BankThink

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau raised concerns in a bulletin that consumer reporting agencies may be holding free information from their customers. They have issued warning letters to six agencies that have made it too difficult for consumers to find their annual reports.

It would appear that a bank could not negotiate a loan on more favorable terms than the deal I was looking at. Yet, something did not make sense.

Consumer-focused regulations, in general, should reflect what financial products actually do, not the technicalities of who issues them or what legal status they hold.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Nice Try, Guys: The Fed will require foreign banks with major operations here to house them in entities subject to the same capital rules as U.S. banks, central bank Gov. Daniel Tarullo said. The papers interpret his speech as a thinly veiled repudiation of Deutsche Bank and Barclays, which moved their stateside investment banking shops out of Fed-supervised holding companies to avoid having to inject them with billions of dollars. The Journal's "Heard on the Street" column calls the regulator's move prudent, considering that "the Fed had to lend billions of dollars to foreign banks during the financial crisis … The Fed is rightly taking the view that it, and U.S. taxpayers, can't risk being left holding the bag should parent companies be unable, or unwilling, to provide a backstop" — an unfortunately plausible scenario given the state Europe's in.

Federal Reserve Board Gov. Daniel Tarullo gave a glimpse of what significant policy changes U.S. regulators are considering for the supervision of large foreign banking organizations in a speech at Yale University's Law School.

The bureau could offer an X Prize, encouraging companies to solve problems through competition or invite applications from entrepreneurs and financial companies, providing those with the most promising ideas a time-limited waiver for pilot tests.

The very same low interest rates and easy credit terms that ran up the "for sale" housing business are now busily at work running up the multifamily rental business.

The risk profession continues to aid and abet our tendency to want to quantify everything. But understanding real life is ultimately a social, not physical, science.

Just days after the Senate's top Democrat, Harry Reid, proposed a two-year renewal to the Transaction Account Guarantee program, a leading Republican on the Senate Banking Committee came forward and said he plans to oppose the extension.

The effort to extend the Transaction Account Guarantee, which is due to expire at yearend, received a major "boost this week after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled a bill to keep it alive for another two years," writes American Banker's Joe Adler.