The House Financial Services Committee last week spent three days marking up the Republican majority’s alternative to the Dodd-Frank Act. H.R. 10, the Financial CHOICE Act, introduced late last month by committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, would make a number of changes to the mortgage regulatory landscape. One provision would provide a safe harbor against litigation for residential mortgages held on the lender’s balance sheet since the origination of the loan if the mortgage fails to comply with ability-to-repay requirements. The measure also would revise the definition of “points and fees” under the Truth in Lending Act to exclude fees paid for affiliated business arrangements. Other language in the bill would exempt smaller creditors from TILA’s escrow requirements. Another provision ...
Ocwen Financial Corp. recently filed two related motions that seek an early court ruling that the CFPB is unconstitutional, and therefore its enforcement action against the lender/servicer should be thrown out.Echoing an argument made earlier by PHH Corp. in its own dispute with the bureau, Ocwen told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, West Palm Beach Division, that the CFPB is unconstitutionally structured because it vests “too much unfettered power” in the hands of the agency’s director and in the bureau itself. The company informed the court and the Department of Justice that it intends to directly challenge the CFPB’s constitutionality at the earliest possible opportunity and to seek dismissal of the case on this ...
Ocwen Financial Corp. is facing more trouble than just its struggle with the CFPB and a number of state regulators. The mortgage lender/servicer also faces the increasing likelihood of some ratings downgrades as well as pending class-action lawsuits. Fitch Ratings recently revised Ocwen’s U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities servicer ratings outlook to negative. “The revision of the rating outlook for the servicer ratings is based on uncertainty surrounding the financial and operational impact of new regulatory actions taken by the CFPB and the multi-state actions following the findings of the Multi-State Mortgage Committee,” Fitch said. The negative rating outlook also takes into consideration Ocwen’s financial condition. Fitch placed the company’s and its corporate parent’s long-term issuer default rating on “rating watch ...
The American Bankers Association last week issued the first industry call for the CFPB to delay implementation of its pending Home Mortgage Disclosure Act final rule in its entirety, citing compliance difficulties and concerns about consumer data privacy. The call came in a white paper submitted to the Treasury Department as part of the banking industry’s response to President Trump’s executive order earlier this year, EO 13772, outlining “core principles” for financial regulation. The ABA has three main gripes about the HMDA rule, most of which is scheduled to take effect in January 2018. First, it said that collecting all of the required data will be costly. “Although it is not simple to distill the cost estimates from the bureau’s ...
Industry observers like Tim Howard, a former Fannie CFO, said that while reducing the corporate tax rate would lower the taxes the GSEs pay in the long run, it would drain the value of their DTAs in the short term.
Some in the industry believe the GSE common shares are essentially worthless with the junior preferred falling into the category of being a speculative bet.
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