Yesterday’s robosigning settlement that all but one state ultimately signed off on, was far from perfect.
Let’s make that perfectly clear.
Depending on what you have read, you might be outraged, you might be relieved, you might be overjoyed. And the target of your wrath or sympathy might depend on your own personal perspective.
But make no mistake about it, yesterday was a day of reckoning, for me, and much more importantly, for the people I represent.
Yes, the banks got a slap on the wrist and the money they are trickling back to the homeowners won’t make up for the systemic fraud these lenders engaged in, and make no mistake it was fraud at the highest level.
I wish I could personally put the handcuffs on each CEO who allowed robosigning to occur.
But here’s the silver lining, now we have a reengaged President, who is anxious to see the job done. We have Eric Schneiderman on the case, and he is going full-speed right at the banks.
They may have not gotten the flogging they deserve, but I am optimistic that they surely will.
Conservatives can blame the borrowers all they want, and certainly not all were faultless. But the banks were the grown-ups here, they should have known better. They had the chance, in the midst of the housing boom, to stop, take a breath and take a look back at what they had done.
They didn’t.
The truth is no amount of money would have been enough. And since we can’t put the banks in jail, they got what was in essence a very public shaming. And people’s eyes were opened. What you have now learned, can not be unlearned.
The banks for years, had their hands in their cookie jar, and tried as I might, I could not get people to glance over at the jar to see. I felt like a lone wolf calling out the banks on this blog.
Here was my challenge to borrowers back in 2009!!
Make the banks prove they own your note. Many times the banks are clueless who owns their note.
People thought I was Chicken Little, telling everyone the sky was falling. Well it was, and now everyone knows it. I went from being a lone wolf to a man lost in the crowd. My voice was far from the loudest voice yesterday, and that’s just fine by me.
When I first discovered that banks were essentially hiring people to impersonate banking officials and crank out thousands of fraudulent signatures, and were paying them what your average burger flipper makes, I couldn’t believe it. It was perjury and forgery, and those are crimes.
If not for the banks’ own arrogance and stupidity, yesterday’s settlement would never have come. If they had just plugged away and kept things running as they always had, they would have made money hand over fist and my clients would have been kicked out of their homes.
And what’s really bad for the banks is that robosigning is the key into the much larger world of securitization fraud, which is the real crime here.
Robosigning would have never been necessary if the banks hadn’t bundled up all these mortgages and sold them off to the highest bidder in the first place. If they had been satisfied with making millions, instead of trillions, we would not be where we are today.
What’s even worse for the banks is that robosigning provided the proof to investigate the banks for the larger fraud.
We are looking forward to the final day of reckoning, when the President and Schneiderman wrap their latest investigation because trust me, when they do, no one will give a damn about robosigning.
As always I am talking to you from the trenches.
Roy Oppenheim
