Law and regulation

In the aftermath of the crisis, Congress keeps piling on rules to enforce, without proportionately increasing the number or competence of examiners. Is it any wonder overstretched supervisors never asked, "What if home prices stop going up?"

Gov. Daniel Tarullo met in private with big bank CEOs and talked in public about the progress of regulatory reform last week. American Banker’s editors discuss the takeaways.

At a congressional hearing Monday, an FHFA official sought to manage expectations regarding a program that many see as a key step in clearing the nation's inventory of foreclosed homes.

A coalition of consumer and community groups is urging regulators to crack down on a Florida bank that is issuing prepaid cards for payday lender CheckSmart.

Americans are mostly powerless to correct harmful errors on their credit reports thanks to loopholes and obstacles in the federal law governing credit-reporting agencies, according to a report Sunday in an Ohio newspaper that was widely picked up by national media outlets.

Megabank CEOs want the Fed to disclose more about its stress test models. They can show good faith by supporting the international effort to make global counterparty risk transparent.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency closed Security Bank in North Lauderdale, Fla., on Friday, bringing the total number of failures so far in 2012 to 23.

In a presidential election year, banks tend to hedge their campaign donations. But in 2012, banks are betting heavily on Romney, in part because they don't think Obama can take a harsher view of their business.

Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went head-to-head with Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian Texas Congressman, last week and dived into some interesting areas.

The Federal Housing Administration is "by no means out of the woods," former commissioner and current Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens says.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sees non-bank services as most in need of new regulation, Director Richard Cordray says. In a speech and subsequent interview, he discusses the progress of CFPB enforcement actions and the weakness of data on consumer finance practices.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is in talks with the Justice Department over how the agencies will divide and litigate fair lending cases, a CFPB official said Friday.

In 2004, I had the unique distinction of being perhaps the only person in history to have the U.S. Senate place a bounty on his head. I didn't rob a train. My crime was leading a federal investigation into misconduct at Fannie Mae.

Floyd Stoner, the former chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, has joined the board of $1.4 billion-asset Orrstown Financial Services in Penn.

The Treasury Department said Thursday it plans to auction off pools of the preferred stock it owns in small banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Coastal Banking Company in Beaufort, S.C., has become the latest community bank to take advantage of a new law that relieves small banks from the burden of filing financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A day after top bankers met with Federal Reserve officials, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon blamed policymakers for stalling banking's recovery by "shooting ourselves in the foot."

Industry groups are calling on CFPB to lower the thresholds it will use to designate which firms will be included in its nonbank supervision program.

The Justice Department's antitrust division is probing Visa's new pricing system, signaling that regulators are still paying very close attention to how Visa and MasterCard set the fees for accepting and processing debit cards.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan will testify before Congress next Tuesday regarding efforts to allow more Americans to refinance their mortgages.