Today's Must Read

The mortgage/foreclosure mess is even bigger than I had imagined. Here's the transcript from 60 Minutes.

It's bizarre but, it turns out, Wall Street cut corners when it created those mortgage-backed investments that triggered the financial collapse. Now that banks want to evict people, they're unwinding these exotic investments to find, that often, the legal documents behind the mortgages aren't there. Caught in a jam of their own making, some companies appear to be resorting to forgery and phony paperwork to throw people - down on their luck - out of their homes.

It's not only sloppiness -- in a lot of these cases, it's outright fraud:

One of the strangest signatures belonged to the bank vice president who had signed Szymoniak's newly discovered mortgage documents. The name is Linda Green. But, on thousands of other mortgages, the style of Green's signature changed a lot.

And, even more remarkable, Szymoniak found Green was vice president of 20 banks - all at the same time.

Where did all those documents come from? We went searching for "the" Linda Green and found her in rural Georgia. She told us she has never been a bank vice president.

In 2003, she was a shipping clerk for auto parts when her grandson told her about a job at a company called Docx. The company, that was once housed in Alpharetta, Ga., was a sweatshop for forged mortgage documents.

Y'know, one thing I don't understand -- why aren't some of these banksters in jail? Oh, wait -- it's probably because they're not poor and brown.