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The Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit held a hearing today on “Examining How the Dodd-Frank Act Hampers Home Ownership.” The hearing was about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Qualified Mortgages (QM). The fear of Dodd-Frank and the CFPB is that the rules are so severe that it could hamper home ownership. Even though the current rate of home ownership remains above the 1994 rate of 64.2%. On May 29, 2013, the CFPB adopted a number of amendments to the QM rule that were proposed concurrently with the final rule in January. The amendments would (1) exempt...

In the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart stars as George Bailey, the director of the Bailey Building and Loan Association in the fictional community of Bedford Falls, N.Y. Bailey faces numerous challenges to keep the Building and Loan afloat in order to continue supporting the people and businesses of his hometown. His chief challenge is Mr. Potter, the wealthy slumlord who repeatedly schemes to force Bailey out of business. Although It’s a Wonderful Life is fictional, the Building and Loan is a prototype of a real, modern institution, the community bank. And in 2013, community banks are...

First the bad news: In a basketball shoot around witnessed by reporters Obama missed 20 of 22 shots including a layup. On the brighter side, North Korea is restarting its shuttered nuclear facility in order to process weapons grade nuclear material to target the US; the Cyprus contagion has not abated, but seems to be spreading; factory orders fell in the US and Europe; and unemployment remains little changed-- except for all those people who stopped looking for work. No wonder the S&P 500 is making new highs. As the world runs from one man-caused-crisis to another, something in our...

Bartiromo Takes Frank to Task Over Lack of ’08 Financial Crisis Prosecutions • Frank: 'Individuals' should be prosecuted on Wall Street, will not say who Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) advocated criminal prosecutions against “individuals” involved in the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent collapse on Wall Street Friday on CNBC. Maria Bartiromo reacted incredulously to Frank’s refusal to name specific individuals who may have perpetrated criminal wrongdoing, accusing the former Congressman of playing populist politics by making specious allegations against the financial industry. Frank attempted to deflect the criticism by stating as Chair of House Financial Services...

s it relevant that the man who helped craft Obamacare’s regulations on insurers will now make lots of money by suing insurers based on those regulations? The firm that hired him seems to think so. Here’s the press release: KEY OBAMACARE ARCHITECT JOINS MEHRI & SKALET, PLLC Former HHS Director, Longtime Insurance Regulator Jay Angoff to Lead Firm’s Insurance and Healthcare Practice as PartnerWASHINGTON, DC (January 14, 2013)—After nearly three years at the Department of Health and Human Services—as the first Director of Obamacare insurance implementation, as Senior Advisor to the Secretary, and as a Regional Director—longtime insurance regulator and...

Over the next year, we will probably see much controversy over the implementation of Obamacare. Health insurance is something that almost every adult has some acquaintance with, and there seem to be glitches aplenty in the legislation, much delay in issuing regulations and some possible changes resulting from litigation. We're likely to see or hear less about the operations of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation, passed four months after Obamacare. Most of us don't work at banks or financial institutions, which will have to grapple with its myriad provisions and the regulations to be issued thereunder, and we tend to...

Transcribed from a speech given by Paul Singer of Elliott Management Investing is an art, more so than a science. And for me, what I get paid for is managing the “dark art,” if you will, of risk management and trying to be a visionary and having a dark vision at all times about what can go wrong. It’s a particularly fruitful and impactful time to be thinking about risk management and the thing I want talk about today is what I’ve described as “The Shape of the Next Crisis.” That doesn’t mean we’re going to be talking about the...

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration named Holly Petraeus--wife of retired Gen. David Patraeus, who resigned last week as CIA director after revealing he had had an extramarital affair--to a $187,605-per-yer job in the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB, created by the Dodd-Frank law, was placed by that law under the umbrella of the Federal Reserve. The funding of the CFBP, which comes from the Federal Reserve, is not subject to congressional oversight. Mrs. Petraeus became a member of the CFPB Implementation Team on Jan. 12, 2011. She is now the assistant director for the Office of...

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration named Holly Petraeus--wife of retired Gen. David Patraeus, who resigned last week as CIA director after revealing he had had an extra-marital affair--to $187,605-per-yer job in the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Obama's second term means the leviathan legislative packages of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank are indeed going to survive fully intact and are now preparing to rule over the health care and financial industries with an iron regulatory fist... and it's not going to pretty. From the Associated Press: Financial stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 were down more than 3 percent around midday, worse than any of the other nine stock categories in the S&P.The concerns that plagued stocks broadly — looming government spending cuts and tax increases, a deepening recession gripping Europe — are especially hard on banks and...

