Trade organizations representing the mortgage banking industry provided a number of important suggestions for the CFPB as it proceeds with a Dodd-Frank Act requirement to assess its mortgage servicing rules at the five-year mark. The first issue the American Bankers Association raised in this regard in its comment letter to the bureau was the scope of the assessment. “The CFPB should incorporate all of the servicing rules into its review, including the rules that implement the Truth and Lending Act and the amendments that the CFPB adopted to the servicing rules in 2016,” the ABA said – not just the rules promulgated under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. The bureau also should take into account the rules’ effects upon consumers...

JPMorgan Chase told the CFPB it supports the bureau’s mission of protecting consumers and recognizes that regulatory guardrails are necessary to make sure mortgage servicers adequately address consumers’ needs. “However, certain provisions of Regulation X [which implements the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act] impose burdens on servicers that increase servicing costs and impact access to consumer credit without providing proportional benefits to consumers,” the servicer said. JPMorgan was one of the industry participants commenting on the CFPB’s proposal to start assessing the effectiveness of its mortgage servicing rules under RESPA. The financial institution went on to some of the problem areas in Reg X that still need to be addressed, one of which has to do with rules for loss...

Last week, the CFPB issued a proposal to temporarily ease reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act for small banks and credit unions that issue home-equity lines of credit – but based on the number of such loans, not asset size of the institution. Under the CFPB’s HMDA rules scheduled to take effect in January 2018, financial institutions are generally required to report HELOCs if they made 100 such loans in each of the past two years. Under the proposal released last week, the bureau would increase that threshold to 500 loans through calendar years 2018 and 2019 in order to give the consumer regulator the time to consider whether to make a permanent adjustment. “Home-equity lines of credit worsened ...

It’s one thing for a regulatory agency to promulgate a rule and catch a lot of slack from the affected industry. It’s quite another when another regulatory agency takes issue with a rule. The CFPB got a bit of a surprise in this regard when it issued its arbitration final rule last week: the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency expressed concerns about the potential risk the rule could pose to the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking system. In a letter to CFPB Director Richard Cordray, OCC Acting Comptroller of the Currency Keith Noreika, a recent appointee of President Trump, said, “The OCC has a mandate to ensure the safety and soundness of the federal banking system...

The American Bankers Association and banking associations from each of the 50 states and Puerto Rico last week called upon the CFPB to delay the new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data collection and reporting requirements, which are scheduled to kick in Jan. 1, 2018. “We appreciate the bureau’s efforts to help lenders comply with the new reporting requirements,” the trade groups began. “Nonetheless, banks of all sizes are gravely concerned that they will not be able to assure proper compliance by the January timeframe.” For one thing, the new HMDA rules are inherently complex and very expensive to implement, according to the ABA and its affiliates. Also, they are incomplete. “Recently proposed adjustments to the rule are complicating compliance efforts...

GSE shareholders are continuing to argue that the structure of the Federal Housing Finance Agency is unconstitutional. The topic has come up ever since a 2016 ruling found that the similarly structured Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not constitutional. Two new cases filed within the past month in Michigan and Minnesota are asking the courts to vacate the Treasury sweep of GSE profits altogether. In late June, three GSE shareholders filed a fresh lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. The three plaintiffs, Atif Bhatti, Tyler Whitney and Michael Carmody, also want the court to strike the...

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee is moving closer to beginning what is likely to be a long and drawn-out process to gradually and predictably unwind the U.S. central bank’s huge portfolio of agency MBS and debt – the sooner, the better, according to Fed chief Janet Yellen. “The FOMC intends to gradually reduce the Federal Reserve’s securities holdings by decreasing its reinvestment of the principal payments it receives from the securities held in the System Open Market Account,” she said this week in her semi-annual Humphrey-Hawkins testimony on monetary policy to members of Congress. “Specifically, such payments will be reinvested...

The average daily trading volume of agency MBS reached $209.9 billion in June, the second highest reading of the year and a sign that liquidity is picking up, according to figures compiled by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The increase in trading comes despite the fact that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae issued a total of $317.7 billion of new MBS in the second quarter, a 6.1 percent decline from the first quarter. For the six-month period, 2017 holds the edge with volume up 3.5 percent. But it hasn’t been...

ABS investors could see strong returns by employing the “Moneyball” strategy pioneered in Major League Baseball by the Oakland Athletics, according to analysts at Wells Fargo Securities. The strategy, detailed in a book and movie, focuses on certain statistics that managers of the Athletics thought were undervalued by other teams. Wells said the theory can be adapted to the ABS market, with an emphasis on deals that can reliably hit “singles” instead of potentially risky investments that aim for home runs. “With interest rates low and ABS spreads reasonably tight, many market participants are...

As talks intensify on how to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of limbo, smaller lenders are clamoring to make sure they have a say in how housing-finance reform plays out. Nearly all sides agree that small lenders should continue to have access to the secondary market; how that’s accomplished is a different matter. The Main Street GSE Reform Coalition – an umbrella group made up of small-lender and community-advocacy groups – wants the government-sponsored enterprises to begin rebuilding capital buffers by suspending their dividend payments to the Treasury Department. It also wants...