Tweet me!The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and labyrinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
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. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.
In The Truth Goes Viral, Part 2: Italian Towns Damaged by Derivatives, Downtown Brooklyn Real Estate, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Europe’s Overbanked Status, Reggie Middleton, Matt Taibbi, and Simon Johnson – All in One Video, Matt Taibbi is interviewed in depth, as well as Simon Johnson (the ex-chief economist at the IMF) and yours truly (the world's most charismatic and handsome financial blogger). In a timely turn of events, I am posting a reminder of this video as I prepare an indepth post to remind the world that Europe is destined to blow up in the near future, and has yet to do so. Click here for the full video from the source: The Attack on Europe: Debt and Redemption, produced by VPRO Backlight and aired on BBC2. For those who aren’t fluent in Italian and Dutch, I have provided breakpoints that are in English for you to skip to:
- 7:22 Matt Taibbi on IR swaps, big banks and small Italian towns (for those of you who don’t know, Matt Taibbi wrote that scathing piece in Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs – The Great American Bubble Machine | Rolling Stone Politics
- 10:32 More Matt Taibbi on derivative products
- 27:10 to hear Matt Taibbi, Goldmans Sachs’ biggest fan (what would you guys think of a Matt Taibbi/Reggie Middleton collaboration?)
- 28:40 Simon Johnson, former Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department at the IMF, called for European boycott of Goldman Sachs (Simon Johnson — Biographical Information – IMF
- 30:30 Matt Taibbi
- 31:29 Simon and Matt
- 31:46 to 37:43 Yours truly, Reggie Middleton in Downtown Brooklyn on the banks and the truly distressed sovereigns. It resumes at 38:15, but you should watch it through to get the feel for the subject matter at hand. By the, the discussion on derivatives here gets quite interesting, be sure to view the whole piece.
- 46:35 resumes in English with some basic, common sense advice
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The Robo-Signing Mess Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg, Mortgage Putbacks Will Be the Harbinger of the Collapse of Big Banks that Will Dwarf 2008!
- Reggie Middleton with Max Keiser on the Keiser Report Discussing Banks, Fraudclosure and Derivative Exposure
- We’ve Been Bamboozled by the Banking Industry, but the Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost
- Here Is a Reason Why Mortgage Modifications May Be Moving So Slowly, The Servicer Gets the Vig!
- JP Morgan’s 3rd Quarter Earnigns Analysis and a Chronological Reminder of Just How Wrong Brand Name Banks, Analysts, CEOs & Pundits Can Be When They Say XYZ Bank Can Never Go Out of Business!!!
- The Trillion Dollar LIE? Housing Activity and Prices, Lending, Credit and Charge-offs Are All Getting Worse SINCE the Bailout!
- A Step by Step Guide to Exactly How Much Derivatives Risk Each of the 5 Big Banks Actually Have, and How It Could All Go Boom!
- Is the US Government About to Forgive Mortgage Debt? Let’s Crowdsource Our Way Through a Scenario or Two!
- Why the Case Shiller Index, Although Showing Another Downturn Coming, is Overly Optimistic and Quite Misleading!
- Yes, Housing Prices Have Much Farther to Fall. We’re Talking Years…
- Because 105% LTV On Depreciating Property Wasn’t Good Enough for the US Taxpayer…
- I Told You Housing Was Going to Take a Downturn for the Worse. I’ll Tell You Something Else, We Are in a Housing Depression! It’ll Get Worse Until Market Forces Rule Over Government Bubble Blowing!
- As I Made Very Clear In March, US Housing Has a Way to Fall
- It’s Official: The US Housing Downturn Has Resumed in Earnest
- The Great Global Macro Experiment, BoomBust Cycles, and the Refusal to See the Truth: Bubble Economics in the Mainstream Media
- The 3rd Quarter in Review, and More Importantly How the Shadow Inventory System in the US is Disguising the Equivalent of a Dozen Ambac Bankruptcies!
- Banks, Monolines, and Ratings Agencies As The Three Card Monte (Wall)Street Hustlers! Its a Sucker’s Bet, Who’s Going to Fall for it in QE2?
