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Wells Fargo Bank Sues Itself
Extreme economic problems require extreme solutions, and Wells Fargo Bank has come up with a good one. They have decided to sue themselves. Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium that is going into foreclosure. As holder of the first, they are suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is Wells Fargo. It gets better. The company has hired a lawyer to defend itself against its own lawsuit. The defense lawyer even filed this answer to the complaint, "Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied." On the website The Consumer Warning Network, Angie Moreschi wrote: "We've apparently reached the perfect storm for complete and utter idiocy by some banks trying to foreclose on homes."
This sounds like something out of HitchHikers or a Python sketch.
Under normal circumstances I'd say this is completely wacked...but in legal land I guess it's just business as usual.
Suing yourself is collusive litigation. We pay taxes to support the legal system and it is outrageous for a corporation to abuse the already overburdened judicial system resolving disputes that are not really disputes.
There must be more to this story, though. Maybe it's Wells Fargo Holding Co., Inc. versus Wells Fargo Partners, Inc. That would make sense.
Too big to not fail?
I must come to the inescapable concludsion that there are too many lawyers in the U.S.
I RTFA, and it appears that Florida requires that you sue all lien holders. Since they have 80/20 double mortgage, they have to sue themselves.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
It actually makes a perverse kind of sense though. Banks can effectively lend money to themselves, so they should be able to sue themselves too!
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By my count, the bank is only the fifth stupidest here.
Let's count it down:
5) Wells Fargo
For getting itself in the position of having to sue itself
4) Florida State government
For writing a law that requires a bank to sue itself.
3) Al Lewis/Fox News
For writing/publishing this worthless article.
2) samzenpus
For posting this on slashdot.
1) Me
For commenting on this crap.
But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and pile scorn on the banks.
It'll take your mind off the fact that you're the real sucker.
Seems like a clear case of "heads, we win, tails, you lose". This lawsuit ensures that one part of wells fargo gets the proceeds of any auction or resale, and what's left over after satisfying the original note (yeah right)/ will still go to the other part of wells fargo. Maybe the 80% note is subordinate to the 20% note?
You know, the joke was funny enough without you having to explain it.
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Woosh!
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
Except the defense is DISPUTING the claims of the plaintiff. If it was just for bookkeeping purposes, wouldn't the defense nod their heads, and rubber stamp a settlement?
even if you understand that, the fact that this nonsense ends up in court means there's no one in a management position prepared to actually make decisions.
Ok, different divisions have different objectives, but it's the job of the CEO to manage the company as a whole. This should all be resolved in conference room 101 internally
So we can bail out Wells Fargo for unforeseen expenses they incurred?
this and the example listed here are a perfect example of how a bank can get so large that they can't even deal with themselves.
It's not the size, it's the stupidity.
Everything I know about management I learned from the "telephone game" we played as kids, where you whisper a message around in a circle and find that after about three hops it gets completely mangled.
Stupid people ignore this phenomenon, and go through their lives acting as if telling someone something once is sufficient to get the message across. Stupid people run stupid organizations that radically under-communicate. Some people who are both stupid and evil use this to create private fiefdoms within organizations.
Smart people recognize this phenomena, and create organizations with multiple, redundant and simple lines of communication, and work to keep policies clear and concise so they are harder to mangle in the communications process.
Organizations run by stupid people are therefore extremely complex and hard to understand, whereas those run by smart people are generally simple. This leads stupid people--who are vastly in the majority--to think that organizations run by smart people aren't very capable, because they are too stupid to realize that capability comes with simplicity, not complexity.
Corporate America is hugely invested in the myth of complexity, and hires and trains managers accordingly. Attempts to simplify are fought at every turn. This creates the kind of environment where an organization can actively pursue and defend a lawsuit against itself, by itself, rather than carrying through the pro-forma motions required by law, because the people on both sides are too stupid to consider any other possibility.
