Less of a diary than a heads up here. Matt Taibbi's latest wherein he reports on the special courts set up in Florida to clear the backlog of foreclosures is up on Rolling Stone.
About those courts:
The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed.
This probably won't be too shocking to those here that have been following the mortgage fraud story. Still it is a definite must read.
You've heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.
It looks like the guilty parties may get away with fiscal mass murder because TPTB don't have a better plan.
In one corner we have the rule of law and in the other massive entrenched interests, so don't be too surprised if the banks get a pass on their fraud and the foreclosures keep rolling because the alternative would be to let the dominoes keep falling. Mortgage and title insurance providers are already crying foul. If all of this mess hits title insurers then they go down without the government stepping in. Why would mortgage companies continue to lend without title insurance? All of housing could be locked up with only cash sales still happening.