Policy & Regulation

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.