Last month’s surprise ruling in Canning v. National Labor Relations Board, in which President Barack Obama’s recess appointments to the NLRB were declared to be unconstitutional – along with the president’s renomination of CFPB Director Richard Cordray – have resurrected Congressional Republicans’ desire to scale back the CFPB.The big questions now are whether the GOP will succeed in compelling the president to make a deal, and if so, just what such a deal might look like. Within a few days of the Canning ruling (see Inside...
Steve Antonakes, most recently the associate director for supervision, enforcement and fair lending at the CFPB, has been tapped to temporarily fill the shoes of departing Deputy Director Raj Date, who has since left the agency with no publicly announced plans for his future. Date’s departure was publicly confirmed in mid-November, and after three months, the bureau has yet to find a permanent replacement, suggesting to some observers that finding a comparable successor is proving to be a challenge. Alan Kaplinsky...
The Department of Housing and Urban Development released its long-awaited “disparate impact” final rule last week, formalizing for the first time the long-held interpretation of the Fair Housing Act by HUD, which has repeatedly asserted that housing policies and practices can be determined to be discriminatory not simply through their intent, but also by their effect. “As we’ve learned over the years, housing discrimination comes in many forms. Discrimination doesn’t have to be intentional in order to have a damaging...
The CFPB’s legal position on a borrower’s right of rescission under the Truth In Lending Act again swayed the day for a consumer. This time, it was the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in Sherzer v. Homestar Mortgage Services, that agreed with the bureau’s legal argument that a lawsuit filed more than three years after a mortgage has been closed can be brought, so long as the borrower sent the lender a written notice of rescission within the three-year period.In this instance, borrowers Daniel and Geraldine Sherzer obtained...
The federal prudential banking regulators should work closely with the CFPB in areas where their responsibilities overlap, such as credit card supervision and fair lending laws, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry told attendees at the recent Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council’s Consumer Compliance Specialists Conference in Washington, DC. “In the area of overlapping supervisory responsibilities, one example that springs to mind involves credit cards,” Curry said. In the new world being fashioned by the...
Many in the mortgage finance industry were unsettled with the recent Canning v. National Labor Relations Board ruling, fearing compliance chaos could ensue right as the industry is about to be confronted with implementing a handful of critical new regulations that will transform the landscape of mortgage lending for decades to come, such as the new ability-to-repay final rule. However, some top industry compliance attorneys urged the industry to press on full-speed ahead with their compliance efforts, regardless of the uncertainty...
CFPB Director Richard Cordray told an assemblage of financial industry representatives last week that it would be a mistake for prudential regulators to examine institutions in such a way as to steer them toward providing only mortgages that can be defined as “qualified” under the bureau’s ability-to-repay rule, according to one industry source in attendance. Cordray said the CFPB wants other types of mortgages to flourish as well, the source continued. Bureau staff added that they would expect the percentage of QMs in the...
Providers of financial products to college students are going under the CFPB’s magnifying glass. The bureau has begun an inquiry into the effect of financial products marketed to students through colleges and universities in an attempt to determine if such arrangements are in the best interest of students. Products being scrutinized include bundled or co-branded student identification cards that double as debit cards, cards used to access scholarships and student loans, and school-affiliated bank accounts. In its notice and request for...
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