Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Two Leadership Hires Made. Harvard University Professor of Economics Sendhil Mullainathan has been hired to serve as assistant director for research at the CFPB...

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently released a letter on preemption maintaining that, under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, its 2004 preemption rule still applies to national banks...

The complexity of the task of getting a brand new agency of the federal government, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, up and running could slow the adoption of national mortgage servicing standards...

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau generated a lot of press last week when it released two new prototype mortgage disclosure forms that are noticeably more user-friendly for borrowers than those currently in use under the Truth in Lending Act and 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...

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...

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...

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...

There is "not even a whiff of a hint of a compromise" between Congressional Republicans and President Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress over the possible appointment of Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to some industry insiders...

Performance of Home Affordable Modification Program mods does not vary much between non-agency mortgages and agency mortgages, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Performance has been generally lackluster, although differences have emerged among non-prime HAMP servicers. As of the end of March, 1.56 million trial HAMP mods had been started, including 716,006 on non-agency mortgages, according to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. And 670,186 permanent HAMP mods had been started, including 309,027 on non-agency mortgages. Some 46.6 percent of trial mods started on... [Includes one data chart]