Regulatory reform

The future secondary mortgage market entities will receive high investment grade ratings, even as there is no clarity on their scope or form, Fitch Ratings said.

The acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said he is “pleasantly surprised” with most personnel but raised concerns about those who lean toward the regulatory philosophy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

As lawmakers consider reforms to the Dodd-Frank Act, fresh data shows a dramatic reduction in new items issued by the regulatory agencies.

The financial services industry and community reinvestment advocates both praised the Treasury Department’s recommendations for reforming Community Reinvestment Act enforcement.

The latest salvo by the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — proposing in the agency's semiannual report that all CFPB rules be subject to congressional approval — left many observers stumped if not outraged.

As part of a larger regulatory relief effort, regulators have raised the dollar-amount threshold for commercial real estate transactions that require a formal appraisal.

Acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Mick Mulvaney proposed dramatic curbs to his agency's power in a report Monday, including a recommendation that all CFPB rules must be approved by Congress.

Lenders should not get so desperate chasing volume by originating lower credit non-qualified mortgage products that they are inviting the next regulatory crackdown, said David Stevens, the Mortgage Bankers Association's CEO.

The new request for information is the 10^th in the series that is part of acting Director Mick Mulvaney’s “call for evidence” to assess the CFPB’s overall effectiveness.

One purpose of the Senate bill was for small banks to rein in skyrocketing costs, but some bankers question whether the changes will save them money, and adapting to the reforms may even increase spending.

The biggest legacy of the current regulatory relief effort may be the increasing focus on whether organizing banks in supervisory buckets by asset size makes sense. Yet the bill deals with just one of the two big asset thresholds in the law.

The information collection effort is consistent with acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney's efforts to set the agency on a more pro-industry, anti-enforcement course.

While regulatory relief legislation would raise the asset threshold for “systemically important” banks, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank could still apply prudential scrutiny to banks below that new cutoff.

A bill to allow captive insurance companies to be reinstated as members of the Federal Home Loan Bank System appears to be dividing the FHLB community.

As policymakers take another crack at housing finance reform, federal leaders and the housing lobby are once again perpetuating the false notion that ending government guarantees would cause the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage to vanish.

Critics of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have long sought to convert its leadership structure from a single director to a five-member commission. Here’s why the idea is dead on arrival.

The House Financial Services Committee chairman's effort to make changes to a Dodd-Frank revision bill could either give him a defining victory or extend his losing streak.

First the House and now the Senate have included provisions in their regulatory relief bills that bankers say would go a long way toward clearing up confusion over how to treat high-volatility commercial real estate loans.

A day after the Senate passed regulatory relief, top House Republicans vowed to have a big say in the final version before the bill heads to the White House. That raised fresh questions about how quickly the Dodd-Frank reforms will become law.

With the Senate finishing its work on a regulatory relief package, a showdown in the House still looms while critics of Dodd-Frank weigh whether this is their last shot at unwinding it.