Janet Tavakoli: This is the biggest fraud in the history of the capital markets

Here's a good background article on MERS from the NY Times. It helps explain how deep the problem goes.

"It's as if there is this massive edifice of pretense with respect to how mortgage loans have been recorded all across the country and that edifice is creaking and groaning," said Christopher L. Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah. "If courts are willing to say MERS doesn't have any ownership interest in mortgage loans, that may eventually call into question the priority of liens recorded in MERS's name, and there are millions and millions of them."

Here's another very good article describing how the banks are trying to create the documents after the fact.

And this means document forgeries and fraud are not just a servicer problem or a borrower problem but a mortgage industry and ultimately a policy problem. These dishonest practices are so widespread that they raise serious questions about the residential mortgage backed securities market, the major trustees (such as JP Morgan, US Bank, Bank of New York) who repeatedly provided affirmations as required by the pooling and servicing agreement that all the tasks necessary for the trust to own the securitization assets had been completed, and the inattention of the various government bodies (in particular Fannie and Freddie) that are major clients of LPS.

... The result is a train wreck in US residential mortgage securities, the biggest asset class in the world. The problems are too widespread for the authorities to pretend they don't exist, and there is no obvious way to put this Humpty Dumpty back together