The latest salvo in the scandal that won't go away appears courtesy of Wall Street scourge Gretchen Morgenson and her New York Times colleague Michael Powell (presumably no relation to the former FCC chairman).A piece in today's Times discusses MERS, an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. The firm's principal significance is that, according to the Times article, its "private mortgage registry has all but replaced the nation's public land ownership records." Most major real estate loan servicers and providers used MERS for record keeping, on the theory that "efficient" electronic, privately-managed "data" would prove superior to the old-fashioned paper documentation county bureaucracies provided.
How did that proposition shake out? Click on the Times story here for the details. I'll give you a hint: how many vice presidents does it take to operate MERS? If you guessed "thousands," you're on the right track.
Hats off to Morgenson and Powell for attempting to shed light on this issue. It's essential reading in any attempt to understand the American housing catastrophe, and the exponential growth of corruption in our society.
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