Law and regulation

A group of House Democrats is urging President Barack Obama to nominate a permanent director for the Federal Housing Finance Agency to replace an acting chief they say is standing in the way of aid for struggling borrowers.

The Treasury Department has decided to cancel the auction of Coastal Banking Company's Troubled Asset Relief Program shares after the bank received approval to pay dividends.

Many companies are idling while the U.S. considers its options for handling the migration to chip cards from magnetic-stripe cards. Even a company based in the UK finds itself stuck.

Richmond Fed President Jeff Lacker has a much different approach to ending "too big to fail" than his central bank colleagues, including making it impossible for regulators to unwind a failing institution.

Jeremiah Norton, a board member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said Wednesday that regulators should consider proposing a stronger leverage ratio for banks to help protect the financial system.

Visa's quarterly earnings increased by 26% from a year earlier, and its financial outlook for 2013 has also brightened, the company said Feb. 6.

Federal Reserve Gov. Elizabeth Duke urged community bankers on Tuesday to continue lending despite challenges created by compliance with a host of new Dodd-Frank regulations.

A recent court ruling filed by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has casted doubt over whether renominated Richard Cordray will continue to serve as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Virtually all discussions of banking crises these days assume that depositors should always be protected, often at taxpayer expense. Let's consider whether at least some depositors should be bailed in.

The House Financial Services Committee held its first full hearing of the year on Wednesday, with lawmakers divided on the future of the Federal Housing Administration.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will rejoin the Council on Foreign relations later this month, the organization announced on Wednesday.

The EMV smartcard standard is so commonly combined with a PIN code that most consumers know it simply as "chip-and-PIN." But Visa and MasterCard don't agree on whether PIN use should be a priority when the U.S. adopts the EMV standard.

A crime ring based in New Jersey created thousands of fake identities to obtain 25,000 credit cards and steal more than $200 million in one of the largest scams of its type, the Justice Department said.

HSBC's reputation was "crushed" after it agreed to pay $1.92 billion to settle U.S. probes of money laundering in places such as Mexico, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver said.

A crime ring based in New Jersey created thousands of fake identities to obtain 25,000 credit cards and steal more than $200 million in one of the largest scams of its type, the Justice Department said.

Regulators seem obsessed with preventing false negatives: loans that pass underwriting and then default. They should consider the costs of false positives, i.e., restricting loans that probably would perform fine.

Royal Bank of Scotland will pay about $612 million in fines for manipulating interest rates, the second-largest penalty imposed in a global regulatory probe.

The Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) standards don't appear to have a lot in common, but there is one alarming similarity — the tortoise-like pace of migration which threatens deadlines for both.

A unit of United Community Financial (UCFC) in Youngstown, Ohio, has been freed from an enforcement action with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Ohio Division of Financial Institutions.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s board of directors will consider a proposal next week to clarify the definition of deposits protected by the agency.