As I have said many times, “If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive.”

Well, Michael Powell and Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, cover it, and I think that this is the important take away:

Apparently with good reason. Alan M. White, a law professor at the Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana, last year matched MERS’s ownership records against those in the public domain.

The results were not encouraging. “Fewer than 30 percent of the mortgages had an accurate record in MERS,” Mr. White says. “I kind of assumed that MERS at least kept an accurate list of current ownership. They don’t. MERS is going to make solving the foreclosure problem vastly more expensive.”

(emphasis mine)

Regardless of issues of law, on matters of basic fact MERS is completely unreliable, and the attempts by regulators to protect it are actually an assault on basic property rights, which depend on the rule of law, in the United States.

I’m not suggesting that anyone should go full Tyler Durden at “Library Street, in Reston, VA,” but I am suggesting that someone with a law go full avenging angel on their asses, with a good dose of RICO mixed in.

H/t Barry Ritholtz.