The leading Democrats on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and the House Financial Services Committee urged Congressional leaders earlier this month to reject any Republican attempts to use so-called must-pass government appropriations legislation to scale back the Dodd-Frank Act and the CFPB. In a letter sent to Senate and House leaders of both parties earlier this month, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-OH, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, said they will oppose ideological policy riders to year-end funding legislation aimed at rolling back the consumer protections of Dodd-Frank. “Specially, Congress must not include in end-of-year funding legislation any riders designed to repeal, undermine or delay any provisions of Wall Street reform, including those targeted at the CFPB and the ...

Securitization Group Meets with CFPB Officials. Earlier this month, staff and members of the Structured Finance Industry Group met with CFPB Director Richard Cordray and other senior officials to talk about the state of the non-agency mortgage securities market and some of the factors hampering its return.... Mortgage Lenders Meet With Bureau, Other Regulators, to Discuss Diversity, Inclusion. A small group of mortgage lenders recently met with staff of the CFPB, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to discuss best practices on how to develop and maintain diversity and inclusion programs within the mortgage industry, according to an account by the Mortgage Bankers Association....

The Federal Housing Finance Agency raised the maximum conforming loan limit for GSE mortgages by $7,100 for 2017, amid rising home values. The new loan limit, announced Nov. 23, is $424,100 and represents the first time in a decade, since the housing downturn, that the conforming loan limit climbed above $417,000. The baseline loan limit was established by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act and is recalibrated each year to reflect the changes in a national home price index. Until now, the index has not risen above levels set in the third quarter of 2007.

Fairholme Funds, the plaintiff in an ongoing GSE shareholder lawsuit, hosted a conference call late last week and dished on recent developments in the case. “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are obligated to protect the capital of all preferred shareholders, not just one of those shareholders, the Obama Treasury,” said Bruce Berkowitz, Fairholme’s CEO. Plaintiffs in Fairholme Funds Inc. v. United States, et al, argue that the U.S. Treasury’s net worth sweep of GSE profits is against the law. “And, really, only those who oppose the dream of American homeownership would attempt to dismantle two publicly traded, shareholder-owned companies that have single-handedly provided $7 trillion in liquidity to support America’s mortgage market since 2009,” he said.

Some of the public comments submitted to the CFPB regarding its TRID 2.0 clarifying rulemaking highlight tensions and rivalries that have emerged between different factions in the homebuying and mortgage-making industry since the original integrated disclosure rule took effect.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau late last week filed its much-anticipated petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to reconsider some of the key holdings made by a three-judge panel of the court against the agency in PHH Corp. v. CFPB back in mid-October. One such holding was the panel’s determination that the CFPB’s leadership structure is unconstitutional because it is run by a sole director who can only be removed by the president for cause. While an appeal by the bureau was widely expected, the issue took on a new urgency after Republican real estate developer Donald Trump won the presidential election. In its petition, the CFPB asserted...

A federal district court judge in Washington, DC, ordered the transfer of a False Claims Act complaint filed by the Department of Justice against Quicken Loans alleging violation of FHA rules to the nonbank lender’s home court. Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied the DOJ’s arguments to keep the case in the nation’s capital and instead granted Quicken’s motion to transfer it to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in downtown Detroit. Among other things, the government accused...

The Federal Communications Commission last week denied a request from the Mortgage Bankers Association to exempt calls from mortgage servicers to borrowers from provisions of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Officials at the MBA said the denial was unexpected. Among other issues, the petition had received some support from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The TCPA and FCC rules prohibit...

The latest “Green Paper” from the Structured Finance Industry Group proposes that issuers of non-agency MBS improve transparency by comparing the representations and warranties on a new issuance with a set of benchmark reps and warrants. “A substantial population of investors have very clearly stated their collective belief that the current representation-and-warranty process is neither practically useful for its intended purpose, nor scalable,” according to the fourth SFIG Green Paper aimed at reviving the non-agency MBS market. Currently, non-agency MBS issuers provide...

Commercial bank and savings institution holdings of non-agency ABS fell again during the third quarter of 2016, marking the 11th consecutive quarterly decline in the industry’s investment in the sector, a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of call-report data reveals. Banks and thrifts held $128.55 billion of ABS on their balance sheets at the end of September, down 1.9 percent from the previous quarter. The industry’s aggregate ABS portfolio was off 8.8 percent from the same point in 2015. The ABS market itself shrank...[Includes two data tables]