News Topic: Financial Institutions

Community banks and credit unions are the darlings of Congress in the financial services industry. This is quite understandable--they play an important economic role in their communities and have a much greater civic presence than the big banks. The ... Read full article

Adam Levitin predicted here that the "independent" review of banks' foreclosure files ordered by the OCC in the wake of the robosigning scandals would be a sham, based among other things on the adverts to hire the reviewers.  Now, one ... Read full article

Which is available here .  Slow going: ... Read full article

Kiva.org is the on-line microlending network that allows anyone to lend $25 or more to individual low-income borrowers around the world for micro-enterprise and housing.   Kiva is an entirely different way of thinking about credit and financial ... Read full article

Bloomberg has a story Foreclosure Wave Averted as Doomsayers Defied . I think it's a great example of defining deviancy downward. There's no question that we haven't seen a foreclosure tsunami in the wake of the federal-state servicing ... Read full article

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing something promising with its anti-abuse authority under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.  It is going after credit industry exploitation of consumers, particularly ... Read full article

After the robo-signing scandal broke in the fall of 2010, followed by a huge bureaucratic in- fight,  a federal interagency review produced the Independent Foreclosure Review Program, announced with great fanfare in April 2011. ... Read full article

While we wait to see if the second Obama administration will do anything new to help homeowners hit by the lingering mortgage crisis (finally replace Bush-holdover Ed DeMarco at FHFA to make way for debt relief ?), there’s time to review a recent ... Read full article

As somebody who has dabled in empirical legal studies , and recently noted the tendency among academics and policymakers to ignore inconvient data , I'm quite eager to see how the models hold up . ... Read full article

In my most recent Wiley lecture , given in connection with the chair I hold, I argued that boards, particularly in financial institutions, should think outside the box with regard to new board appointments, if they really want to improve corporate ... Read full article

An important post about the great industry bugaboo – "regulatory uncertainty" – and the issue of "qualified mortgages," which, as Adam has noted , has become something of a political football. ... Read full article

A few very quick impressions about the NYAG's suit against JPMorgan.   ... Read full article

An important post over at Dealbook (no, it's not by me) about the difference between the Volcker Rule and general TBTF regulation of SIFIs under Dodd-Frank. ... Read full article

Me, over at this place called The New York Times , on the safe harbors in the Code, again. ... Read full article

If you've been tuning out the Euro situation, despite Gelpern's periodic updates , today's Times magazine has a since summary of where things stand. I also think the end of this bit nicely captures the extant cynicism regarding financial ... Read full article

Susan Wachter and I have a new paper out, entitled Why Housing ?   The paper is a critical review of scholarly theories of the housing bubble.  It focuses on the question of what made housing vulnerable to a bubble and why it has been so hard to ... Read full article

The NYTimes had a very good editorial today bemoaning, with resignation, that there will not be any serious prosecutions of senior bank executives or institutions for the financial crisis.  The biggest fish to be caught was Lee Farkas. Who? That's ... Read full article

Ezra Klein has joined the melee over the Obama Administration's housing policy failure with an apologia for the Administration.  Klein argues:  The right question on housing, then, is not whether the administration’s policies proved insufficient. ... Read full article