A Mortgage-Backed Security Map: The Fantastic Fate of One Man's Loan

A recent story from PBS Newshour featured the case of homeowner Daniel Edstrom, who is employed by a company who happens to perform securitization audits, who decided he'd look into the history of his own mortgage.

He reportedly spent a year mapping his mortgage, came up with this flowchart showing how his mortgage was ripped apart during the securitization process, and observed:

• "If someone steals a car, they can make much more money if they break the car up into pieces and sell the pieces individually. That's exactly what happened here [to my mortgage]."

The story concludes with this excerpt:

• [I]ncreasingly, those who engineered these deals are looking suspect, as Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Arthur Schack recently explained to us. If a judge were to study Daniel Edstrom's chart of his own wayward mortgage, might his or her honor have even more reason to slow the foreclosure process? Take a close look yourself and see how you might rule.

For the PBS' story, see A Mortgage-Backed Security Map: The Fantastic Fate of One Man's Loan.