Law and regulation

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accused GE Capital Retail Bank of misleading consumers into a health care credit card product that retroactively charged exorbitant interest rates, marking the agency's first significant attempt to go after such offerings.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Tuesday approved a nearly 11% reduction in the agency's budget for 2014, a further sign of how the improving economy is reducing bank failures.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a strategy document on its method for unwinding failed behemoths, but concerns raised by board members and questions asked to the public in the document signal the start of a broader debate.

Regulators braved a short-lived but intense snow storm in Washington D.C. on Tuesday to approve the final Volcker Rule, a regulation designed to prevent banks from engaging in proprietary trading. Within minutes of its approval, banks, lawmakers and others reacted to the long-awaited provision. Following are some of the highlights:

Regulators appeared visibly relieved Tuesday as they signed off on a final Volcker Rule after three years of interagency wrangling, but the hardest part will be figuring out how to implement and enforce the new regulation

The five-member board voted unanimously to flesh out how the policy will work when a systemically important company fails. But this show of unity may be misleading and fleeting.

Underwater homeowners in New York state may soon have a new way to reduce the principal on their mortgages.

Rep. Mel Watt cleared a procedural hurdle in the Senate Tuesday toward becoming the next director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with a final confirmation vote to come as early as this afternoon.

Janet Yellen has made it clear she wants to move the Federal Reserve away from a bank-centric regulatory model to one that appropriately tailors rules to the nonbanks that it now regulates.

The president and chief executive of Pacific Premier Bancorp (PPBI) in Irvine, Calif., has been elected to the board of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco.

In more than 71 pages, banking and securities regulators detailed precisely how they planned to strike a balance between banning proprietary trading while providing banks with the flexibility to continue to engage in certain market-making activities.

The FTC's goal of compensating victims of merchant fraud is laudable. But effectuating that goal through a "crackdown" on processors and ISOs, which effectively makes them insurers of merchant fraud, seems misguided.

The regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Monday directed the two housing finance giants to raise fees for all loans in an effort to bring private capital back into the mortgage market and better reflect the credit risks of borrowers.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, renewed calls on Monday for Congress to pass a bill that would help address ongoing cybersecurity threats to financial institutions.

A group of state regulators issued a paper calling on federal regulators to do a better job of exempting small banks from their regulations, including urging the CFPB to provide more exemptions for small banks to its "Qualified Mortgage" rule.

State financial regulators have received few applications for licensing Bitcoin businesses even as they've handled many inquiries about them, according to David Cotney, the commissioner of banks in Massachusetts.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will release a long-awaited document Tuesday detailing how it plans to use the "single point of entry" method to resolve failed behemoths.

Following pressure from the governors of Colorado and Washington, the agencies say they're considering steps to lessen banks' risk when establishing relationships with pot dispensaries and producers.

A ban on portfolio hedging would perfectly illustrate the current practice of regulatory ‘populism’ that has pervaded financial regulatory reform since the crisis.

New York's Benjamin Lawsky and other state regulators have given no indication of differentiating between online lenders that operate well and those that don’t. Yet the spectrum of alternative lending operations indicates that just such a distinction is needed.