A number of trade groups that represent firms involved in the securitization market are pushing for an appeal to be heard in a case that has significant implications for the MBS and ABS markets. A ruling in May by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Madden v. Midland Funding determined that nonbanks shouldn’t receive the federal preemption of state law that has been allotted to banks under the National Bank Act. “The outcome of the case would significantly impair...

No matter how cleverly hidden, the Securities and Exchange Commission can eventually ferret out bad business practices – a costly lesson learned by AlphaBridge Capital Management. The SEC ordered AlphaBridge, a registered hedge-fund adviser, and two of its principals to pay a $5 million penalty for allegedly inflating the prices of illiquid MBS held in hedge-fund portfolios managed by the firm. The SEC charged...

The Department of Veterans Affairs has announced measures lenders may employ to provide relief to VA borrowers whose lives and homes were upended by recent severe storms, tornados and flooding in Texas, Oklahoma and Guam. VA mortgage relief would be available to the families of borrowers who died during these natural catastrophes and to borrowers whose homes were badly damaged or destroyed. Relief is also available to those whose work environments were destroyed or severely damaged. Other people have been indirectly affected as well, and the impact may continue to ripple throughout the country, as evacuees travel nationwide to seek support and shelter from family members in unaffected areas, according to the VA. VA encourages holders of guaranteed loans to extend forbearance to distressed borrowers and to provide counseling to them. Lenders are also authorized under VA regulations to reapply prepayments to ...

The GSEs benefited from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s free pass on the debt-to-income ratio requirements of the qualified-mortgage rule, resulting in a $132.9 billion increase in business.A new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of mortgage-backed securities data illustrates that from the beginning of 2014 through the end of the first quarter of 2015, approximately 16.3 percent of the loans securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had DTI ratios exceeding 43 percent. In the non-agency world, a qualified mortgage has to have a DTI ratio of 43 percent or less. While the government-insured market has its own QM rules that effectively ignore DTI, a loan eligible for sale to the GSEs is considered...

An increase in short-term interest rates will have an outsized impact on commercial MBS among structured finance assets, according to Moody’s Investors Service. In a report released last week, the rating service said higher interest rates will be credit negative for existing deal performance and new issuance for commercial MBS and largely neutral for residential MBS and most ABS sectors. As interest rates rise, Moody’s said term default risk on loans backing new issue commercial MBS will increase because the loans’ debt service coverage ratios will be lower than the DSCRs at the time of origination of loans in outstanding deals. “Rates on loans backing new conduit deals will increase, thereby reducing DSCR in relation to a given property’s cash flow,” the rating service said. “New conduit deals are typically backed by loan pools that were originated no more than ...

Late last week, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered some long-sought clarity on the legitimacy of disparate-impact claims brought under the Fair Housing Act in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. The highest court in the land validated the position of various lower courts, regulatory agencies and administrations over the last four decades that disparate impact is ...

The U.S. Supreme Court last week validated the disparate-impact legal theory as it relates to housing discrimination in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. And while the immediate effect of the ruling has more to do with the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s enforcement of the Fair Housing Act’s restrictions on disparate impact, there are definitely implications for the CFPB’s enforcement of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act’s prohibitions against disparate impact. The crux of this case was whether disparate-impact claims are cognizable under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, where a plaintiff alleges discrimination based on the disparate impact that a defendant’s “facially neutral” practice has upon members of ...

Here’s a fair lending regulatory compliance tip from the American Bankers Association’s 2015 regulatory compliance conference in Washington, DC: If you are advertising or marketing mortgage products in Spanish, you would be well advised to provide all requisite disclosures and servicing in Spanish. “As you think about how to reach people, advertising and marketing in Spanish is a good way to get to Spanish-speaking population,” said Andrew Sandler, chairman and executive partner at the BuckleySandler law firm, during a breakout session on fair lending. “But one thing regulators are intent on is, if you’re selling me in my language, then you need to be servicing me in my language too. So lenders should be careful to think about that,” the ...

The CFPB and the U.S. Solicitor General recently submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in Hawkins v. Community Bank of Raymore, a case that will likely decide whether the Equal Credit Opportunity Act applies to loan guarantors, and may affect the bureau’s enforcement of a related regulation. As the government brief noted, ECOA makes it unlawful for “any creditor to discriminate against any applicant, with respect to any aspect of a credit transaction,” on the basis of prohibited characteristics including gender and marital status. “Since 1985, regulations promulgated by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the CFPB have provided that, for certain purposes, the ‘applicants’ protected from discrimination under the act include guarantors ...

Regulators such as the CFPB are still paying attention to fair lending issues these days, but their focal point is shifting more towards greater emphasis on access to credit. “What we’re seeing is a pendulum swing from the focus of concerns being loan pricing, to the focus of concerns being loan access,” said Jeffrey Naimon, a partner in the Washington, DC, office of the BuckleySandler law firm, during a webinar last week sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliated publication. Many wonder why it appears that access to credit remains so tight, seven years after the last financial crisis. Naimon said the CFPB ability-to-repay rule’s qualified mortgage standard could be one of the reasons. “Basically, lenders only want to make ...