Behind foreclosure corner-cutting, troves of missing documents

"In the rush to make new home loans and sell them off as fast as possible to investors on Wall Street, the original lenders --big banks as well as now defunct makers of subprime loans --destroyed original documents, or never turned them over as required to the ownership pools that scooped them up. From 2004 through the end of the housing boom in 2006, more than half of all new mortgages were securitized and sold to such pools, known as mortgage-securitization trusts, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association."