Law and regulation

Now that two of the biggest U.S. banks are convicted felons, the Justice Department appears to have proven the point it set out to make a year ago — that it could deliver the harshest penalty possible against financial institutions without inflicting fatal wounds. It may be a tough act to follow.

Nonbank servicers selling and buying Fannie and Freddie MSRs must meet new capital and liquidity requirement to transfer servicing.

Despite strong rhetoric from both sides that legislative action is needed to help community banks, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee remain divided in their approaches ahead of a markup Thursday.

WASHINGTON — The Financial Stability Oversight Council is encouraging mortgage agencies to continue clarifying when lenders must repurchase defective loans.

Cuba has found a Florida bank willing to handle its future business in Washington, removing a major impediment to the communist country opening an embassy in the U.S.

Benjamin Lawsky, the New York regulator known for aggressive investigations and headline-grabbing fines against financial firms, is stepping down, and he reportedly plans to make a living offering banks and other companies advice.

Benjamin Lawsky will step down next month as New York's top bank regulator after four years, during which he threatened to take away the U.S. charters of some of the world's biggest banks and collected billions of dollars in penalties by being the squeaky wheel in global bank settlements.

The proposed legislation for regulatory relief seeks to roll back critical mortgage protections put in place to prevent another housing crisis.

Six of the world's biggest banks will pay $5.8 billion and five of them agreed to plead guilty to charges tied to a currency-rigging probe as they seek to wind down almost half a decade of enforcement actions.

Critics of the regulatory relief bill proposed by Sen. Richard Shelby argue that will endanger the financial system and benefit big banks. But in fact, the changes offer sensible, nonpartisan fixes to some of the biggest problems with the Dodd-Frank Act.

UBS Group AG will pay $545 million to settle U.S. investigations into its role in manipulating currency and interest rates, removing two of the bank's biggest legal hurdles.

Lost in the debate so far over Shelby's regulatory relief bill are the significant changes it makes to the housing finance system. It essentially takes consensus elements from multiple past stabs at reform, leaving out the most controversial parts and making future reform far easier.

How the company marketed and enrolled customers into its PayPal Credit product has resulted in a $25 million enforcement action from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The U.S. financial system has weathered several external threats in the past year, but significant hazards remain, including the potential for cyberattacks and excessive concentration of risk in central counterparties, according to a report by the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

Calling his state's foreclosure process "badly broken and in need of change," New York banking regulator Benjamin Lawsky wants new policies enacted to fast-track vacant property foreclosures and reform the state's mandatory foreclosure mediation requirements.

Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee unveiled legislation Tuesday to rival a plan by the panel's GOP chairman, signaling that the partisan divide over regulatory reform isn't likely to soften ahead of a panel markup later this week.

It's a good idea to raise the asset threshold at which financial institutions are automatically designated as systemically important financial institutions. But Sen. Richard Shelby's proposed legislation for regulatory relief does require one crucial change.

The regulatory relief package coming before the Senate Banking Committee Thursday would force the Federal Housing Finance Agency to withdraw the contentious proposal within 30 days.

No bank has fully disclosed what it spends on the Federal Reserve's Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review, in part because the figure is hard to isolate. It's a key piece of information missing in the debate over banks' regulatory burden.

Crucial operational steps remain before the government could clean up the collapse of a massive firm without threats to the broader financial system.