The Name Game

If you manage to slog through the entirety of Sara Rabb's front-page Sunday News Journal report on the failed 2,718 acre "Jubilee" housing development in nearby Pace -- an area distinguished primarily by an abundance of fundamentalist churches, chemical plants, and cows -- what you might be left with is the impression that a lot of grown men were playing kiddie poker using toothpicks for chips.

That didn't stop them from making 10, 20, and 30 million dollar bets with each other and dreaming of "a glorious new community with more than 500 homes valued at up to $1.5 million."

But this is Northwest Florida. They needed Other People's Money to make it seem like real life.

Enter Barney Ng, son of Walter Ng, founder of RE Loans, LLC. He claims to have invented "a new product, a six year first trust deed that could be used for both residential and commercial property alike."

Mr. Ng is no stranger to strange investments. One of his companies just unloaded the dry-docked Queen Mary which, weirdly, has been serving as a Long Beach "ghost hotel" while the California bankruptcy court sorts through the wreckage. He also recently foreclosed on the failed Olympian Brewery in Tacoma.

Now, there's a poker player everyone wants to see come to the table late in the evening! And, indeed, it seems that Mr. Ng has been left holding the bag -- again.

Ng said he never intended to be more than an investor in the project, and now, he realizes he has inherited a development that is many, many millions of dollars over budget, and now, he realizes he has inherited a development that is many, many millions of dollars over budget.
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Ng said he is in the midst of sorting through the project's financing, trying to determine which bills have been paid and which are still owed.

Reporter Rabb has some fun ticking through the various names the home town boys gave to their game. They went from "Governor's Club" to "Arcadia Mills" to "Jubilee" and now, apparently, "Contrada Hills."

Gosh, being a developer must be fun! You get to think up neat names and make 'billboards featuring boys, rabbits and girls' and stuff like that while waiting for the money to roll in from ... well, from somewhere or another.

Ng is now hoping "to get approval to create a community development district for the project, which is the subject of a hearing to be held Feb. 28 at the Santa Rosa County Courthouse."

Clearly, it's time for another name change. How about Potemkin Village?

Another Horatio Alger Story

Question: How do you make $115 million in a single day and get someone else to pay your country club bills and airfare for the next four years?

Answer: Become CEO of Countrywide Financial and Mortgage Co. ... entrap hundreds of thousands of consumers into borrowing on mortgages they can't afford ... slide more charges onto their bills without the customers' knowledge... sell your own stock in the company while stiff-arming the S.E.C. ... run the company to the brink of bankruptcy when the customers can't pay... reassure Wall Street everything is just ducky... then abruptly fire 12,000 salaried employees.

Finally, you thank your mother for encouraging you to go to college.

Inspiring.

The Bank You Know...

... may not be the bank you owe.

On Oct. 10, Judge Boyko, 53, ordered the lenders’ representative to file copies of loan assignments showing that the lender was indeed the owner of the note and mortgage on each property when the foreclosure was filed. But lawyers for Deutsche Bank supplied documents showing only an intent to convey the rights in the mortgages rather than proof of ownership as of the foreclosure date.

Saying that Deutsche Bank’s arguments of legal standing fell woefully short, the judge wrote: "The institutions seem to adopt the attitude that since they have been doing this for so long, unchallenged, this practice equates with legal compliance. Finally put to the test, their weak legal arguments compel the court to stop them at the gate."

* * * [T]he inability of Deutsche Bank, as trustee for the pools, to produce proof of ownership at the time of the foreclosures will fuel borrowers’ concerns that they are being forced out of their homes by entities that may not even hold the underlying loans.

Adds one mortgage securities specialist, "There is no industry repository for mortgage loans. I have heard of instances where the same loan is in two or three pools."

Yikes! If Wall Street investment banks don't even know that the mortgages they think they own are also being claimed by others, who's to say Wall Street arbitrageurs aren't double- and triple-counting even the ordinary investment assets they think they own?