PennyMac Financial must be rolling in the dough: the firm is handing out huge stock awards to its top officers.

Only a crazy person would speculate in GSE junior preferred stock. Meanwhile, Dr. Frankenstein reveals himself.

The treatment of balloon loans under new federal rules is one example where regulation is taking a broad brush approach that disadvantages community banks.

Former GSE regulator James Lockhart noted that only one “catastrophic” guarantor is needed, though he stressed that “you need more than one issuer.”

Residual income is the amount of money left after deducting a borrower’s housing and installment debt from gross monthly income.

With rates rising and refis falling, will certain mortgage companies head for the exits? And if they do, will they get too greedy on the sale price?

Former top CFPB officials are banking on the widespread assumption that most mortgage lenders plan to avoid making mortgages that do not meet the “qualified mortgage” standard under the bureau’s ability-to-repay rule. Raj Date, the former deputy director at the CFPB, and three other high-placed bureau alums, Garry Reeder, former chief of staff; Chris Haspel, former senior advisor for mortgage servicing and securitization; and Mitchell Hochberg, former regulatory senior counsel, have created a new consumer finance company called Fenway...

Eight lender industry trade groups have called upon the CFPB and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide written guidance that clearly spells out that complying with the bureau’s ability‐to repay/qualified mortgage rulemaking will not make lenders vulnerable to disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act or the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. In February of this year, HUD came out with its disparate impact rule under which liability for such claims can be established as per the Fair Housing Act. Back in...

The CFPB has published the first update to its exam procedures for the new mortgage regulations it issued in January 2013 having to do with appraisals, escrow accounts, and compensation and qualifications for loan originators. The exam procedures offer financial institutions and mortgage companies guidance on what the CFPB will be looking for as the rules become effective. “The CFPB recognizes that the easier we make it for financial institutions and mortgage companies to follow the new regulations, the better off consumers...

The CFPB recently put out two more small entity compliance guides, one for its loan originator rule and the other for its mortgage servicing rules that were finalized in January and kick in Jan. 10, 2014. The loan originator rule generally regulates how compensation is paid to a loan originator in most closed-end mortgage transactions. That includes prohibiting a loan originator’s compensation from being based on the terms of the transaction or a proxy for a transaction term. The LO rule also prohibits loan...