Congressional Republicans are doing just about everything they can- short of calling on U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 - to weaken, throttle, starve or deep-six the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau before it gets up to full speed...

A handful of Congressional Democrats aren't letting the prospect that legislation they are sponsoring may go nowhere in committee keep them from trying to toughen the terms of the regulatory debate over national servicer standards...

The U.S. Supreme Court last week called upon the Solicitor General for advice on whether the high court should review a case involving allegations that Quicken Loans obtained unearned "loan discount fees" in some mortgage loan transactions in Louisiana, contrary to Section 8(b) of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., as the receiver of Washington Mutual, earlier this month sued Lender Processing Services of Jacksonville, FL, and CoreLogic of Santa Ana, CA, and their corporate parents and affiliates for a combined $283.5 million, alleging gross negligence and breach of contract related to appraisals performed for hundreds of the defunct lender's mortgages between 2006 and 2008...

Staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other legal professionals are scrutinizing the fundamental questions the foreclosure crisis has raised about the adequacy of the legal framework for modern mortgage note transactions, especially when it comes to transferring and enforcing notes and mortgages, and how best to resolve them. The role of the Mortgage Electronic Registration System is a part of the discussion. To date, they are relying upon a number of issues that have been identified in a draft discussion document prepared recently by the Permanent Editorial Board of the Uniform Commercial Code, in conjunction with...

Industry attorneys are warning FHA lenders and other users of federal funding to carefully screen loans they originate, or risk a government lawsuit for violation of the False Claims Act. First enacted during the Civil War against government contractors gouging the Union Army, the FCA has expanded beyond defense contractors and health care providers and is now being used aggressively to challenge improper FHA lending practices, according to panelists on a recent webinar hosted by the Washington law firm BuckleySandler. With government insurance increasingly on the hook, federal enforcement along the lines of the recent Department of Justice lawsuit against ...

Accounting for the FHAs single-family mortgage insurance program using the current methodology spelled out in the Federal Credit Reform Act or an alternative fair value approach will yield opposing results that could mean "savings" or potentially significant losses for the government and taxpayers, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In a recent study, the CBO estimated that, using the FCRA methodology, the FHA program would produce budgetary savings of $4.4 billion in fiscal year 2012. In contrast, a fair-value approach would result in ...

FHA endorsements fell 22.1 percent from the fourth quarter as the refinancing wave of 2010 ended, as did production in other channels in the first quarter of 2011. The FHA endorsed $57.6 billion in 1-4 family mortgage loans in the first quarter, including reverse mortgages, down from $74.0 billion the previous quarter. It lost some market share to VA, whose total originations were up 26.2 percent from the first quarter of last year. The agency reported a 33.8 percent increase in applications in March ... [includes one data chart and one graph]

Consumer advocates called on Congress to extend national mortgage servicing standards to all servicers, including those of government-insured home loans. Testifying before the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development recently, Diane Thompson, of counsel to the National Consumer Law Center, said loans made by the FHA, the VA and the Rural Housing Services are generally aimed at ...

FHA loans in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware performed better in 2008 and in 2009 than in 2006 and 2007 as credit quality became stronger, according to a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The findings should allay concerns of policymakers in Washington, DC, that FHA defaults have risen during the housing crisis and may put the federal mortgage insurance fund in peril, the study said. Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, one of the data sources used by Fed analysts, indicate that overall lending patterns in the Third District states have ...