Dodd-Frank

Ahead of the House vote Thursday on the Financial Choice Act, the two parties were assailing each other as proxies for Wall Street and painting themselves as defenders of community banking and the consumer.

The House passed a bill that assigns Qualified Mortgage status to loans that banks hold in portfolio.

Clearing the bill through the House has value, giving baseline legislative language that the Senate might select in a more modest legislative package.

Senators on both sides of the aisle paid lip service Thursday to giving relief to community banks and credit unions, but didn't appear closer to specifics of what would be in a bill.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said he wants policymakers to flesh out a potential return of the Glass-Steagall Act, but wasn't sure if it should separate commercial and investment banking.

The Senate Banking Committee may pass a number of small legislative proposals to help banks and credit unions, but the panel is still figuring out what sort of package can ultimately be agreed upon, top Democrats said Tuesday.

While a House bill expected to be passed this week has little chance in the Senate, some of its individual provisions could be enacted by Congress, including one aimed at banks' systemic threshold.

A bill to overhaul the Dodd-Frank Act could get a vote in the full House as early as June 7.

Roughly 58% of 6,000 voters in key states said they would support moving the bureau from a single director to a bipartisan commission, according to an industry-supported poll.

The trend of putting ever-smaller pieces of the same commercial mortgages into multiple securitizations requires investors to be extra careful, and will inevitably make workouts of bad loans more complicated.