Fannie Mae claims to have owned my mortgage a month BEFORE we bought the house!

[Yo_Mama]

31. Okay, but that is about assignments, not mortgages

And in this case ownership is not an issue generally, because the original mortgage or DSD or Trust Deed names MERS (that's the case discussed in the article). Nor are recording fees even relevant, because if MERS always held title to the document, there was no assignment. Instead a right to payment stream was transferred, rather than the more traditional sale of the mortgage and note. Because the original debt was recorded to MERS, MERS may then turn around and assign the note and mortgage to the creditor with the right to the payment stream if that creditor decided to foreclose. There are no missing assignments because there was never a legal need to do them.

Depending on state law and how the documents were originally drawn up, there may be an issue if the debt is not described or the debt is not assigned properly. Nor are all MERS docs done the same way. Some were originally done under a different name, and then assigned to MERS, and in that case if the assignment was not properly made out it may not be recordable now, which could cause a genuine legal issue.

Much of what is written on this subject is rather confused, because it is the right to a payment stream which is commonly sold in a securitization - hence the trustee. The traditional way was for the note and mortgage to be assigned (legally conveyed) to the Trustee, for the recordation of that assignment after the mortgage or DSD or whatever was recorded, and then in the final step of securitization, securities are created that are legal entitlements to a portion of the payment stream from the pool of mortgages held by the trustee.