Opinions

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday proposed a series of regulatory relief measures for small institutions, especially those in rural areas, to help them provide credit while they try to follow the agency's tough mortgage rules.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., are prodding the biggest banks for information about how they will respond to changes to a controversial Dodd-Frank Act swaps provision signed into law last month.

The Basel Committee's revisions to banks' risk disclosure requirements should help investors glean more meaningful information, thereby allowing them to impose market discipline on less creditworthy institutions.

Banks partnering with prepaid card providers face the potential of higher deposit insurance fees and other ramifications from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. classifying accounts as "brokered."

Joining the hunt for higher-yielding niche loans, the asset management unit of NewOak Capital has quietly launched a private fund to acquire nonqualified residential mortgages.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a letter Wednesday emphasizing that financial institutions should take a measured approach to banking relationships rather than cutting ties with entire lines of businesses.

Dumping entire categories of clients is a crude and inappropriate reaction to large fines, says Stephen Platt, author of Criminal Capital: How the Finance Industry Facilitates Crime." However, he says, regulators should hold a dialogue with banks and attempt to accommodate businesses that carry high risk but whose services are desperately required, such as remittances to war-torn Somalia.

WASHINGTON — The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has issued "harmonized templates" for regulators to adopt in order to ensure that banks' risk and capitalization disclosures are comparable and consistent.

The U.S. is investigating whether the Netherlands' Rabobank Groep ignored signs of money laundering by clients at branches of its California banking unit near the Mexican border, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The government has added further protections to reverse mortgage borrowers' spouses who are not named in the loan agreement, but placed conditions under which they are ineligible for older protections.