Banks Lose Pivotal Mortgage Case

The highest court in Massachusetts ruled against U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo & Co. Friday in a pivotal mortgage foreclosure case that could spark more turmoil and uncertainty in a housing market already mired in depression.
The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a lower court judge's ruling invalidating two mortgage foreclosure sales because the banks, in their capacity as trustees for mortgage securities, did not prove that they actually owned the mortgages at the time of foreclosure.
DENISE LAVOIE AND MICHELLE CONLIN | 01/ 7/11 10:18 PM

The decision, which highlights the failure of financial firms to adhere to the rules that govern mortgage-backed securities, is likely to lead more borrowers to sue bank servicers and trustees for wrongful foreclosures. It's unclear what the ruling means for people who were forced from their homes after defaulting on their loans or for those who purchased houses in foreclosure sales.


"There are now thousands of these homes that have been purchased through foreclosures handled in a very similar fashion where the titles are defective," said Ward P. Graham, a Massachusetts title attorney who co-authored a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of the Real Estate Bar Association for Massachusetts, Inc.

Last fall, the banking industry's foreclosure machine came under intense scrutiny with revelations that low-level employees called "robo signers" powered through hundreds of foreclosure affidavits a day without verifying a single sentence. At the time, analysts warned that the banks' allegedly fraudulent document procedures could imperil their ability to prove that they owned the mortgages. The Massachusetts ruling stokes those concerns.
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State of Emergency – The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook – review

On the march . . . in support of the miners, 1972. Photograph: PA Photo

Andy Beckett on a volume of history that feels over-familiar

• Andy Beckett
• The Guardian, Saturday 9 October 2010
• Article history

How do you write readable social history? Few historians have found a perfect answer. Do you focus narrowly and intensely, as Carlo Ginzburg did in his 1976 classic The Cheese and the Worms, which recreated an entire world from the persecution of a single 16th-century heretic; or do you try to cover every major event and trend in a given era, as David Kynaston has recently done in his bestselling books about Britain in the 40s and 50s? There are always trade-offs: between narrative pace and comprehensiveness, between being clear and panoramic and leaving room for texture, ambiguity, fresh thinking.

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