Wells Fargo v. Wells Fargo: Wells Fargo Sues Itself

banks do dumb things like sue themselfves, yet the doomers on SE cite their housing predictions like they are the Ten Commandments.

Is this all that Fox Business can report on? If you own a company that goes bankrupt and the company owes you money, you have to sue the company that you own - yourself. Because it is a different person.

There is a clear distinction in many states between mortgages with recourse and without. In Florida a mortgage lender has recourse against the debtor, but there is also a homestead bankruptcy exemption and many other factors that affect who gets sued in cases like this. For there to be a clean title all liens must be cleared, which is what Wells Fargo is doing.

Alpie, why do you constantly post such silly things, or pay any attention whatsoever to Fox News?

"banks do dumb things like sue themselfves,"

and idiots do dumb things like say that manhattan prices aren't down.

Yes, alpo, there are probably folks as dumb as you out there... but Manhattan is in fact down.

this story has been reported on by lots of sources, not just Fox News. I used Fox because someone linked to it at patrick.net.

Gee, this has only happened like.... 100,000 times. Used to happen with Citibank ALL THE TIME with Manhattan Coop foreclosures where they original loan was by CitiMortgage and the second was some form of HELOC through Citibank Private Banking.

BFD.

I don't know if there's any excuse for posting about a stupid article with the usual Fox commentary presented as 'news': "Being a taxpayer-subsidized, too-big-to-fail institution, it's possible that one of the few ways for Wells Fargo & Co. to know what it is doing is to notify itself with a court filing."

Most likely, as 30yrs says, the HELOC was made by one subsidiary and the mortgage by another. In non-recourse states (not Florida), HELOC's have recourse even if mortgages don't. The HELOC could have been made by a different company and sold to Wells Fargo - maybe, for instance, Wachovia, as most banks don't issue both a mortgage and a HELOC as that increases their risk.

Moreover, by federal law each state in which a nationally-chartered bank operates must be incorporated separately. So if the mortgage was made by the California bank because it didn't have offices in Florida (which is true), and the HELOC was made the bank in another state, they will be separate legal entities. The article is a right-wing plant to get the ignorant to laugh about things they don't understand.

A real Rush Limbaugh tactic.

"The article is a right-wing plant to get the ignorant to laugh about things they don't understand."

I won't comment about the right wing part, but I TOTALLY agree it's manufactured "news" designed to "get the ignorant to laugh about things they don't understand."

The entire "too big to fail" thing is a joke: the reason banks were allowed to grow so big was to prevent the "too small to diversify risk" problem that led to the S&L crisis in the '80s. Banks could not operate across state lines, so they were overexposed to regional risks. They also could not compete effectively with foreign banks that were not limited thus, nor did they have a large enough capital base to finance large corporations. (The same reason the Big 8 are now the Big 4.)

Today's problems reside not with commercial banks but for the most part with investment banks and the ratings agencies, and a failure to regulate properly.

BTW that article is so stupid it would seem to be written by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who somehow managed to wangle his way into being a business columnist without knowing the first thing about business.

or law