Why $1 Billion Settlement Won’t Stop Wells Fargo or Anyone Else From Starting Fake Accounts
The problem with free speech is that it enables people to lie without fear. It is the dominant method of securing patrons for your business, votes for your candidate, and investors for your stock. Although frequently illegal, it doesn’t stop anyone from doing it. Only the lowly go to jail. The real big liars go on to make more pornographic profits.
The recent $1 Billion Settlement between Wells Fargo and its investors highlights this continuing problem. Repeatedly hit with “settlements” that implied a promise to consumers, the US government, and now investors, Wells Fargo has paid the tab and continued to fake the existence and status of financial accounts. The difference between Wells Fargo and its cousins on Wall Street is that Wells Fargo was caught multiple times.
The $25 Billion multi-state settlement was a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions (not a misprint or typo) stolen by Wall Street banks. What was missing from that settlement was any meaningful relief to homeowners who had lost the title to their homes because fake claims were presented with fake documents.
Most people do not understand that these fake accounts do not get canceled. Some of them are terminated, but all of them are subject to the pressure of intermediaries working for Wells Fargo to “enforce” the terms of the fake account. This is possible because no settlement ever publishes a list or any form of access to determine if certain account numbers were faked. It is always left to internal procedures to make things right based on a false promise to do so.
As a result, consumers remain blithely unaware that they are paying fake charges on a fake account. All of this is the product of a very cynical business plan based on the apparently correct premise that the banks can stay on top of the food chain by lying.
Why is this relevant to foreclosure?
The entire reason why “securitization” became a business plan is that Wall Street banks were able to create fake accounts with fake terms and fake attributes. They could have pursued a business plan in which transactions were mortgage loans and then either split up or aggregated into assets that were parceled and sold off to investors. They didn’t, but they made us think they did.
The reason they pursued the “under the table” approach rather than the transparent approach is that by faking it, they could create risk-free transactions in which the entire potential for economic loss rested on the homeowner. And the corollary reason was that by foreclosing (i.e., enforcing the terms of a fake account), Wall Street did what Wall Street does best: make other people’s money their money.
By carefully restricting access to information, the banks could convince even the victims that they were not victims of fraud. And because of customs and practices in the practice of law, nearly everyone ignores what happens after a foreclosure process is concluded in the courts or concluded in nonjudicial states.
But for those of us who do follow the money trail, we know that the money collected from the forced sale of property under judicial or nonjudicial process never goes to the party named as claimant and always goes to an investment bank that does not own any unpaid underlying obligation due from the homeowner. We know that there is no “loan account” on the books of any creditor. It only exists as a manifestation of imagination on the books of a company named as a “servicer.”
Wall Street did not need the accounts to be real. They just needed us to think they were real. And so far, they have gotten away with it for over 20 years. Thye drained the US economy of wealth and then went on to continue their illegal activities like drunken sailors.
And they are still doing it.
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