Its current manifestation is faintly ridiculous: Lenders can't say for sure who holds a mortgage—which means that sales can't go through. Buyers won't put down good money for a property if they aren't sure they'll get clear title to it, nor will lenders extend loans. Buyers of hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of mortgage-backed securities may have grounds to sue.

So much has been said about the recent problem with US mortgage foreclosure documentation. It would be interesting to find out if any other markets had developed mechanism similar to MERS and how do they operationalize it. It seems ridiculous to me to shred the original paper documents after digitization.