Experiential Platform: Women Making Money

This is the final in a three-part series. Read Part 1 here and Part II here.

In the previous two parts of this series I have recounted the multiple frauds perpetrated by MERS: it defrauded counties out of billions of dollars of reporting fees, it defrauded homeowners by destroying documents that provide a clear chain of title -- facilitating its foreclosure frauds, and it defrauded securities investors by failing to adhere to PSAs (pooling and servicing agreements) -- making their securities invalid. Now, in order to cover the trail of deceit MERS and the banks are stealing homes as fast as they can in the hope that no one will notice the fraud. Meanwhile, they are destroying real estate values and adding to the headwinds that are pushing our economy into the first great depression of the 21st century.

In this piece, let us step back and examine the big picture to answer the question: Why did Wall Street create this crisis? For the answer, we have got to go back several decades. I do not want to give a long-winded history lesson, but it is necessary to understand the transformation that has taken place since the 1960s. Back then, the financial system was small, simple, regulated and relatively unimportant. Banks made commercial loans; thrifts made home loans; and Wall Street handled investment finance. Households had jobs and rising wages so they didn't need to go into debt to finance rising consumption. With robust economic growth, each generation could expect to have roughly twice the living standard of the previous generation.

Things began to change in the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s as growth slowed, as median real wages stopped rising, and as financial institutions were unleashed to expand activities into new areas. At first households coped with stagnant incomes by putting more family members to work (especially women), but gradually they began to rely on debt. Banks created new kinds of credit and gradually expanded their views as to who is creditworthy. I can still remember one conference I attended at which someone from the financial sector proudly announced that the banks had discovered an untapped market for credit cards -- the "mentally retarded". The argument was that this group would be just as safe as college students, since parents would bail them out in order to avoid having their kids' credit ratings suffer. This was not a joke -- it was a business model.

With slower economic growth, it had become harder for American firms to make profits. They shifted their focus from actually producing goods and services to making money on financial products. GM and GE became primarily financial institutions that happened to make cars and light bulbs as a sideline business. Yes, you could buy a car made by GM, but the company made most of its profits on the auto loan. (It then branched out to -- you betcha -- mortgage backed securities and all other manner of risky assets. I hope readers understand that that is what the "auto" bail-out was all about.) As everyone got into the act of indiscriminate lending, banks found their own business dwindling -- so they had to continually innovate with new products and to find new activities to finance.

The economy became "financialized", as financial institutions inserted their activities into virtually every aspect of American life. Health care morphed into financialized health "insurance", given a huge boost by "Obamacare" legislation that for the first time in US history mandates that Americans turn their incomes over to private financial firms. Even death became financialized with "peasant insurance" (employers take out contracts on employees) and "death settlements" (life insurance policies on those with fatal illnesses are securitized and sold to gamblers betting on early death). Retailers increased the financialization of consumer goods -- they couldn't get enough profit on the sales or even on the consumer credit, so they offered "extended protection" on everything from TVs to toasters and then tried to scare customers with an unusual marketing pitch: the products they carry are so shoddily produced that insurance is necessary to protect the purchase.

Every kind of debt or insurance product became a financial commodity, packaged into a security and sliced and diced and bought and sold. At the same time, "insurance" (often in the form of credit default swaps) replaced underwriting (credit assessment) to make these loans more marketable. And then the credit default swap insurance, itself, became a way to bet on the death of securities, companies, and even nations. It is not a stretch to say that Wall Street's capitalists returned to their roots as "undertakers" (the old term for entrepreneurs), with death becoming their main line of business.

Debt grew. In 2007 just before the crisis hit, total US debt reached five times national income -- the previous record was just three times income, a level reached in the propitious year of 1929. In other words, each dollar of income had to service five dollars of debt. In the decade previous to the crisis, American households spent more than their incomes in almost every year. For every debtor created there is a creditor. Not surprisingly, creditors are richer than debtors. Over time, the proportion of Americans who were debtors grew, and the proportion of creditors fell. The rich got richer and every one else either got poorer or at best just managed to break even. In other words, the debt train fueled a massive redistribution of income and wealth to the very top. It is no coincidence that inequality in the US has returned to its previous peak -- reached, not coincidentally also in 1929. That is what President Bush actually meant when he talked about the ownership society -- a society in which a small elite would own everything.

Banks became giant one-stop casinos that facilitated every kind of crazy bet. They would make a loan to you, but then simultaneously securitize it to sell-on to an investor plus place a bet that you would default on your loan so that the security would go bad. For a fee, they'd let a hedge fund manager choose the riskiest loans to bundle into a sure-to-fail financial product that they would then sell to their own customers. And then they'd join the hedge fund in betting against their customers. The more loans they made, the more fees they collected; the more bad loans they made, the more bets they would win. The more debt they piled on households, the greater their profits; riskier debt meant even higher fees and more defaults and thus greater wins from gambling. Prospective death was a booming good business for our undertakers.

America became "Bubbleonia" -- with a "bubblicious" economy that moved from one bubble and crash to another: A commercial real estate bubble and crash in the 1980s that killed the thrifts; a series of developing country debt bubbles and crashes in the 1980s and 1990s fueled in part by American banks; a US stock market bubble and crash in 1987; the dot-com bubble and crash at the end of the 1990s; and then the US real estate and global commodities markets bubbles and crashes this decade.

Increasingly, the bubbles were managed cooperatively by Wall Street and Washington. Chairman Greenspan and President Clinton made a pact with Robert Rubin's Wall Street to pump up "new economy" internet stocks through "irrational exuberance". When that failed, Greenspan extolled the benefits of adjustable rate mortgages, while President Bush hawked the "ownership society". Wall Street turned America's residential real estate sector into the world's biggest casino -- $20 trillion worth of property that could serve as the basis for many tens of trillions of dollars of bets. Bernanke promoted the bubble by assuring markets that America was enjoying the "great moderation" -- a new era in which stability dominates -- and that in any case, the Fed would protect markets in the case of any hiccups.

The home finance food chain was fundamentally changed to facilitate the rapid pace of gambling that would be necessary to feed Wall Street's appetite. Real estate appraisers were paid more to over-value homes; mortgage brokers were rewarded with higher fees to induce borrowers to accept unfavorable terms; mortgage lenders got better fees for riskier loans; securitizers wanted more junky loans to increase the projected returns spit out by their own internal models that presume more risk is always rewarded with higher profits; credit raters got paid to rate trash as AAA -- as safe as treasuries; and investors shunned "plain vanilla" securities in favor of risky structured products that were so complex no one could understand them -- so that they could have any value desired. No worries, AIG sold "insurance" on all this garbage!

That homeowners would default on the unaffordable mortgages was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, it was the desired result of the business model. The preferred marketed loans tell it all: Subprimes! NINJAs! Liar's loans! Washington helpfully changed bankruptcy law to make it more difficult for a homeowner to get out of mortgage debt in preparation for the wave of defaults that everyone knew would result. Wall Street would get the homes, and homeowners would still have to pay on the debts. Then the foreclosed property would be resold, with more fees for everyone in the finance food chain, and the whole process through to default would begin again -- a nice virtuous cycle.

It might seem strange that banks would actually want default. But that is the beauty of a casino -- the house always wins, and homebuyers were gambling against the casino. On the way up, fees are collected, and on the way down fees are still collected on the foreclosures and as houses are resold. And if anything should go wrong, Washington backstops the casinos.

But it was necessary to streamline foreclosure to make it as fast and cheap as possible. Enter MERS -- another link in the food chain -- created by the banks in 1997 in preparation for the boom and bust. MERS was set up to be a foreclosure mill. It would break the centuries-old custom that protected property rights by requiring every sale of property to be publicly recorded, and requiring that any creditor claiming a right to foreclose to demonstrate clear title, with an endorsed note in the creditor's name and a record at the county office showing transfer of the property.