And remember: this comes down to a couple of people. They are embedded within a large organization, but it is at the end of the day just them. It isn't like there are huge teams on this. An organization with clear lines of communication and responsibility would make it easy for the people in question to talk to each other, and the issue would be resolved. But that would be smart, and there is nothing smart about the people working for American banks these days.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
In fact, they're the exact opposite of a monolithic entity.
The monolith made our monkey ancestors more intelligent. Corporations are making us more stupidity again =(
You might be confusing RL with Stargate a little bit.
You might be confusing Stargate with 2001: A Space Odyssey a little bit
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Message to all other creditors of Wells Fargo: "Sorry, we owe this money to our #1 creditor, Wells Fargo, due to the outcome of this lawsuit. You can't have any."
Because the people doing real work, who knew what they were doing, were to important to be promoted into doing other things.
Wow. So you speculated on bubble properties, decided to become a deadbeat, and you bitch that YOUR tax money is being misappropriated??
It is the tax money of RESPONSIBLE homeowners and renters that is going to subsidize speculating bubble inflators like YOU.
I hope you get cancer and your wife fucks your brother after the funeral.
No it wasn't, I didn't understand it at all.
Then again, I wouldn't have seen the explanation if it wasn't for your comment saying how redundant it was.
So thank you.
I wish to remain anomalous
Clearly you don't understand banking. Wells Fargo didn't waste any of their smart bankers on operations or procedures - how silly would that be? They directed their brainpower towards bribing the government for handouts! Has they been smart and efficient, they just would have gotten smaller handouts. Working hard to make your business a success is the sort of thing a free market rewards, not the sort of thing a corrupt government rewards. Who are you to criticise - how many billions of taxpayer dollars did you get, hmmm?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Something's not adding up in your story. First of all, (and I'll probably get modded into oblivion for this) it sounds like you bought a house you either couldn't afford or were unwilling to pay for. You calmly claim that you "fell behind" 3 months, were allowed to enter an agreement with the bank to fix that problem, and still complain that in 2 years they wanted their money with interest....the nerve!! Let's put the shoe on the other foot. If your employer stopped paying your check for 3 months, wouldn't you want your money back ASAP and with some interest?
I also do not understand how you were able to repay the 3 month's worth of mortgage owed, but were unable to come up with the interest on the delinquent charges. How is it that in 2 years and 3 months, you couldn't come up with the interest on the 3 month's payments?
Then, to top it off, you claim that your home was foreclosed on, you were refunded 1 year's worth of payments, and that the house was put on the market for 1 year's worth of house payments. I'm going to have to call B.S. on this one. I realize that we're in a "down market" as they call it, but trying to tell me that your home went back on the market for 1/30 of its original price is a little much.
It's not Wells Fargo we ought to be upset at, it's the legal system that's so borked it requires a company to sue itself. Can we burn the law books yet and just govern ourselves by common sense?
Not a system problem at all.
How can all these "computer people" not know the phrase "garbage in, garbage out".
One bank on both sides of a 80/20 is garbage.
Garbage in, garbage out, therefore the cleanup is inherently going to be crazy.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well, their corporate offices are in San Francisco. That said, a quick look at google gives us various applications for Wells Fargo to have heated sidewalks in their Des Moines, Iowa office, where they have an average of 32 inches of snowfall during the winter.
I'm sure electrically heated sidewalks are cheaper than paying some guy to shovel the snow.
As is becoming more common with foreclosure cases these days, a homeowner can fight the action if they can have the bank prove that they hold the note and all the paperwork on the property. In many, many cases, the bank may well have bundled the mortgage into a security with dozens or even hundreds of other mortgages and sold it to another entity. That entity may well have sold it in a different bundled security to another bank and so on and on and on. I do recall reading about a case in, yes, Florida, where a homeowner has actually forced the bank to re-negotiate her mortgage because they have not been able to prove that they hold her mortgage! They sold it off years ago in such a deal, but now cannot trace the labyrinth of transactions to find the original promissory note, because it has been sold and re-sold multiple times since then.
Except you forget: ice on sidewalks means someone is going to slip and fall. And then sue them. Which apparently they don't have enough of these days.