Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

Jeb Hensarling's Alternative Facts

02/15/17
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas 5th) has an alternative fact problem. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Hensarling alleged that "Since the CFPB’s advent, the number of banks offering free checking has drastically declined, while many bank fees have increased.
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Welcome to Guestblogger Gary Neustadter

11/14/16

Credit Slips is delighted to welcome first-time guest blogger, Professor Gary Neustadter. A renowned innovative teacher, Professor Neustadter  specializes in debtor-creditor law, contracts, consumer protection, and legal practice.

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PHH v. CFPB: A Blessing in Disguise for the CFPB

10/11/16

The headlines look pretty bad:  the DC Circuit Court of Appeals held the CFPB's structure to be unconstitutional in a case call PHH v. CFPB, which deals with kickbacks in captive private mortgage reinsurance arrangements allegedly in violation of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act.  In fact, however, the ruling is a blessing in disguise for the CFPB.

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Are Consumer Protection Regulations Harming the Middle Class?

09/27/16

A new paper by Franceso D'Acunto and Albert Rossi, both at the University of Maryland's Department of Finance, contends that the Dodd-Frank Act resulted in "a substantial redistribution of credit from middle-class households to wealt

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Not Wells Fargo's First Rodeo...

09/21/16

Over on Twitter, Michael Barr noticed that there's an eerie similarity between Wells Fargo employees team members being incentivized to open up unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts for consumers and another practice that got Wells in trouble in 2011, falsifying borrower income and employment information in order to sell debt consolidation, cash-out refinance mortgage loans at sub-prime rates (often to prime borrower

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Regulatory Déjà vu All Over Again

08/04/16

A new CMBS issuance is set to test whether regulators will treat the 5% retained credit risk under Dodd-Frank as loans or bonds.  The difference matters because there are different capital charges for loans and bonds.  If regulators treat the retained credit risk as bonds (which matches the technical form of the retained interest), then the risk retention requirement will be much more onerous.

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Still not deleveraging American homeowners

04/15/16

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has finally announced a program to reduce principal balances of distressed home mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, eight years into the foreclosure crisis. Too little, too late would be an understatement to describe this initiative.

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California Cracks Open the Court Doors for Foreclosed Homeowners

03/28/16

As California Monitor, my staff and I fielded tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, questions from homeowners. The hardest conversations were the easiest from a legal perspective. If someone's home was foreclosed in California, we advised there was little, if any, likely recourse. The California Homeowner Bill of Rights created a new remedy for consumers, but for homeowners before its January 2013 effective date, the options were nearly nil.

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Recheck the Math on Reverse Mortgages

03/17/16

Tara Twomey is just a keen observer of the consumer finance world, and she recently alerted me to a trend. Reverse mortgages are being aggressively hawked as a valuable financial planning tool, and the media is picking up the story. Even the reverse mortgage industry rag is excited at its publicity rash.

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