Regulation

A senior civil rights official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is poised to tell Congress Thursday that the agency willfully disregards the process for handling internal employee complaints of discrimination and has repeatedly retaliated against staff who spoke out.

Two groups representing small and mid-size lenders say new proposed state mortgage servicing standards for nonbanks will add an unnecessary layer of regulatory burden, especially for firms servicing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new mortgage integrated disclosure rules will now take effect Saturday, Oct. 3, two days later than the previously rescheduled Oct. 1 deadline.

Bankers and commercial real estate developers are protesting new restrictions on construction lending, arguing they are poised to hurt credit availability and drive loans into risky, unregulated sectors.

The growing popularity of impact investing has led to a raft of new disclosure rules. The problem is that using the SEC to monitor companies' CEO pay policies and use of "conflict minerals" decouples the government agency's authority from its area of jurisdiction.

Senate Democrats are urging regulators to investigate potential discrimination in how banks and other financial institutions handle and market foreclosed homes.

A number of class-action lawsuits allege that investment advisers breached fiduciary duty by failing to recommend the least expensive products. But both trust law and investment theory acknowledge that responsible advisers take other factors into consideration.

Bank of the Orient in San Francisco has received a federal cease-and-desist order because of shortcomings in its compliance with anti-money-laundering rules.

The case against Adrian Rubin offers a tour through lenders' efforts, dating back to the late 1990s, to avoid state-by-state interest-rate caps.

Just as U.S. regulators shy from labeling individual asset management firms as systemic, an international group of securities regulators is similarly abandoning a firm-by-firm approach.