If Mitt Romney is elected and secures Republican control of both houses of Congress, the U.S. could be poised for a vertiginous economic snapback. To understand how, consider that the Democratic explanation for our current malaise is utterly fallacious. Mr. Obama and his allies identify the "Bush tax cuts," "two wars that weren't paid for," and "deregulation" as the causes of America's present economic doldrums. But federal outlays as a percentage of GDP under George W. Bush averaged 19.6 percent. Under Obama, spending has ballooned to 24.1 percent of GDP. Much of Bush's spending was temporary (the two wars, one...

Walmart wants to be your new banker. Walmart launched Bluebird, an alternative to debit and checking account. Should banks be nervous? Today Walmart announced an alternative to traditional debit and checking accounts in partnership with American Express. The Bluebird accounts target consumers who are fed up with increasing fees from traditional bank accounts. The Bluebird accounts will have no minimum balance requirement and no monthly maintenance, annual or activation fee. Customers can access their money for free using one of 22,000 American Express MoneyPass ATMs, but will be hit with a $2 fee if they are not enrolled in direct...

Without its repeal, the economy will continue to struggle. There are always people who believe that Washington's actions are immutable. Yes, they say, the people can elect Republicans who pledge to overturn Obamacare, but when the smoke clears much of it will still be standing. And sure, we have a deficit crisis, but Paul Ryan's budget -- or any other entitlement reform -- will never get 60 votes in the Senate. And Dodd-Frank? Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal Dodd-Frank. Legislation has been introduced by Republicans in both the House and Senate to bring that about. Yet sophisticated commentators tell...

The passage of the Dodd-Frank Act was intended to reign in a run-away financial services industry following the market troubles of 2007. However, experts at the Heritage Foundation recently questioned whether these regulations were too burdensome on small banks, leading to a lack of credit for small town America. James R. Hamby, Chief Executive Officer of Vision Bank in Oklahoma, said that traditional financing was based upon the four “C’s” of credit: character, capacity, collateral, and credit. “In any regulation you will look at today you will never see the word character used once,” he said. “It’s like it’s a...

excerpt: DES MOINES, Iowa — Wells Fargo Home Mortgage has fired an Iowa worker over a 1963 incident at a laundry in the wake of new employment guidelines. Read more: http://www.kcci.com/news/central-iowa/Wells-Fargo-fires-worker-for-1963-crime/-/9357080/16281692/-/dny0ehz/-/index.html#ixzz24noXiio7

Do you remember that thing about how the banks wouldn't lend to blacks and Hispanics because they were racists? And do you remember how they passed the Community Reinvestment Act so that banks were forced to reduce down payments practically to zero and lend to a lot of people they knew were bad credit risks? And do you remember how Wall Street bundled all these risky subprime mortgage and sold them to investors around the world so that when it became clear that those people weren't going to be able to pay their mortgages banks everywhere were left holding the...

The Obama administration urged Congress to make it easier for people to discharge a portion of certain student debt by filing for bankruptcy protection. The recommendation, in a report by the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wouldn't affect the vast majority of student debt, which is issued by the federal government. It would apply only to the roughly $150 billion, or 15% of total outstanding student debt, issued by private lenders such as SLM Corp.'s Sallie Mae and Wells Fargo & Co. Consumer bureau chief Richard Cordray said Congress should consider modifying a 2005 law that, except...

A Texas community bank and two advocacy groups are filing suit in U.S. District Court to challenge the constitutionality of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. In particular, the suit will contend that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created by the law, lacks sufficient checks and balances and, in the words of the CEO of State National Bank, is "simply unconstitutional." “No other federal agency or commission operates in such a way that one person can essentially determine who gets a home loan, who can get a credit card and who can get a loan for college,” said bank head...

President Obama would do us all a big favor if he'd ask himself this: "Would I start or expand a business without knowing what regulations or taxes government will impose next year?" If he'd just stop and ask that, he'd have a sense of what's wrong with the economy. He'd understand why a country that must create 120,000 new jobs each month just to absorb newcomers created only 69,000 last month. Past recoveries were quicker. Something is different. What could it be? Let's remember that the economy -- which is to say, us -- is already burdened by byzantine bureaucratic...

