Foreclosure-Gate

As you've probably heard, the latest iteration of the housing crisis is what's being called foreclosure-gate, in which many of the nation's largest banks have been foreclosing on properties that they may not even own. With thousands of homes in foreclosure around the country, and the ownership of many of them unclear, banks have been rubber-stamping foreclosure documents without, in some cases, ensuring that they hold the title to the property. In one case, Bank of America foreclosed on the house of a man in Fort Lauderdale, Florida - even though he had paid cash for it and didn't have a mortgage.

You'll recall that the housing crisis was driven by the practice of securitizing and selling off mortgages, often chopping them up into little bitty pieces. One of the results of this is that it's not clear, at this point, who owns many of the houses that have been foreclosed on. In many instances, the foreclosures have been initiated by a little-known company called MERS, which maintains an electronic registry of mortgage records. MERS doesn't actually hold any mortgages, just the records of them, but it has begun thousands of foreclosure proceedings anyway. Whether or not it's legal for it to do so remains very much an open question.

What we do know is that the attorneys general from all 50 states have signed on to an investigation of the foreclosure process, which shows how expansive, both geographically and politically, this problem has become. What all of this will do to a still-fragile housing market is anyone's guess.