Katherine Kane

The creation of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an emphasis from all regulators on unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts and practices has created new staffing demands. “Banks are scrambling to find compliance personnel with expertise in consumer protection law,” writes American Banker’s Andy Peters.

C. Boyden Gray, the lawyer involved in the suit challenging the constitutionality of the CFPB, writes in the Washington Times that "the new regulatory regime primarily helps the big banks while placing its heaviest burdens on community banks.”

Many in the industry have criticized the length — 1,400 pages — of the CFPB’s recently proposed rule on mortgage disclosure forms and fees. Why so many pages in order to get simpler forms?

The former chairman of the Securities Industry Association jumps into the Glass-Steagall debate. But instead of championing the revival of Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking, he'd like to revive the SIA’s proposed legislation from the 1990s.

In a recent report the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau provided details about its consumer complaint database. In its first year of operation 43% of the complaints the agency has received have been about mortgages and 34% were about credit cards.

Jeffrey Kutler, editor-in-chief of Risk Professional magazine, isn’t surprised that bankers have balked at new regulation. But if there’s still debate about whether or not the Volcker Rule would have prevented JPMorgan's trading losses in the London office “what does that imply about the overall quality of the reform effort?” he asks.

Bank lobbying groups have been pushing for an extension of the Transaction Account Guarantee program that would continue to make FDIC coverage for all transaction accounts mandatory. "But prior to Dodd-Frank, the original TAG — which regulators created in 2008 to strengthen liquidity — was voluntary and charged participants extra fees to opt in,” writes American Banker’s Joe Adler.

"The kind of problems we're trying to address deal with clarity of the market — know before you owe — right from the very application stage," said Richard Cordray, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director, in a recent interview with the New York Times about the two new mortgage forms the agency proposed in July.

Sen. Richard Shelby might be the Senate Banking Committee chairman in 2013, depending on which party is in control. If he does, he has his agenda ready.

"The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is urging colleges to adopt a new form designed to make it easier for students to compare financial aid offers,” writes American Banker’s Kevin Wack.

Working on your wish list for Dodd-Frank repeals? Mark A. Calabria, the director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, has Section 1071, which requires a system for tracking data on lending to women-owned and minority owned small business, on his.

Rep. Scott Garrett and Sen. David Vitter have introduced bills that would that "would repeal the government's authority to designate non-bank financial institutions as systemically important," writes American Banker’s Kevin Wack.

Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said the sight of the 1,099-page proposal from the CFPB on simplified mortgage disclosures made him “physically ill,” according to Bloomberg.

What caused the big failures during the crisis? "Lousy management and lax oversight. Those are the problems we need to focus on," writes American Banker editor-at-large Barbara Rehm. "And whether anyone wants to admit it or not, those are exactly the problems the Dodd-Frank Act went after."

After Sandy Weill's let's-break-them-up bombshell, the authors of a certain major piece of legislation can, by comparison, take a more moderate stance on breaking up big banks.

The CFPB has taken its first civil action, suing a Los Angeles law firm that it says has preyed on distressed borrowers by offering bogus mortgage loan modifications.

OK, this isn’t your normal DFRW fare, but we can’t quite let this vision go.

Two measures that the banking industry is hoping to see pass in the Senate are being stymied by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint. His hold on the bill that combines the two measures is "an effort to force a symbolic vote on repealing" on Dodd-Frank, writes American Banker's Kevin Wack.

"Federal Reserve Board Gov. Sarah Bloom Raskin urged regulators to narrow a proposed exemption to the Volcker Rule, saying it may allow banks to avoid compliance with the ban on proprietary trading," writes American Banker's Donna Boraks.

Dodd-Frank "however good its intentions, has not and will not protect us against another meltdown," writes former senator Ted Kaufman. He's concerned about the growing size of big banks and what he views as fatal flaws in living wills. Want to really protect against another meltdown? Add that Kaufman-Brown amendment to the legistlation.