BankThink

Adequate communication, data retention, requests for approval and, ultimately, cooperation can minimize a company's risk of being investigated by the CFPB or state attorney general's office.

The SEC has lost many rulings in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, often hinging on cost-benefit analysis issues. New York Times columnist Floyd Norris is concerned about the vacancies on this court and warns it is poised to doom the SEC's implementation of Dodd-Frank.

Big mortgage servicers wonder why borrowers won't respond to attractive refi offers. How can they be surprised? We've overloaded consumers with such an excess of incoming communications through antiquated channels that they ignore almost all of this.

It's in consultants' best interests to extend the foreclosure review engagements as long as possible without coming up with an estimate for each servicer of its total liability to borrowers.

Gather a group of credit union execs together in a bar and over beers the fermentation will turn to lamentation as the group debates whose operation has had it the worst over the past few years.

How to better leverage merchant lending according to Trina Larson, director of sales for the CRIF Select division of CRIF Lending Solutions.

Interest-rate-risk-derivatives-swap-cap is not an easy concept to understand. When evaluating this concept, we need to look at the words that make it up and try to understand the meaning of each.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...The Fed Dissected: It's been well over a week since the Federal Reserve announced another round of (this time unlimited) quantitative easing, but the U.S. central bank is still making headlines. The Journal has two stories this morning dissecting Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo's schedule. Their major takeaways include that Tarullo, considered the Fed's top banking regulator, spends a lot of time talking "with Obama administration figures, U.S. regulators and foreign officials" in an attempt to coordinate the massive regulatory overhaul taking place worldwide. He also made plenty of time for bankers, having "met in person or talked on the phone more than 60 times during one recent year with top U.S. bank executives" or, as the paper, alternately puts it, "five times more often" than Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did. Tarullo spoke most often with Morgan Stanley Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, who has a role in organizing meetings between big-bank financial chiefs and the regulator. He also met periodically with Bank of America chief Brian Moynihan, Goldman Sachs head Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase boss James Dimon and Citigroup leader Vikram Pandit, though the Fed is declining to comment on what any of these meetings were actually about.

As long as the federal government can print money at will, the politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) will accumulate debt until the United States experiences a financial collapse.

Will lenders get a safe harbor against borrower lawsuits about underwriting in the "qualified mortgage" rule? Or will the CFPB opt for a "rebuttable presumption"? The agency's director says the differences between the two are "in some ways overstated." Either way he promises some bright lines to "minimize litigation risk."