Law and regulation

Ed DeMarco, the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac signaled Tuesday that the Federal Housing Finance Agency is unlikely to pursue a broad principal forgiveness program.

Joseph Smith said in an interview Monday that he wants to avoid surprising the banks as he oversees their compliance with the $25 billion mortgage servicing settlement.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau detailed a slew of new mortgage servicing rules late Monday that it plans to propose this summer, including a call for expanded disclosures for payments and fees and new policies in how banks must handle customer accounts.

A Texas woman who posed as an employee for a debt settlement company has pleaded guilty to five counts of wire fraud for allegedly swindling $13,000 from a Mississippi couple.

Joseph Smith, who is responsible for monitoring compliance with the $25 billion multi-state mortgage settlement talks potential fines, consumer complaints about servicers and how he plans to move forward on hiring help for the massive undertaking.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau outlined its regulatory plans for the next several months, which include at least eight rules including a call for expanded disclosures for payments and fees and new policies in how banks must handle customer accounts.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke called attention to the need to develop more tools to manage risk to the financial system to match the resources of the central bank's monetary policy.

Former Federal Reserve Board official Stephen H. Meyer has joined the Washington D.C. office of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.

Thomas Curry officially took office Monday as the 30th Comptroller of the Currency, the agency announced in a press release.

Goldman Sachs Group [GS] is raising money for a new fund that will buy home-loan bonds and, it hopes, benefit from an improving real-estate market, according to Bloomberg. My initial reaction is: this is insane.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) has donated $5.5 million to the University of Colorado Denver Business School to open a center for the study of commodities.

The OCC's approval clears First Niagara to close its deal for 195 branches in New York and Connecticut by May 18, CEO John Koelmel says.

Participants in the Small Business Lending Fund increased small business lending by $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter, a 37% increase from the previous quarter, the Treasury Department said Monday.

The industry wants to avoid rate hikes, service cutbacks and new competition from the public sector.

Two years after the federal government largely took over the student loan market, the remaining banks in the industry are preparing for another shakeup.

Ally Financial Inc., the government-owned auto lender, is making a $134 million dividend payment to the Treasury Department.

A federal court has imposed a $3.89 million judgment against Samuel Paul Bain and three of his companies - U.S. Homeowners Relief Inc., Waypoint Law Group Inc. and American Lending Review Inc. - for their role in an allegedly fraudulent mortgage modification and foreclosure relief scheme.

The SEC says Anthony Nocella, Franklin Bank Corp.'s former CEO, and J. Russell McCann, its former CFO, fraudulently concealed the deterioration of the bank's loan portfolio and inflated its earnings before the company declared bankruptcy in 2008.

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Editor's Note, July 25, 2012: This and other BankThink opinion columns written by Joel Sucher bearing this note, published between October 2011 and June 2012, mentioned the law firm of Stephen J. Baum, Litton Loan Servicing, or both. The columns should have disclosed that Baum's firm, working on behalf of Litton, had attempted to foreclose on the writer's property in 2009. American Banker's editors were unaware of this history at the time the columns were published.