Issuers of auto ABS will likely continue to complete clean-up calls on seasoned transactions even in a rising interest-rate environment, according to S&P Global Ratings. The rating service said clean-up calls yield a positive impact for auto ABS issuers and investors.

Self-employed households have been slower to recover from the financial crisis even though they make more money than salaried households, according to a new study from The Urban Institute. The study attributes the situation partly to the fact that incomes for self-employed households are still below pre-crisis levels while incomes for salaried households have largely recovered. Also, mortgage use and the homeownership rate have largely declined more for self-employed ...

A “suppressed” CFPB report showing that the nation’s largest banks were ripping off students by charging high fees has now come to light.

With financial institutions set to report mortgage disclosure data collected in 2018 to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, attorneys are concerned that it may lead to an increase in fair lending investigations and enforcement actions by government agencies.

An increase in asset-based underwriting by banks prompted warnings from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last week. The OCC said its examiners have seen greater use of asset dissipation underwriting, a practice used to qualify borrowers using a hypothetical income stream from their asset liquidation rather than debt-to-income ratios. Banks are increasingly using asset dissipation or asset depletion as a response to “intense competition” from nonbanks, among other ...

State regulators will likely put more effort into enforcing fair lending laws, even as the CFPB continues to reassess the use of the disparate-impact theory under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

Seth Frotman, the former student loan ombudsman who dramatically quit the CFPB in August, has launched his own initiative to help solve the student debt crisis.

The CFPB last week released a fair lending report covering the agency’s activity in 2017. The report generally summarized the bureau’s past fair lending efforts and laid out its priorities.

Performance of ABS backed by credit-card receivables remained strong in the third quarter of 2018 despite rising consumer-debt levels, according to an update from Moody’s Investors Service.

The spread between interest rates for qualified mortgages and similar non-QMs has narrowed somewhat this year. The lower premium placed on non-QMs suggests that lenders are getting more comfortable with the liability associated with the loans. The findings were detailed recently by two economists at the Federal Reserve who had access to loan-level data from Optimal Blue. The data comprised loan applications and mortgage locks from January 2013 through September 2018 ...