Reply #17: Financial institutions' resistance to fixing this mess means one thing

[gratuitous]

It's even worse than they're letting on. Having thousands of properties out there totally unmarketable because nobody has clear title to them is a horrible thing. When properties can't be bought and sold, when neither buyers nor sellers have any confidence that their transaction won't go sour in a year or three years or ten years, it hurts everyone.

The only thing I can think of is that the financial institutions who make money off the trading of properties are crossing their fingers and hoping it all goes away. They're hoping courts and mortgagees will simply throw up their hands, declare the problem insoluble, and just let someone (guess who?) swoop in and take possession of the property so it can go back into the market mix. Bad paper on questionable properties will work itself out of the system (slowly, but at a pace that shouldn't affect all those lovely, lovely annual bonuses), the property titles will be rehabilitated, and everything will be right with the world again.

If your jaw isn't in your lap by this point of the description, you may have just as unrealistic estimate as the banksters do of what it's going to take to set things to right. For the people occupying these houses, it isn't just a property but their home. As folks organize and the word leaks out that the banksters weren't always as careful as they should have been about crossing the t's and dotting the i's, you can bet that foreclosure proceedings are going to get more and more complicated, and the farther and farther away from the original transaction an entity is, the less likely they're going to have a clear chain of possession.

This could take decades to sort out if the banksters don't want to facilitate the process and own up to their shoddy practices. Or, they can flood the system with a bunch of bribe money and hope to install a Congress more amenable to letting them off the hook. Given their track record, which path do you suppose they'll try to take?