This article was written Dec 27, 2021. It may be of interest to some.
Jim’s Rant For The Day. Cede & Co. And The Ever Rising Stock Market.
First let’s discuss the history of Recording Deeds, Mortgages and Promissory Notes.
The English battle of Hastings in 1066 ended with rights being given to common people by the king. One such right was in order to repossess land due to non-payment on a mortgage,
the original mortgage and note must be presented in court. This is still our law.
Until around 1880, people hid their deeds, mortgages and notes at home. A fire could make them lose their land as well. Then county governments realized they could make money recording and certifying those documents for the courts; their word was good. But recording was, and is not, required. The penalty for not recording an instrument is if another instrument is recorded before yours, regardless of the date they were signed, the first recorded instrument is in line legally ahead of you. You get the shut out.
So if you fail to record your deed, the original seller can sell the property again and that buyer can record his deed, making him recognized by law as the rightful land owner. Thus everybody started recording instruments. This benefited the counties because now they knew who to bill for land taxes annually. So this is why people record instruments at the county court houses. The recording satisfies the Battle of Hastings requirement to produce the original documents. A certified copy from the county suffices.
Now let’s discuss MERS, the Mortgage Electronic Registry Service. They were incorporated in 1996 due to the new practice of big Wall Street banks boxing up thousands of mortgages and selling them as Mortgage Backed Securities. The bankers knew they would be sold over and over again to investors. The bankers did not want to record each of the thousands of individual mortgages in the boxes in each land owners county and pay the fees. So they had a corporation record them in a spreadsheet noting the location of the original documents in various offices around the U.S. So when the box was resold they just updated their spreadsheet by assigning the docs to the new bond holder company. Such a simple world now.
Here's the shortfall of that system though. Before MERS, investors were always given the original docs to hold in their hands. Now they have been trained to accept photo-copied docs which are not legal original documents. Once the bankers got rolling they ran extra copies of the illegal docs and sold them too. So there may be five people that hold five different mortgages on your home without you knowing about it. All five can try to collect from you. Now the banks were openly cheating the world.
Around 2011 MERS went bankrupt. All the records in mini warehouses were hauled off to landfills after non-payment of rent. Judges and lawyers were reluctant to uphold the original documents requirement because it would destroy the bankers and the pension funds that own those boxes. If one really pushed an attorney they would play fair. I have a very close relative in that situation. I explained to her the above and advised her to push an attorney for the original documents when she could not pay her mortgage. She has been in her home and has been making partial payments for the past seven years. She cannot be foreclosed on so the investors hope she will sell the home someday and pay off the mortgage. That’s all they can do is hope. All the above is what killed the global economic system in ‘08 - ‘09 and why today everywhere you look in the financial world you can expect to see rampant fraud, intentionally created.
Now let’s talk about Cede & Company. This corporation was founded in the same year (1996) as MERS was for a similar reason. Instead of registering and re-registering stocks and bonds as was the practice in order to deliver those “receipts of ownership” to the owners, the stock market simplified the system. All stocks are registered to Cede & Co. who holds them in their name. They then keep a giant spreadsheet on who the individual owner of the day is. Now come the investment funds we purchase stocks from. They take our money and post in their spreadsheet you have 10 shares of stock. The stock held by Cede is assigned to your brokerage house. But what happens if either your broker or Cede go out of business? You are simply a creditor of that broker and have no contractual relationship with Cede & Company, therefore you can’t get your stock from Cede. All records will be lost. The bankers have just screwed you and the pension funds again.
This is why the federal government is committing fraud to print worthless digital money to prop up the stock market – it's to keep the fools in the dark about the giant Ponzi schemes the bankers and government created. This is why several big financial advisers have been predicting for a few years that the stock market will continually go up in price until one day no one will care. They won’t care because no one will have the stocks in hand or know who owns what or how many people bought the same share of stock. It too, like MERS, is a Gordian knot that can never be unraveled. In the end, all of us victims will be holding Confederate dollars to show our Grand-Kids.