Congressional Republicans are doing just about everything they can- short of calling on U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 - to weaken, throttle, starve or deep-six the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau before it gets up to full speed...

A handful of Congressional Democrats aren't letting the prospect that legislation they are sponsoring may go nowhere in committee keep them from trying to toughen the terms of the regulatory debate over national servicer standards...

Consumer advocates called on Congress to extend national mortgage servicing standards to all servicers, including those of government-insured home loans. Testifying before the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development recently, Diane Thompson, of counsel to the National Consumer Law Center, said loans made by the FHA, the VA and the Rural Housing Services are generally aimed at ...

Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee are warming up another set of bills designed to "tie the hands" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unveiled last week, the seven bills affecting the operations of the government-sponsored enterprises while they remain in conservatorship will be discussed during a hearing next week in the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and GSEs. "These seven bills were carefully designed to tie the hands of Fannie and Freddie so that they are no longer a drag on American taxpayers, a threat to our economic security and an impediment to private market growth and...

Non-agency mortgage-backed security investors appear to be unwilling to support new non-agency MBS issuance until reforms are implemented for second-liens. Nancy Mueller Handal, a managing director at MetLife, said potential non-agency investors are looking for an alignment of issuer, investor and servicer interests. "A big piece of this comes down to the fact that servicers have been managing their second liens in portfolio to the detriment of the first lien," she said at a discussion this week hosted by the American Securitization Forum. Second liens became a major focus of a hearing on national servicing standards last week at...

High-touch servicer Nationstar Mortgage announced this week that it plans to raise up to $400.0 million via an initial public offering. The servicer - owned by Fortress Investment Group - primarily focuses on defaulted agency mortgages. Nationstar serviced a $64.2 billion portfolio as of the end of 2010, with subprime mortgages accounting for a 14.6 percent share. Reps. Gary Miller, R-CA and Brad Sherman, D-CA, recently introduced legislation to permanently increase the conforming loan limits. Few analysts believe that H.R. 1754, "the Preserving Equal Access to Mortgage Finance Programs Act," will gain much traction considering...

Can I afford this mortgage, and can I get a better deal somewhere else? Those are the two questions the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants borrowers to be able to answer when it is finished producing a new mortgage disclosure form that combines and would ultimately replace those required under the Truth in Lending Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. This week, the CFPB released two alternate prototypes for industry and public review and comment, part of its Know Before You Owe project. The goal is to create a single, simpler form that makes the costs and risks of the loan clear and allows consumers to...

New legislation introduced in both the House and the Senate would impose tough national mortgage servicing standards, with plenty of sticks and barely a single carrot. Early last week, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-OR, and Olympia Snowe, R-ME, introduced the Regulation of Mortgage Servicing Act to help homeowners stay in their homes by making the rules for mortgage servicers "more fair and transparent." The bill would require mortgage servicers to create a single point of contact for borrowers, end dual-track processing of foreclosures while homeowners are negotiating a modification, and provide an independent, third-party review before sending a family into...

All the witnesses at a hearing late last week in the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development agreed that national mortgage servicing standards are a necessity, but they acknowledged that the trick is deciding what they will cover and how they will work in an environment ridden with competing problems. "Servicers do not believe that the rules that apply to everyone else apply to them," said Diane Thompson, counsel at the National Consumer Law Center. "This lawless attitude, supported by financial incentives and too-often tolerated by regulators, is the root cause of the failure of...

Two California members of the House, one Republican, one Democrat, have introduced a bill to extend indefinitely high-cost loan limits for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA due to expire this fall.