The only thing that kept the qualified-mortgage rule from devastating mortgage production was the temporary loophole that allows Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the government-insurance programs to treat loans with debt-to-income ratios above 43 percent as QMs, an industry official said. “Many have referred to QM as the Y2K moment for mortgages: nothing happened. We all thought this thing was going to implode. And yet there wasn’t too much of a glitch,” said Rod Alba, senior regulatory counsel at the American Bankers Association, during the ABA’s annual regulatory compliance conference in Washington, DC, this week. “At the macro level, that’s...

The outstanding supply of home mortgage debt – even what had been the fastest-growing sector of the market – ebbed in the first quarter of 2015. The Federal Reserve late last week reported the supply of home mortgage debt outstanding fell to $9.855 trillion as of the end of March. That was down 0.3 percent from December 2014 and reversed a modest expansion of the servicing market over the second half of last year. While banks, thrifts and credit unions managed...[Includes two data tables]

Despite having more than 21 months to admire its new integrated disclosure rule before it went into effect, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this week found an “administrative error” that would require a two-week delay for the scheduled Aug. 1 launch date. The agency decided to add another six weeks to the delay, making the new effective date Oct. 1, 2015. The CFPB said the additional time is to “accommodate the interests of many consumers and providers whose families will be busy with the transition to the new school year.” What about getting ready...

Industry observers noted that FAQs didn’t answer some of the big questions that matter to lenders, such as quality control, student debt and pre-funding review requirements.

The face-saving mechanism in the CFPB's announcement was a claim to the discovery of a legal glitch.

Higher interest rates prompted declines in applications for both refinances and purchase mortgages.

The revised consent orders include limitations on the acquisition of mortgage servicing rights outside of the banks' own originations and limitations on outsourcing servicing functions.

Some industry participants are concerned that they’ll have to contend with new disclosure-related compliance overlays from secondary market investors.

Industry Groups Urge Restructuring of CFPB. Wading into risky political territory, a number of industry groups last week urged Congress to support H.R. 1266, legislation that would revamp the governing structure of the CFPB. Submitting a statement for the record to the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit, the industry groups said consumers and the industry would be better served by changing the CFPB governance structure from a single director to a bipartisan five-person commission as used by other federal agencies. “The CFPB has tremendous authority to supervise a multi-trillion dollar industry, which as we have learned, can have incredible ramifications on our economy,” the statement said. “As such, it is imperative the CFPB remain stable ...

Financial institutions demonstrated a big improvement in the way they handled money transfers in the first quarter. The same could not be said for the money-transfer specialists. The performance of these companies was noticeably more uneven in the period ending March 31, 2015, according to the latest Inside the CFPB review of the CFPB’s consumer complaint database. Among the big three money-transfer companies – Western Union, MoneyGram and PayPal – Western Union did the best, seeing zero change from the fourth quarter of last year and an 18.8 percent drop year over year. MoneyGram did the worst of the three, with complaints up 72.9 percent from the fourth quarter and up 53.7 percent from a year ago. PayPal saw a 7.3 percent ...