Randy Wray — Join the Protest Against Hometheft

Randy hits another home run. Here are some high points.

It is not an overstatement to say that the Global Financial Crisis would not have happened without MERS. MERS was absolutely essential to the “efficient” securitization model that led up to the crisis.

It is all illegal. There was never any law that permitted the industry to create MERS to evade US property law (and to avoid paying recording fees in local jurisdictions).
Many brave homeowners have fought against the banksters, taking their cases to court.

The banks have lost some cases, but have also won some. So, predictably, our lawmakers and other policymakers are moving to legalize home theivery. Make it all completely above-board. Create a national electronic registry along the model created by MERS. The intention is to destroy property law and to undermine local property records that protect American homeowners. It is led, of course, by the banksters, but also–I guess not surprisingly–by the Fed.

You see, the Fed does not like local proptery law. It acts like sand in the securitization-foreclosure cogwheels created by the banksters. They want the cheapest, quickest way to turn your home into a money-making machine. Making money for them, that is. They do not want local yokels slowing that down by actually trying to protect the interests of local homeowners. What, you want accurate property records? You want to know who owns your mortgage? You want to know when a bank sells your mortgage to some foreign bank? You want to be able to track down who you are supposed to make payments to, and whether they actually received them? No, the Fed and the Bankers do not think you have a right to this sort of information. They’ll keep it for you in a national electronic registry. No more going down to your local recording office to find out.

In truth, you cannot do that any more. MERS and the banksters already destroyed the chain of title. The Fed wants to rubberstamp what the industry already did.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Join the Protest Against Hometheft
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City
Market "efficiency" at work.

The Fed wants to keep securitization cheap–indeed, the Fed is quite open about that. It wants to reboot 2004 all over again. It wants to bring back the subprime bubble. Steamrolling a new–legal this time–MERS is part of the plan to boost another real estate bubble. It was so much fun last time around! And there are still some Americans among the 99% who still own their homes. The banks need to mortgage those so they can foreclose and move the rest of the real estate to the top 1%.

In an environment of low rates, the best way to get a safe return is to buy up foreclosed houses on the cheap, rent them at a risk-weighted rate of return higher than otherwise available in the market, and then flip them for a tidy gain in the next engineered bubble.

See also:

New Economic Perspectives
Survey of Bankers Unintentionally Documents their Depravity
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Peter Radford — Irving Fisher and Inequality

“Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.” ~ Irving Fisher, 1919

That markets exist, indeed can only ever exist, inside a broader sociopolitical context disappeared altogether from mainstream economic thought. The consequence being, as I have said far too many times before, is that economists ended up studying only economics and not actual economies. Their models, large or small, formal or ad hoc, mathematical or narrative, all overlooked the sociopolitical impact subsequent policy advice derived from them might have. In this way economics became “performative” in that policy advice and the lessons learned in the classroom all had the effect of trying to bend society to conform to the ideal, rather than bending the ideal to conform with reality.

Economics became a massive social experiment. Economists began tinkering with society even while being oblivious to the fact that they were tinkering. Innocent or not – and I still believe that some economists knew full well they what they were doing – the mainstream drew to itself a massive ethical responsibility that it has never to this day recognized. Namely that if your advice is based upon some theory that assumes away most if not all social reality, and that it then has the effect of altering the reality it presumes to model, you had better be damned sure both theory and advice do no harm. Hiding behind idealized theoretical constructs is not acceptable. When you seek to bend real social relations to mimic those of your theory you had better be prepared to be called to task for any consequences society might not like. The loss of democracy being high on that list.

Or is it that many mainstream economists simply have a contempt for democracy because it muddies their pristine theoretical waters?

The  post contains some excellent quotes about the intersection of culture, law and the economy.

The Radford Free Press
Irving Fisher and Inequality
Peter Radford