mortgage backed securities

On Monday, a group of institutional investors sued Countrywide and Bank of America over Countrywide's mortgages practices. The bank is accused of issuing vast numbers of loans using methods that went beyond lax standards and into fraud, with the sole goal of repackaging them into securities to resell with inflated ratings.

Better-than-expected earnings from General Electric helped lift the Dow and S&P 500. The Nasdaq closed lower after disappointing results from chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices. Overall, the week's strong earnings bode well for coming corporate reports.

A U.S. bankruptcy court judge in New York wants officials from HSBC and Litton Loan Servicing to appear in her courtroom next month -- to explain their failure to provide adequate documentation concerning how HSBC wound up claiming to hold a mortgage that's involved in a bankruptcy case.

After an exhaustive examination, DailyFinance's legal reporter comes to a clear verdict. Banks have done three things to create the massive glut of foreclosures choking America's legal systems and laying waste to its real estate markets.

A top Massachusetts court has criticized banks for their "carelessness" during the securitization of mortgages in the state. But interests supporting the banks have issued their own messages -- trying to minimize the court's decision.

On Oct. 20, New York courts ordered attorneys for foreclosing banks to swear they'd personally confirmed that their documents are true and accurate. But a Brooklyn judge has taken things a step further. Since the banks aren't complying, he has started throwing out foreclosure cases.

Peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com has stopped letting high-risk borrowers use its site because too many of them failed to repay their loans. The site's problem, says columnist and one-time lender Alex Salkever, is that Prosper got in the way of letting a social bond form between microborrower and microlender.

Major news stories ebb and flow, rising to the headlines and then slipping out of the spotlight. But even if they fade from attention, keep an eye on this handful of long-term issues, such as North Korea, which have the potential to disrupt the U.S. economy and global recovery.

Allstate is suing Bank of America and its Countrywide Financial division over Countrywide's sale of $700 million in mortgage-backed securities to the insurance giant, alleging that Countrywide knew in advance that the assets would drop in value because of a high percentage of defaults.

U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Martin Glenn denied Wells Fargo's request for permission to foreclose on Tandala Mims's house in the Bronx for a second time on Thursday because he still wasn't satisfied that Wells -- as opposed to some other bank -- had the right to do so.