Compliance

If the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau provides lenders with a hold harmless period, it must also include protections to keep lenders from facing future lawsuits related to TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosures compliance.

Community bankers merit more regulatory relief, particularly those that hold mortgage originations. That was a key message from James Bullard, St. Louis Fed President, during a community banking conference in St. Louis hosted by the Federal Reserve Board and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors.

The Federal Reserve Board has approved the merger of M&T Bank and Hudson City Bancorp after more than three years of delay. The approval came on the day the regulator had set as a deadline to announce its verdict on the deal.

WASHINGTON — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is working with other regulators on examiner guidance to help ensure that the agencies enforce new mortgage disclosures in a "corrective" manner, not a "punitive" one, Director Richard Cordray said Tuesday.

A bipartisan group of housing experts is seeking to inject more discussion about the mortgage market into presidential campaigns.

The key to housing finance reform is a new securitization model that allows the private sector to price and absorb the majority of housing credit risk.

The most recent outcry came from four housing groups that warned lawmakers last week that the proposal by the Federal Housing Finance Agency "would make harmful changes" to the FHLB membership rules.

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.

U.S. Attorney General Benjamin B. Wagner announced Thursday the arrest of three leaders of Shon-Te-East-A, an organization that eliminates practitioners' spiritually cumbersome mortgage debt.

Lenders that allow borrowers to shop for third-party settlement services face new liability, as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's integrated mortgage disclosure rules will let borrowers sue over problems with vendor lists.