Bank: We're defaulting, but don't you dare

This post comes from Al Lewis at partner site MarketWatch.

Thomas Marano, chief executive officer of Residential Capital, wrote me a letter.

"Dear Homeowner," it begins. (That's me, homeowner.) 

As you may have read or heard, Residential Capital LLC recently announced that it and its subsidiaries, including GMAC Mortgage, are restructuring under Chapter 11 . . . The restructuring . . . does not change your obligations as a mortgage borrower . . . You must continue to make your scheduled mortgage payments on time and in full.

I can only guess why he sent me this letter. Maybe he's afraid I'm going to do what he's doing.

ResCap is a subsidiary of Ally Financial, which was founded in Detroit as General Motors Acceptance Corp., or GMAC, in 1919. It nearly collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis after it had made a bold expansion into "liar loans" and other subprime mortgage products.

Additionally, the U.S. auto industry it serviced was near death.

To keep GMAC alive, the Federal Reserve allowed it to become a bank holding company -- giving it the ability to borrow from the Fed at nearly 0%. The U.S. government, beginning with the Bush administration, also gave it a $17.2 billion bailout, of which it still owes nearly $12 billion. (Post continues below.)

GMAC was apparently so embarrassed as it became a ward of a state that it began re-branding itself as Ally. GMAC Bank became Ally Bank in 2009, and then its parent company became Ally Financial in 2010.

In a stroke of marketing genius, Ally began running a series of commercials to distract consumers from its extraordinary bailout. The ads suggested that the other banks were the cheaters, taking advantage of customers in ways that are amply apparent, even to children. A slick-talking banker conned children out of toys using treacherous contract language, and then a voiceover declared: "Even kids know it's wrong to hide behind fine print. Why don't banks?" (Watch the ad.)

Today, Ally is 74% owned by the taxpayers. And it has suffered the same problems every major mortgage lender has faced, from allegations that it fraudulently foreclosed on homes to lawsuits from investors who claimed it misrepresented the quality of its mortgage pools.

Last year, Ally attempted an initial public stock offering to help pay back the taxpayers, but the IPO was withdrawn because of market conditions, and, of course, Ally's legacy mortgage issues.

Now, Ally has come up with a plan to launder its bad mortgages and related liabilities by taking a subsidiary through the bankruptcy cycle. This is a novel way for a commercial bank to shed bad loans, but I suppose Ally has to do something after failing a financial "stress test" from the Fed in March.

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If only I could restructure my finances the way Marano is restructuring his.

The property I mortgaged through GMAC is a rental house, and it would be immensely more profitable if I did not have those pesky monthly payments. If only I could form a subsidiary to hold my GMAC mortgage and then have that subsidiary file bankruptcy.

Of course, as Marano wrote to me, I'd have to write to my tenant, so that he didn't get the wrong idea:

Dear Renter: I am restructuring my GMAC mortgage. My unusual financial shell game does not change your obligations as a tenant. You must continue to make your rent payments on time and in full. Yes, I know. GMAC is not making its payments. And I am not making my payments. So you must be asking why you should be making your payments? Well, to borrow a line from an Ally commercial, "It's just the right thing to do."

Hey, even kids know a bad example when they see one. Why don't banks?

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