Emigrant Bank was recently identified to receive a waiver that would allow the bank to opt out of rigorous Dodd-Frank requirements. These of course are the same new rules and regulations that Barack deems essential to the nation. Yet when the bank’s owner, Howard Milstein, who is a close friend and was a bundler for President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, protested that the new rules would seriously crimp operations of his bank, the Obama Administration worked with members of congress to grant him a waiver from the new rules. Other financial institutions and banks have consistently and vehemently argued that...

Bloomberg News reports that Emigrant Bank in New York will be the sole recipient of a Dodd-Frank exemption. The bank asked legislators on the House Financial Services Committee to change the language of the financial regulations slightly, exempting Emigrant from having to comply and saving the bank $300 million.  A New York City bank with $10.5 billion in assets would be the sole beneficiary of a Dodd-Frank Act exemption approved today by the House Financial Services Committee. Emigrant Bank asked lawmakers on the committee to approve a change to the 2010 financial-regulation overhaul law that will save the institution $300...

All the President's Man The Dodd Frank law was supposed to rein in abuses by Wall St. It was supposed to end "too big to fail." It was supposed to end so-called "risky trading" by banks. Some of us knew better. Barack Obama was effusive in his praise of the bill as he signed it. We are gathered in the heart of our nation’s capital, surrounded by memorials to leaders and citizens who served our nation in its earliest days and in its days of greatest trial. Today is such a time for America. Over the past two years, we...

Recently, Barack Obama has refrained from mentioning Dodd-Frank as one of his big accomplishments as President. That's fortunate, because had Obama used that as a campaign claim this month, the huge loss taken by JP Morgan and one-time Obama ally Jamie Dimon would have done serious damage. As it is, Politico wonders whether Obama might have a big problem convincing voters that he's done anything significant to address the underlying issues that created the 2008 financial-system collapse: The giant $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase highlights a central problem in President Barack ObamaÂ’s case for a second term: Four...

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history." This...

Financial businesses — from banks to investment advisers — will spend 24 million hours a year to comply with the first 185 regulations to implement the Dodd Frank Act, according to the House of Representatives' Financial Services Committee.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is warning that if GOP lawmakers continue their push to roll back portions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, it could "critically undermine" the ability to prevent damaging future crises. In a letter sent to lawmakers Tuesday, Geithner blasted a package of measures set to be considered by the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, including a pair that would repeal or trim key pieces of the Wall Street makeover. "The act provides essential reforms that should not be weakened or repealed," he wrote to committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) and ranking member Rep. Barney Frank...

The Financial Times today carries a story that U.S. banks have been resisting a new Fed regulation—issued under the Dodd-Frank Act—that would limit their credit exposure to one another. According to the article, the banks have data showing that this would reduce credit availability by about $1.2 trillion. Similar restrictions will apply to all nonbank financial firms—insurers, finance companies, securities firms, hedge funds, and others—that could be designated as systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a group of federal financial regulators created under the Dodd-Frank Act. If that occurs, these firms will become subject...

You mention toxic mortgages. How does Dodd-Frank address that problem?Not at all. There is no attempt in Dodd-Frank to address the key problem of government subsidization of mortgage risk, and the exposures of Fannie Mae [FNMA], Freddie Mac [FMCC], and the Federal Housing Administration are still growing. How do you explain the omission?There is a powerful political interest that wants real-estate lending to be sponsored by the government. Starting about 1830, an important influence on the politics of banking came from farming interests, which increasingly promoted bank exposure to farm real-estate risk. What has changed since World War II is...

During the Vietnam conflict, a common complaint of soldiers was that you could never tell who the enemy really was. In this current economic recession, too, I am beginning to wonder who the enemy of our recovery really is. The president, Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the regulators are all telling us why so many others are to blame. The big banks have done it to us! shouts one group. Wall Street did it, claims another. Homebuyers who bought homes they could not afford are the real culprit! claims another. Perhaps those who have been charged with the responsibility for...

This is truly Orwellian: the latest and greatest Executive Branch/Federal Reserve power grab is labeled "consumer protection." I am indebted to correspondent Jim S. who seems to be one of the few Americans to have actually sorted through this monstrosity and gleaned its true nature: an unprecedented extension of Executive (i.e. Imperial Presidency) and Federal Reserve power.

