Under the original conservatorship agreement, the GSEs are allowed to maintain a small capital buffer, but within three years that buffer will be reduced to zero.
One of the boldest underwriting moves was taken by TD Bank, which recently announced a portfolio loan that has a downpayment requirement as low as 3 percent.
Reverse mortgages guaranteed by the government are due and payable upon the death of the homeowner, the sale of the home, and other conditions, including the failure to reside in the property or pay the taxes and insurance.
Lenders should expect additional enforcement actions from the CFPB along the lines of last year’s move against Castle & Cooke Mortgage LLC, where regulators targeted not just the firm but the executives making the decisions, warned Benjamin Olson, counsel at the law firm of Buckley Sandler. “While this is the only public action, it is certainly not the only action the bureau is currently undertaking” to enforce its loan originator compensation rules, said Olson, former deputy assistant director in the bureau’s Office of Regulations, during a webinar last week sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance Publications, which publishes Inside the CFPB. “We are seeing civil investigative demands and the bureau’s equivalent to the subpoena, where the CFPB is diving into an...
CFPB Staff Answer Bankers’ Questions on Mortgage Compliance. CFPB staff members answered mortgage compliance questions from members of the American Bankers Association during a live webcast last week. Among the key take-aways was the statement that creditors may use lender and seller credits to reduce the amounts that are calculated into the points-and-fees test. A written statement of who is providing which credits is sufficient to indicate compliance, a CFPB staffer said. Also, home equity line of credit resets do not constitute new transactions that would trigger full ability-to-repay rule underwriting.Another take-away is that loan originator bonuses deriving from funds that exclude mortgage profits are not subject to the otherwise applicable 10 percent limits on loan originator compensation. Regarding...
Sen. Dan Coats, R-IN, has introduced the Community Financial Protection Act, legislation to provide smaller financial institutions such as community banks and credit unions with some regulatory relief from financial regulations enacted after the 2008 financial crisis that many complain are crippling their businesses. The Coats bill would modify the way in which the CFPB requests information from financial institutions with less than $10 billion in assets. Under the Coats proposal, the CFPB must use publicly available information or seek the requested information from existing banking regulators. Specifically, the Community Financial Protection Act would stipulate that the CFPB must use current and existing publicly available information and data prior to requesting any information from the prudential regulator. Also, if the...
Reps. Robert Pittenger, R-NC, and Denny Heck, D-WA, recently introduced H.R. 4383, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection Small Business Advisory Board Act, which would require the CFPB to establish a small business advisory board. “Consumers, banks, and credit unions already provide valuable insight on what the CFPB proposes, but the smaller operators in finance have a tougher time being heard,” said Heck. “As a small business owner myself, I know local financial service providers in Washington state can partner with the CFPB to better protect consumers and give input on how CFPB actions affect customers and operations.” The Pittenger and Heck proposal would institute a board made up of at least 12 members who are “representatives of small business...
The CFPB is largely ineffective at controlling mortgage risk and is already borderline obsolete, according to a former Wall Street professional now working in the halls of academia. To begin with, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, the architect of the bureau, and Richard Cordray, its current director, misunderstood the problem facing mortgage borrowers and lenders, according to Anthony Sanders, a professor of real estate finance at George Mason University and former head of asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities research at Deutsche Bank in New York City.“Essentially, the world that Warren and Cordray wish that existed (1999) when real median household income was at its maximum and mortgage foreclosures were just above 1 percent doesn’t exist anymore,” the professor said in a...
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