March 18th, 2009 by Reed Allmand 
According to an article in the Dallas Morning News a handful of banks are responsible for as much as 40 percent of all the home foreclosures in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 2008.
The article said:
Two financial firms – Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank – were responsible for about a quarter of the residential foreclosure filings, according to a study of residential property foreclosure sales in 2008. Other major U.S. lenders, including U.S. Bancorp, Citigroup and Countrywide Financial, were on the list of companies that had the most foreclosures in the five-county D-FW area.
Wells Fargo alone accounted for over 3,000 foreclosures in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 2008; but few people know where those loans originated. And no one is owning up to making those bad loans to homeowners facing foreclosure.
“Foreclosures on these loans may be filed in our name even when we didn’t originate or service the loan,” Wells Fargo spokesman Jason Menke said Tuesday. “We are only named because of our capacity as trustee and played no role in any cycle of the lending or collecting process.”
Representatives of international lending giant Deutsche Bank said much the same.
“In the vast majority of foreclosure cases in the U.S., including the ones you’re looking at, Deutsche Bank is not a lender,” said John T. Gallagher of Deutsche Bank media relations. “In fact, we do not have a mortgage lending arm in the U.S.
Maybe this is at the root of the foreclosure crisis. No one knows who made these toxic loans so no one can be held “personally” responsible for the imminent foreclosures. Banks like Wells Fargo can feign innocence about toxic mortgages being pushed on homeowners and then passed off as good investments in the form of bundled securities to future retirees and other investors because “they don’t know” where they originated. They truth is that all of these banks are interconnected and interdependent therefore even if Wells Fargo and other major banks did not actually approve the initial loan they helped create, sustain and are still profiting from the system that has created a foreclosure crisis that is slowly sucking the lifeblood out of the average American homeowner. They are still dragging their feet on saving homeowners from foreclosure when it is clearly in their power to do so. They are still working overtime to block crucial legislation designed to help homeowners receive toxic mortgage modifications during bankruptcy. It is time for the banking industry to stop passing the back and do their part to stop this foreclosure crisis–now.
About Reed Allmand
Allmand's vision is rooted in his own financially precarious childhood in Abilene "My father always had difficulty holding a job and supporting our family, so after my parents divorced when I was 12, my sister and I got jobs to help make ends meet," he recalls. "I remember what it felt like as a child to worry that our car would be repossessed or home foreclosed on."
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