Last week, the CFPB brought a $9 million enforcement action against Savannah, GA-based TMX Finance, the parent company of TitleMax, accusing the company of luring consumers into costly loan renewals by presenting them with misleading information about the deals’ terms and costs. The CFPB said that employees of the auto title lender, as part of their sales pitch for the company’s 30-day loans, offered consumers a monthly option for making loan payments. They then offered consumers a “Voluntary Payback Guide” that showed how to repay the loan with smaller payments over a longer time period....

The CFPB last month sued five auto title lenders doing business in Arizona – Auto Cash Leasing, Interstate Lending, Oasis Title Loans, Phoenix Title Loans and Presto Auto Loans – for allegedly failing to disclose the annual percentage rate in online advertisements about title loans, in violation of the Truth in Lending Act. “For example, one lender advertised on its website a monthly interest rate but failed to include the legally required annual percentage rate for the loan,” the bureau said....

Fitch Ratings was the most active rating service in the sluggish non-agency MBS market through the first half of 2016, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking. Standard & Poor’s was the top rating agency in the more active non-mortgage ABS market. Fitch rated just seven non-agency MBS issued during the first six months of the year, which totaled $4.74 billion in volume. While that equaled 30.9 percent of total non-agency MBS issuance for the period, many deals were private placements without ratings. Fitch’s share of rated issuance was 55.4 percent. DBRS ranked...[Includes two data tables]

Bank and thrift holdings of non-agency ABS fell slightly during the second quarter, but the industry is not backing away from the consumer credit space. Depositories prefer to hold these assets in unsecuritized form on their balance sheets. A new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of call-report data shows that banks and thrifts held $130.98 billion of non-mortgage ABS at the end of June. That was down 0.7 percent from March and represented the 10th consecutive quarterly decline since the end of 2013, when the industry’s ABS holdings hit their all-time peak. According to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the supply of non-mortgage ABS debt outstanding actually rose...[Includes two data tables]

Investors in auto loan ABS may need to buckle up. Both prime and subprime auto loan ABS have weakened month-over-month and year-over-year, according to S&P Global Ratings. “Collateral performance in the U.S. prime auto loan ABS sector was weaker in July, with net losses and 60-plus-day delinquencies increasing month-over-month, while recovery rates decreased,” the S&P analysts said. “Collateral performance for the subprime sector deteriorated...

New issuance of non-mortgage ABS faltered in the second quarter of 2016, but the market has rebounded strongly in recent weeks, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. New ABS issuance totaled $43.07 billion in the second quarter, a modest decline from the first three months of 2016. That put year-to-date production at just $86.42 billion, off 18.0 percent from the first six months of 2015. Activity picked up...[Includes two data tables]

The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are looking a little more serious about pushing legislation that would change the leadership structure of the CFPB from that of a single director to a five-member commission and subject the bureau to the congressional appropriations process. Last week, the full House passed appropriations legislation with provisions that would do just that. Other language would restrict the CFPB’s ability to limit payday lenders, halt the bureau’s efforts to end forced arbitration clauses in credit card contracts, and rescind the agency’s guidance on indirect automobile lending. One additional provision would defund the CFPB’s efforts to stop what it calls predatory lending to borrowers looking to purchase a manufactured home, and another would make ...

Pleas from the securitization industry for the Supreme Court of the United States to hear an appeal of Midland Funding v. Madden were rejected this week, prolonging uncertainty in sectors of the secondary market. SCOTUS may still consider the issue at some point going forward, according to analysts, providing hope for the industry. Richard Johns, executive director of the Structured Finance Industry Group, said the denial of certiorari for Madden will result in significant challenges for borrowers of credit cards, mortgages, auto loans and other financial products. “The injection of uncertainty into the credit markets will ultimately increase the cost of credit for all and directly impact the real economy,” he said. The Madden case involved...

Standard & Poor’s lost a little market share in the business of rating non-mortgage ABS during the first quarter of 2016, but the firm still was the most active player in the market, according to a new ranking by Inside MBS & ABS. S&P rated 58.4 percent of the $41.42 billion of non-mortgage ABS issued in early 2016, down from its 61.5 percent share for all of last year and its 64.1 percent share back in 2014. The company’s strong suit was in vehicle-finance ABS, where it rated 64.7 percent of the market, by dollar volume. While S&P’s share was up slightly in a few categories, its stake in the credit card ABS segment fell...[Includes two data tables]

Commercial banks and thrifts reported a further decline in their holdings of non-mortgage ABS during the first quarter, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of call-report data. As of the end of March, banks held a combined $131.96 billion of ABS in their portfolio, including assets intended to be held to maturity as well as those available for sale. That represented a 2.3 percent drop from the end of 2015, and a hefty 15.9 percent decline from a year ago. It was...[Includes two data tables]