Reconciliation

I'm trying to reconcile these two statements from the MERS Mortgage Registry.

“The MERS System is not a legal system of record or a replacement for public land records. No interests are transferred on the system—they are only tracked,” Smith, Merscorp vice president of corporate communications, wrote in a response to emailed questions. “MERS does not have or maintain any document recording system, public or private, and does not do anything to compete with or supplant the public records for land located in the County records.”

OK. That could be true.

MERS is the true owner of the mortgage, and is not, in the complaint’s words, a “straw man” placeholder listed in public records.“The ‘owner of the loan’ is the party who has possession of the promissory note, but the promissory note is not, and has never been, and is not required to be disclosed or filed in the public records”

I'm now totally confused. I'm a mere engineer with a small understanding of electron flows. This legal stuff has me confused.

Congress to the Rescue.

A new Senate bill proposing to wind down the GSEs by at least 10% a year also includes a provision that would replace the private MERS System with an identical platform run by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) — along with new national standards for mortgage title transfers.

The bill outlines the director of the FHFA to establish “MERS 2” and incorporate a single national database for all mortgage title transfers, to be maintained and operated by FHFA.

Well they accidentally let the cat out of the bag.

In his first-ever, and so far only, media interview since becoming president and CEO of Merscorp in April, Bill Beckmann told MT that Merscorp can and must succeed as a revamped company with a higher level of scrutiny on its operation.

“If this model doesn't work, there are only two outcomes I could see,” Beckmann said in the interview, which appeared in the September issue of MT. “One would be a nationalized approach. Personally, I think that's nuts. Why would you go that route when you're already 60% of the way there with something the regulators and the constituents say is OK?”

And who is behind this little proposed bail out of the mortgage slicers and dicers? Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

So real estate will no longer be a state issue but a Federal one based on Federal preemption. I predict that if they actually try to pull this off the transition will be a bitch.

As my grand pappy used to say, "They are all crooks."

H/T Zero Hedge

Cross Posted at Classical Values