t is still a big question mark how Kathy Kraninger, President Trump’s nominee to head the CFPB, will perform in Senate confirmation hearings. But the widely different reactions from Republican and Democratic lawmakers signal a contentious and drawn-out process. The White House last week officially sent the nomination of Kraninger to the Senate. The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs will hold a hearing on the nominee, which could ...

The CFPB fined a South Carolina-based installment lender $5 million for unlawful debt collection practices, including threatening consumers with jail, shoving them and physically blocking a consumer from leaving private property. It is the second enforcement action since Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, took the reins of the CFPB last year. The Security Group and its subsidiaries own and operate approximately 900 locations in 20 states across the country ...

CFPB oversight has not significantly reduced the volume of mortgage originations, but it has changed the kinds of loans being made, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found. Critics of the CFPB have argued that its activities increased compliance costs and ultimately reduced the availability of financial services to consumers. However, a recent New York Fed staff report found there’s little evidence supporting that theory in the mortgage business. The market share of ...

Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney plans to cut the agency’s 2019 budget by 20 percent, bringing its spending down to roughly the level set in 2015. “I’ve asked them to run through the experiment of reducing spending by 20 percent,” to under $490 million, said the acting bureau chief in a recent round- table discussion with reporters. Mulvaney is also the director of the Office of Management and Budget. The CFPB later confirmed the spending cuts, noting that ...

In response to the CFPB’s request for information on adopted rules, industry groups especially want the bureau to make some changes to the qualified mortgage standards under the ability-to-repay rule, including making the “GSE patch” permanent. The ATR rule generally requires a maximum debt-to-income ratio of 43 percent in order to get QM status. Special rules apply to agency mortgages, however, including a temporary provision that loans eligible for sale to the ...

The CFPB has issued a report on end-of- year credit card borrowing and repayment of credit card balances in the following year. The report found the year-end rise in consumer debt was most pronounced in general purpose credit card debt and retail store card debt. Delinquency rates on credit cards rise during and after the holiday season, driven by consumers with subprime credit scores, the report said [Includes one brief] ...

Fed researchers examined data before and after July 2011, when the CFPB began operation…

At the same time, there has been an increase in the share of loans with downpayment assistance…

The CFPB is expected to move more quickly to reconsider its payday-lending rule after a federal court denied the delay of the rule’s compliance date that had been requested in a joint motion filed by the CFPB and two trade groups. Two payday-lending trade groups – the Community Financial Services Association of America and the Consumer Services Alliance of Texas – in April filed a lawsuit in Texas federal district court, alleging the agency’s payday-lending rule is unlawful ...

The Treasury Department wants to reduce the GSEs’ footprint in the mortgage market, according to Treasury Counselor Craig Phillips. He also reiterated, about a week before the administration formally published its thoughts on reform (see story page 3), that ultimately the goal is to take Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of conservatorship. He said that at 70 percent the federal share of housing is clearly far too high. The Treasury official spoke at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch mortgage and housing finance conference in New York last week that was closed to the press. BAML provided a report on his remarks.