Did President Barack Obama’s appointment of Richard Cordray to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without a Senate confirmation vote violate the Constitution? The answer is plainly yes.Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution says the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Officers of the United States … but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone (and) … The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess...

Regulation: Tuesday's GOP debate moderator was shocked by the front-runners' broadside against Dodd-Frank banking rules. He seemed to think they were hyping their damage. They weren't. The media elite are under the assumption that all government regulations are good. So when both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich took shots at Dodd-Frank, NBC News anchor Brian Williams was flabbergasted. He expressed skepticism that its new rules posed any problem. Gingrich straightened him out, arguing the media and the public don't know how "bad" the Democrats' law is. "If you could repeal Dodd-Frank tomorrow morning, you would see the economy start to...

<p>I'm officialy endorsing Newt Gingrich for president today. Was going to wait until after Florida, but see no reason to delay. We need Newt to win in South Carolina and Florida to stop any possible momentum building up for the establishment big government, statist, abortionist RINO!!</p>

If Lizzy [Elizabeth] Warden is truly opposed to Wall Street money, then shouldn’t she reject the DSCC’s money? Otherwise she is just using the DSCC to funnel in Wall Street money.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a man whose political success is largely attributable to the aura of befuddled incompetence he uses to disarm his adversaries, was a failed Watergate baby. In 1974, a slew of often sanctimonious and very liberal Democratic politicians rode the tide of understandable national disgust with Richard Nixon to Congress. Then the lieutenant governor of Nevada, Reid ran for the U.S. Senate, hoping to tie his opponent to the "imperial presidency" that had allegedly sprung up ex nihilo under Nixon. Given Nevada's inherent conservatism (at least back then), Reid cast himself as an incorruptible champion of...

President Barack Obama says he won't take "no" as an answer from Republicans, so he's going around them to appoint the head of a new consumer protection agency. Obama says Republicans would just keep holding Richard Cordray's nomination hostage—and the president says that's inexcusable and wrong. He says Cordray must be in place in order for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to start helping consumers deal with unscrupulous mortgage companies, dishonest payday lenders, and others. Obama announced the appointment of Cordray during a stop Wednesday in Ohio, where Cordray once served as attorney general. Republicans are outraged but Obama says...

California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris is suing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to force the mortgage giants to answer questions about their role in California's housing meltdown. In two suits filed Tuesday in San Francisco County Superior Court, Harris seeks to compel the companies to respond to subpoenas from her office that have been ignored so far. Harris is seeking information about the practices by Fannie and Freddie in California as part of her ongoing investigation into the mortgage industry. The suits ask a judge to order the two companies to answer a set of 51 questions served in...

"Barney Frank: I've destroyed the economy, my work here is done." — Washington Times headline, Nov. 29 It was quite a confluence of news last week when in the span of hours came Rep. Frank's retirement announcement, a report on declining housing prices and home-ownership rates, and a poll belaboring the obvious about Americans' fears about the housing and stock markets. With his fellow Democrat, former Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Rep. Frank, D-Mass., shoulders much of the blame for today's economic catastrophe and the fiscal crises plaguing governments at all levels. They spent years pushing policies that ultimately required...

Wrapping himself in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt's "National Greatness" agenda, President Obama urged the nation to stand strong and unite behind ... his umpteenth regulatory czar. Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat. If Richard Cordray, the stalled White House nominee to enforce the Dodd-Frank financial bureaucracy, is not approved, the wheedler-in-chief warned in Osawatomie, Kan.: "Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student or a senior citizen or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can't afford -- something that...

Job-killing bank regulations threaten to wipe out all the gains in private-sector employment since the recovery began, the industry warns. Washington, however, is hiring thousands more bureaucrats to enforce the rules. Signed into law last year, the Dodd-Frank Act is the biggest rewrite of financial regulations since the New Deal. It was intended to rein in Wall Street "excesses." But the banking industry says burdensome red tape is hurting economic growth and jobs in a still-sluggish labor market. "The level of real GDP could be 2.7% less by the year 2015 than would otherwise be the case for the United...

Even as Bank of America and other major lenders back away from charging customers to use their debit cards, many banks have been quietly imposing other new fees. Need to replace a lost debit card? Bank of America now charges $5 — or $20 for rush delivery. Deposit money with a mobile phone? At U.S. Bancorp, it is now 50 cents a check. Want cash wired to your account? Starting in December, that will cost $15 for each incoming domestic payment at TD Bank. Facing a reaction from an angry public and heightened scrutiny from regulators, banks are turning to...