The banksters did not want to go through all that paperwork, and needed to subvert the transparency that would shine light on their crimes. Hence, they set up a fraudulent shell corporation that claimed to be the mortgagee; while the original sale would be recorded at the county office, subsequent sales and purchases of the mortgage would be recorded only by an "electronic handshake" between two "members" of MERS. Even that record was considered by the banksters to be purely voluntary -- MERS did not require members to actually record transactions. If they found it more convenient to conceal the transfers, that was permitted.

MERS even farmed out its name -- for 25 bucks anyone could buy the MERS trademark and use it. And in a touching display of fraternity, everyone got to be a certified vice president of MERS. (Sort of like those 1950s marketing campaigns advertised on cereal boxes -- for 25 cents, you too can be a Super Fraudster with a nifty membership ring and all the benefits of membership in an international criminal conspiracy!)

MERS deliberately undermined the legality of the loans and the records. Homeowners could no longer search the public records to find out who actually held their mortgage -- the record would show MERS as owner, but MERS was a shell corporation with no real employees. It was not a servicer, so the homeowner could not make mortgage payments to the purported owner. As a result, checks were sent to the wrong servicers; servicers credited the wrong accounts; servicers claimed delinquencies on homeowners who never missed a payment, and piled late fees and delinquencies on the wrong borrowers; sheriffs were sent to break down the doors of the wrong houses, and threw belongings out on the street in front of homes on which there was no mortgage at all. MERS purposely created the mess, at the behest of banksters who do not want mere legal technicalities to get in the way of stealing homes. The undermining of the public records was not a mistake -- it was MERS's business model, created by the member banks.

And MERS helped banksters to defraud securities holders. Banks not only separated the mortgages from the notes, but they even destroyed the notes as they entered the mortgages into MERS's electronic data base. MERS told servicers that it is "customary" practice to retain notes, not to endorse them over to REMIC trustees as required both by federal tax law and by the PSAs that govern the trusts. This made the securities a "nullity" -- as the Supreme Court ruled over a hundred years ago -- because a mortgage without a note is unenforceable in foreclosure. At best, the securities are unsecured debt, with no real property behind them.

In any case, the mortgages put into the trusts did not meet the representations made to investors -- so even if the notes had been properly endorsed over to the trusts, the securities could be turned back to the banks. By creating a completely fraudulent electronic registry system -- in which data would be entered only if banks found it convenient to do so, and in which data could be modified at any time by any member of MERS -- MERS made it easy to conceal the securities frauds. Destruction or forgery of the paperwork was absolutely necessary to cover the trail of fraud from origination of the mortgage to securitization and finally to the inevitable foreclosure. Again, destruction of documents was not a mistake. It was the business model.

What huge tax break?

You couldn't possibly be talking about what the President and Congress are debating since there is no "break" involved as it still preserves a much higher tax rate for upper income and is exactly the same as the current rate. Besides that tax rate is more relevant to upper-middle class people in major high cost markets than to the rich like the Madoff relatives. They have most of their wealth protected in investment gains and LLC's, all of which get much lower tax rates than ordinary income and were not even on the table for change during or before the current bill floating around Washington. Which is why the Fortune 500 have an effective tax rate almost half as much as the upper-middle-class who are hit by the highest ordinary income tax rate and AMT. If your goal is the "tax the rich" some more, you need to focus on capital gains and corporate tax rates and loopholes (like the ability for rich investors to hide gains by "reinvesting" them back into their funds but then take no interest loans from those investments).

And if your goal is "social justice" or some "fair" distribution of taxes, start by recognizing that 50% of taxpayers end up netting $0 federal payment and 40% get refunds in excess of payments, which means that tax dollars are flowing straight from those 1-in-2 who really pay taxes through to these people's personal wallets without contributing at all to federal expenses. So effectively a big part of our tax system is a straight up alternative form of welfare, operating on top of any other federal or state welfare programs. Why not make taxes really go toward expenses or debt?

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Sunday, December 19, 2010

Women Making Money

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