Kate Berry has covered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for American Banker since 2016. She joined the publication in 2006 covering mortgage lending and the financial crisis. Berry also has covered big banks including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. She has won five awards from the Society of American Business Writers and Editors, and has worked at several news organizations including the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Associated Press. Berry began her career as a clerk at the New York Times.
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The government-sponsored enterprise is working to rebuild partnerships with church organizations and housing financing agencies as part of a broader effort to make owning a home affordable for low- and moderate-income families.
November 2 -
Bank of America has agreed to pay $335 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it misled shareholders about risky mortgages and its dependence on the electronic mortgage registry known as MERS.
November 2 -
The CFPBs expanded data requirements for the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act will create a powerful tool for analyzing fair lending compliance. But some say the initiative is a massive overreach that could compromise borrower privacy.
October 23 -
Mortgage servicer Ocwen Financial failed four servicing tests in the second half of 2014. Joseph A. Smith Jr., the monitor of the $25 billion national mortgage settlement, said the Atlanta servicer was beginning to show progress in complying with terms of the 2012 agreement.
October 22 -
Housing finance reform in Congress is stalled, but Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (often under pressure from their regulator) are forming partnerships, developing new products and finding ways to share risk with the private sector to correct flaws in the housing system.
October 20 -
Mortgage servicers have gotten a rare reprieve from the Federal Housing Administration.
October 20 -
Next year Fannie will require that mortgage lenders use so-called trended credit data for all mortgage borrowers, a move it says could broaden access to credit.
October 19 -
Profit margins in JPMorgan Chase's mortgage banking unit were down in the third quarter, primarily due to the shift in the mix from refinance activity to home purchases, and from retail loan originations to correspondent lending.
October 14 -
It's hard to decide which is more surprising: that the largest U.S. bank has almost abandoned the business of making home loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration, that lots of big banks could be right behind it, or that the FHA might not even need to care.
September 28 -
Wells Fargo is raising minimum credit score requirements on Federal Housing Administration loans, part of the ongoing jockeying by large banks to limit lawsuits by the Justice Department for defective FHA loans.
September 17
