People Please! This settlement has nothing to do with at started the housing crisis, it deals with the Robo signing and makings even worse. X

No, Chris, that link (to a personal injury lawfirm that is apparently trying to establish itself as a "wrongful foreclosure" practice) doesn't help at all. It is worthless.

The intentionally-artful term "wrongful foreclosure" was basically being used in this sense -- people who had indeed fallen behind on their mortgages, and were no longer keeping up with (or making any) payments on their mortgages were subjected to foreclosure proceedings. Nothing unusual in any of that. But then the banks, with so many thousands of foreclosures, utilized a procedural shortcut that they shouldn't have taken; they resorted to having one person (or just a few people) signing off on many, many more foreclosure documents than could possibly have been reviewed by that person. They treated the signature as a mere formality, which it was for the most part, but when a notarized signature says that you have reviewed the file and your signature is notarized... well, you really ought to have read the file.

So that was the mistake by the banks; assigning people to sign off on documents that they had not personally reviewed.

Now that is all just a big procedural debate. The serious question is whether the banks were effectively foreclosing on anyone who was, say, current in their mortgage? Was any bank unjustly kicking anyone out of their home? The answer is, almost without recorded exception in the United States, "NO."

What your link demonstrated was simply this; that by taking a procedural shortcut, the banks set up a situation in which clever lawyers could make claims that the foreclosures were "wrongful." Wrongful, that is, in the sense that some notarized signatures were technically deficient. And the lawyers could then sue the banks, claiming that the procedural defect made the whole foreclosure process invalid. That is, despite the fact that the clients really were in default on their mortgages.

That is why, Chris, in the videos that you linked to, the lawyers were slickly trying to drum up a very peculiar kind of case; one in which the foreclosure had been completed (with some robo-signed documents in the process), and the home had then been badly damaged due to the absence of any resident. So in come the lawyers, they sue for those damages (since their clients probably can't pay the mortgages in any event) and the lawyers take a third of the recovery.

Nice work if you can get it, and you can get if if you try. If you try, that is, and you are also a personal injury lawyer in some place like Florida or Nevada.

Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if public radio bothered to explain something like that? I just don't see it happeneing; not when there are still tear-jerking stories out there from people like Gordon and big banks to pick on in the name of supporting bank-reforming Democrats, who support NPR, etc., etc., etc.

I virtually never comment but feel obligated to caution the listeners about the predicatable downstream effects this will have: significantly more difficulty in getting a mortgage. This has already happened and I can personally attest to this as an individual with a credit score above 800 and no debt who was drowned in documentation paperwork and eventually denied a mortgage that was 2/3 of my annual income. Soon no one will be able to get a loan and that will have predictable consequences on the housing market and the economy.

Charles, the hyperlink for "robo-signing" brings up a page with 3 videos from a wrongful foreclosure attorney who seems to answer a few of your arguments. http://www.southcoastaccidentattorney.com/faqs/what-is-robosigningnbsp.cfm

The root of housing crisis was government trying to "help" people by forcing the banks to depart from traditional practices and to give bad loans which destroyed the whole sector and the personal economy of millions of people.
Who were the politicians and their cronies who started this ball rolling? Was not President Obama himself involved in law suits in the 1990's compelling banks to make loans?

Do people become journalists to be vapid political cheerleaders sticking to the approved talking points and rehashing the same mendacious narrative in order to deceive the public or was their ambition to inform the public with facts and accurate history and let them decide?

More than seven and a half minutes on this story; gratuitous references to "predatory" banks and "robo-signing." But no explanation (I suggest that there IS NO EXPLANATION) as to how something like "robo-signing" caused any foreclosures, nor provided us with ANY examples of any unfair or illegal foreclosures that occurred as a result of such practices.

Let's face it -- this story was carefully designed to portray banks and mortgage lenders as evil; and to further portray consumers as completely innocent victims. As such, public radio audiences are less informed and more ignorantly prejudiced about this subject.