Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

As near as I can tell, this complaint sounds like an offshoot of SovCit approach. Very similar approach.

In any case, I strongly favor discarding deeds, title search fussery, in favor of a national title registry - the decentralized approach seems, today, to be pointless. Maybe MERS should be nationalized and turned into the Standard Property Registry. It should be as simple as checking the database view to see the title, liens, claims, etc.

edit: I read each and every single document I signed for the 30 year conventional mortgage, both in the run-up and in the grand finale. Law is like code, but executed by courts and lawyers with a "virtual machine" of the great Anglo-American legal tradition governing it. Anyone competent to write code and read manuals should be able to read their mortgage documents.

Many of these homeowners, unlike "sovereign citizens", actually appear to have the law on their side. They aren't just making up their own insane interpretation of the legal system. It even sounds like it's more like MERS who made up an interpretation of title that disagrees with state laws.

You seem to be saying that MERS's interpretation should be correct, that MERS's database should be the law of the land and investors should be able to buy and sell the title to mortgages without states and counties being involved.

The current system has homeowners getting windfalls because MERS screwed up, and I suspect that screw-ups in your version would have the opposite effect, where homeowners get robbed by computers and nobody can be held accountable.

So that seems bad. And what would the benefit be? Sure, it would make mortgage-backed securities more efficient, but -- why is that good?

Crap happens. That's the point of the courts; to enforce remedy.

If you've ever dealt a little bit with funky titles, you'd know that having a central authority managing all claims to title would be a big deal and massively improve life for property buyers. Title searches are not exhaustive. That is why title insurance exists.

If MERS is a title registry and it also manages bundling of debts, I genuinely don't care. The issue isn't debt bundling, it was granting high risk mortgages and other high risk behavior.

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