:19:43 -0800 (PST), Foobar
<bamberbert@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>It's a very interesting article. Problematic, but interesting.
>
>
>So, who owns the property?
I don't have a simple answer. It bugged me long enough. Here's an
article(below) by William Engdahl with a section that will interest
you. Do read his four part series of articles in full.
Part I: Sub-Prime Mortgage Debt is but the Tip of the Iceberg
F William Engdahl, November 23, 2007
Part II: The Financial Foundations of the American Century
F William Engdahl, January 16, 2008
Part III: Greenspan’s Grand Design
By F. William Engdahl, January 22, 2008
Part IV: Endgame: Unregulated Private Money Creation
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, February 8, 2008
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8032
===========================================
Part 1
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, November 23, 2007
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7413
Part 1: Deutsche Bank’s painful lesson
Even experienced banker friends tell me that they think the worst of
the US banking troubles are over and that things are slowly getting
back to normal. What is lacking in their rosy optimism is the
realization of the scale of the ongoing deterioration in credit
markets globally, centered in the American asset-backed securities
market, and especially in the market for CDO’s—Collateralized Debt
Obligations and CMO’s—Collateralized Mortgage Obligations. By now
every serious reader has heard the term “It’s a crisis in Sub-Prime US
home mortgage debt.” What almost no one I know understands is that the
Sub-Prime problem is but the tip of a colossal iceberg that is in a
slow meltdown. I offer one recent example to illustrate my point that
the “Financial Tsunami” is only beginning.
Deutsche Bank got a hard shock a few days ago when a judge in the
state of Ohio in the USA made a ruling that the bank had no legal
right to foreclose on 14 homes whose owners had failed to keep current
in their monthly mortgage payments. Now this might sound like small
beer for Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s largest banks with over
€1.1 trillion (Billionen) in assets worldwide. As Hilmar Kopper used
to say, “peanuts.” It’s not at all peanuts, however, for the
Anglo-Saxon banking world and its European allies like Deutsche Bank,
BNP Paribas, Barclays Bank, HSBC or others. Why?
A US Federal Judge, C.A. Boyko in Federal District Court in Cleveland
Ohio ruled to dismiss a claim by Deutsche Bank National Trust Company.
DB’s US subsidiary was seeking to take possession of 14 homes from
Cleveland residents living in them, in order to claim the assets.
Here comes the hair in the soup. The Judge asked DB to show do***ents
proving legal title to the 14 homes. DB could not. All DB attorneys
could show was a do***ent showing only an “intent to convey the rights
in the mortgages.” They could not produce the actual mortgage, the
heart of Western property rights since the Magna Charta of not longer.
Again why could Deutsche Bank not show the 14 mortgages on the 14
homes? Because they live in the exotic new world of “global
securitization”, where banks like DB or Citigroup buy tens of
thousands of mortgages from small local lending banks, “bundle” them
into Jumbo new securities which then are rated by Moody’s or Standard
& Poors or Fitch, and sell them as bonds to pension funds or other
banks or private investors who naively believed they were buying bonds
rated AAA, the highest, and never realized that their “bundle” of say
1,000 different home mortgages, contained maybe 20% or 200 mortgages
rated “sub-prime,” i.e. of dubious credit quality.
Indeed the profits being earned in the past seven years by the world’s
largest financial players from Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to
HSBC, Chase, and yes, Deutsche Bank, were so staggering, few bothered
to open the risk models used by the professionals who bundled the
mortgages. Certainly not the Big Three rating companies who had a
criminal conflict of interest in giving top debt ratings. That changed
abruptly last August and since then the major banks have issued one
after another re****t of disastrous “sub-prime” losses.
A new unexpected factor
(....more)
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