Monthly Archives: March 2011
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Questions Legal Claims of MERS
On Thursday, February 10th, a federal bankruptcy court judge issued an opinion offering a scathing critique of the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, the electronic-lien registry system built by the housing-finance industry to facilitate the bundling and selling of pools of mortgages. The decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Grossman in Central Islip, N.Y., didn’t change the outcome of the borrower’s foreclosure proceeding. The foreclosure had been approved earlier by a state court, and the judge ruled that he didn’t have the authority to stop it. But that didn’t stop [Judge] Grossman from offering an opinion that he […]
MERS, the Mortgage Holder You Might Not Know
FOR more than a decade, the American real estate market resembled an overstuffed novel, which is to say, it was an engrossing piece of fiction. Mortgage brokers hip deep in profits handed out no-doc mortgages to people with fictional incomes. Wall Street shopped bundles of those loans to investors, no matter how unappetizing the details. And federal regulators gave sleepy nods.That world largely collapsed under the weight of its improbabilities in 2008.But a piece of that world survives on Library Street in Reston, Va., where an obscure business, the MERS Corporation, claims to hold title to roughly half of all […]