We Didn’t DeregulateFrom the April 5, 2010, issue of NR. When Barack Obama was running for president, he made no secret of his plan to “restore commonsense regulation� by closing up regulatory “loopholes� he blamed Republicans for opening. Deregulation of the financial industry, he argued, was a main cause of the financial crisis.Much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, President Obama offered a sweeping, ambitious regulatory agenda: a total revamp of the financial industry, including reform of the process by which loans are converted into securities; more robust federal regulation of credit-rating agencies; the creation of a systemic-risk...

fter a worldwide financial meltdown — and a $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout — the need for common-sense financial reforms was clear. But now, even though the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (known as Dodd-Frank, after Rep. Barney Frank and me, its sponsors) is only beginning to take effect, critics are launching false attacks against the law in an effort to undermine it. Whether they are intentionally misleading or just misguided, they are wrong about the law’s purpose and impact. 1. Dodd-Frank is deepening the economic slowdown. Critics who charge that the law is aggravating the recession...

Regulators on Friday closed two banks in Georgia and one each in Florida and Colorado, raising to 84 the number of U.S. banks that have failed this year. The number of closures has fallen sharply this year as banks have worked their way through bad debt. By this time last year, regulators had shuttered 139 banks. FDIC seized the four banks. The largest by far was Community Banks of Colorado, based in Greenwood ... Also shuttered were Community Capital Bank, Jonesboro, Ga. ... Decatur First Bank ... and Old Harbor Bank, Clearwater, Fla. Georgia and Florida have been among the...

Ronald Arculli, Chairman of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, has his eye on the U. S. Congress, and he’s not the only one. International stock exchange leaders voiced their wariness at a panel on exchange regulation yesterday at the World Federation of Exchanges’ general assembly and annual meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Our friends in America have this awful habit of extending their laws beyond their shores, and Dodd-Frank is no exception,” said Arculli, who is Chairman of the WFE. “My caution to those of us from Asia is really to keep a very close watch on the developments.” Dodd-Frank...

In Tuesday night’s Dartmouth debate, the Republican candidates were generally agreed on the need to repeal Dodd-Frank. That is all well and good, but banking does need regulation. For 70 years a cluster of New Deal laws, the Glass-Steagall laws, successfully prevented American banks from becoming “too big to fail.” Dodd-Frank should be repealed, and an updated Glass-Steagall should replace it.

There are the bills a president signs sitting in the Oval Office and the bills that merit a Rose Garden ceremony. And then there are bills so momentous—or at least so critical to a president’s reelection prospects—that those around the commander in chief orchestrate a more elaborate ceremony. Such was the case with (The biggest lie of all)the financial-reform package that President Obama signed into law last July against a backdrop of velvet curtains in a resplendent venue a few blocks from the White House. “Passing this bill was no easy task,” Obama told the 400 dignitaries who witnessed the...

Dick Durbin's Amendment stipulates new rules that will lead to lower fees for merchants when you swipe a debit card in their stores. Merchants currently pay around 1% of every debit card transaction to the credit card cartel. The lower fees to merchants, in theory, could lower prices in stores. We don't think consumers will benefit. The Australian government capped credit and debit interchange in 2003, which has resulted in some pretty pathetic credit card offers compared to what we have stateside. The average annual fee in Australia is $132, compared with $19 in the US. Rewards programs are also...

Hold on to your wallet: The Durbin Amendment goes into effect Saturday. The once-obscure amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill limits “interchange fees,” which banks charge to merchants for providing the service that allows stores to accept debit-card payments. The fees were cut by some 80 percent, which makes it less profitable for banks to offer debit-card services. So the banks have done the natural thing and begun to transfer the fee from merchants to their customers, with Bank of America announcing a new $5-per-month fee for debit-card users. Naturally, the amendment’s author, Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) is in...

(The news that BofA customers will soon shoulder a monthly charge for debit purchases sparks outrage — and threats to abandon the bank altogether.) Bank of America, proclaiming that its bottom line is hurt by new legislation that limits how much money banks can charge retailers for the privilege of letting customers pay with debit cards, announced that it will make up for those losses by charging customers a $5 monthly fee. The fee takes effect in 2012 and affects any customer who makes debit purchases. ATM and credit card transactions will remain free. Predictably, the bank's customers are not...