Law and regulation

Raj Date, the deputy director at CFPB, is seen as a moderating influence at the agency, given his past experience as a banker. His pending departure leaves bankers nervous about the future.

The agency's annual independent actuarial report is expected to show that its capital reserves have been depleted by rising levels of defaults. FHA could shore up its finances by increasing its enforcement against banks and other lenders, but it may also need to tap the Treasury for the first time in its history.

Mortgage servicers are making a push to remind homeowners who may be facing foreclosure they have roughly 48 days to request independent reviews.

A unit of BNY Mellon (BK) will pay $210 million to settle charges that it let clients invest funds with disgraced money manager Bernard Madoff despite its own concerns that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

Sheila Bair says we should prohibit examiners from quitting to work in the private sector, to keep them from gaining unjustly favorable regulatory treatment for the banks that later employ them. But the worse abuse runs the opposite way.

President Obama's reelection has given his administration a "do-over" opportunity in housing.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has made it clear he plans to leave office before the start of President Obama’s second term. Here are the pros and cons associated with some potential replacements.

Internal governance policies should define for shareholders, employees and the public how the bank plans to effectively manage the stated risk appetite.

Federal Reserve Board Gov. Elizabeth Duke doesn't want to see new mortgage rules driving community banks out of the origination market. Exhibit A: balloon mortgages. They may have been abused by other lenders, but are a mainstay of community bank mortgage lending.

There have been some new twists in the strange case of an alleged attempt to blackmail Mitt Romney for $1 million in bitcoins, raising additional legal questions about the digital currency.

Raj Date, CFPB's second in command, said he will leave the agency after it finishes writing a number of mortgage rules required under the Dodd-Frank reform law.

The Supreme Court will decide whether merchants have the right to file class actions against Amex over which cards they must honor, or if arbitration clauses bar them from combining forces.

Some banks bucked the trend and others buckled under it. Overall, about two-thirds of publicly listed banks posted quarter-over-quarter declines in margins during the most recent round of earnings reports.

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The Dodd-Frank Act, sold to the public as the tamer of the Wall Street titans, may well end up having a disproportionate impact on smaller institutions, thanks to the costs of capital implications of being "not too big to fail" and the advent of the CFPB, writes Cato's Louise Bennetts.

You might have missed it, but there was big news last week—and we aren’t just talking about the delay on Basel III implementation. The election dominated the week for obvious reasons but other news was also critical. Following is our list of the most important stories in Washington during the past week:

Coinciding with the Veterans Day holiday, mortgage-settlement monitor Joseph A. Smith invited members of the military and veterans to report their complaints of abuses by mortgage servicers.

There's going to be significant overturn on the House Financial Services Committee next year, thanks to a number of retirements and several lost races.

Accretive Health Inc.'s chairman and CEO should be dismissed because of stock losses resulting from the use of tactics to collect money from hospital patients, according to an investor lawsuit.

A section of Dodd-Frank tells regulators not to rely on the credit agencies, so an OCC rule that goes into effect in January says banks can't use thos ratings to prove the value of their investments. The bank have to use some other source or do their own analysis. That could get costly.