In the old days, a bank gave you a mortgage to buy a house, with the house and your down payment as collateral. If you missed to many payments, the bank could foreclose, very cut and dry. Out you go.
Now a days, these mortgages have been sliced and diced into complex financial products now known as “toxic assets”, and no one seems really sure who owns the lien on many mortgages now. This may turn and bite many banks. How can you foreclose, when there is no clear ownership of the mortgage ?
What gets me is how people, who are making an honest attempt to honor their mortgages, can’t get the bank to work with them until they skip payments. Do the banks really need a hard slap up side the head before they’ll notice customers? Maybe so in this difficult mortgage climate.
Jacquie and I are very glad we chose not to “upgrade” our house during the boom of the early 2000s. 
Here’s a video to clarify what this thread is really about(before we get a bunch of uninformed posts):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0zEXdDO5JU
and here’s a video NPR did about toxic assets: