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

[Samantha]

35. I thought we were going to end realizing we had a terminology miss!

And it probably was even my fault!

But just want to casually mention MERS was not legally allowed to hold any title. It was only originally intended to be a (might be the wrong word) servicer. The lenders who designed this entity did not want MERS to be able to own anything because then there might be a profit and if so, here's the dreaded word -- taxes would be owed.

In the very beginning of states wanting retribution and putting together class action lawsuits -- and again, I believe among the first to do so was Florida and Kentucky, one of those lawsuits actually traced the -- I am not sure exactly what the right word would be put perhaps I can use origination documents of the program itself -- prohibited MERS from actually owning anything. But the facade of ownership appeared when large lenders started going belly-up and just transferred ownership to MERS anyway.

At that point, when things started to get really ugly, some truly smart DU'er (sorry, I do not remember that person's name) put up a short post to people being foreclosed upon. That post said when the foreclosure was filed, the owner of the property should demand to see the original Note from the transaction. "Show me the note" was the post heading. Because the Note itself is the legal document which does in fact establish a debt, and if the party filing against the homeowner cannot produce the Note, Ooops, as Rick Perry would say, the filing party had no standing in law to foreclose. There were cases reported where judges actually refused to allow the foreclosure to proceed because MERS had no platform from which to file. It was just a mere man in the middle so to speak.

From there, we ricocheted into the arena of the "improvised documents", meaning the ones conjured up and subsequently presented as the originals of the transaction to the courts, at which point the whole thing blew up.

So this was the gist of it, probably with my having a few more skewed words thrown in there. I believe everything you say is correct; however, you do use that word tradition. I would like to suggest that between "then" and "now" tradition has left the building.

Sam