Posts Tagged ‘mortgages’

Discrimination law roundup

  • Supreme Court reconvenes for new term and tomorrow will hear cases over whether Title VII ban on sex discrimination extends to sexual orientation and gender identity [SCOTUSBlog symposium with contributors including Richard Epstein, William Eskridge; Will Baude, Volokh Conspiracy; George Will; earlier here, here, here, etc.]
  • New York City Commission on Human Rights declares it a violation of anti-discrimination law to use the term “illegal alien” in workplace, rental, or public accommodation contexts “with the intent to demean, humiliate, or offend a person or persons.” Does it complicate matters that both federal law and the U.S. Supreme Court use “illegal alien” as a neutral descriptive? [Hans Bader]
  • Minneapolis passes law restricting landlords’ taking into account of tenants’ past criminal histories, evictions, credit scores [Christian Britschgi, Reason]
  • Obama-era Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) mandated burdensome pay data reporting by employers. Will courts allow a course correction? [Federalist Society teleforum with G. Roger King and James A. Paretti Jr., earlier here and here]
  • Professor who directs social justice center at Washington, D.C.’s American University proposes new federal Department of Anti-Racism that would wield ample power to order everyone around along with preclearance authority over all “local, state and federal public policies”; also “no political appointees” [Politico via Amy Alkon; Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker with more on work of Prof. Ibram X. Kendi]
  • Late in its tenure, Obama administration began warning Fannie Mae that discouraging some of the riskiest mortgages (>43% debt-to-income) “could be seen as a violation of the Fair Housing Act.” Fannie and Freddie “quickly complied” and brought the punch bowl back out [Damian Paletta, Washington Post/MSN]

Banking and finance roundup

  • Advice to Mark Calabria, newly installed as head of the Federal Housing Finance Administration, or FHFA [Arnold Kling; more on what to do with Fannie and Freddie]
  • Bad blood between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren on consumer bankruptcy issue goes back decades [Matthew Yglesias, Vox]
  • “Financial planning websites consistently emphasize paying off revolving high-interest debt before saving for retirement (unless a company offers a match rate).” But state-mandated auto-IRAs nudge workers the other way [Aaron Yelowitz, Cato, earlier]
  • Competition for incorporation: “Nevada adopts fee-shifting: Should Delaware worry?” [Stephen Bainbridge]
  • “The True Winners and Losers of Financial Regulation” [Diego Zuluaga] Fed vs. narrow banks [John Cochrane, more]
  • FATCA was the bad fairy’s curse at the royal baby shower: “Welcome to Tax Hell, Little Earl of Sussex” [Suzanne Lucas, earlier]

Banking and finance roundup

Banking and finance roundup

Banking and finance roundup

Banking and finance roundup

  • New research suggests “SEC rule intended to prevent conflicts of interest among staff has actually had the perverse effect of causing staff to profit from their knowledge as insiders of the SEC” [Thaya Brook Knight, Cato]
  • “Federal Prohibition Left California Cannabis Farmers Without Insurance or Banks When Wildfires Struck” [Christian Britschgi]
  • “Is Dodd-Frank/SOX reform dead?” [Stephen Bainbridge]
  • Trial lawyers and CFPB did little to correct Wells Fargo fake-account scandal [Ted Frank WSJ letter]
  • Study finds that more-cumbersome judicial foreclosure methods tend to correlate with tougher lending standards especially for poor; should constriction of home credit for poorer households be interpreted as a good? [Brian Feinstein, Chicago via CL&P]
  • A different way to encourage more prudent home lending practice, scale back FDIC coverage [Scott Sumner]

Banking and finance roundup

  • “The real-world impact of Dodd-Frank, stress tests and other regs” [M&T Bank slideshow, American Banker] “Six feet of new mortgage regulations help explain slower housing market” [Ira Stoll]
  • Will Trump administration allow banking for cannabis-related businesses? [Kevin Funnell]
  • “‘Sustainability Standards’ Open A Pandora’s Box Of Politically Correct Accounting” [Howard Husock and Jim Copland]
  • An assumption of complete transparency would take away “the reason for financial intermediation in the first place” [Arnold Kling]
  • Statutes of repose in securities actions are important in protecting interests on both sides [WLF on CalPERS v. ANZ Securities, Inc.]
  • Encrypted messaging services allow Wall Streeters to bypass all sorts of regulatory scrutiny and speak freely, can’t have that [Bloomberg]

Banking and finance roundup

  • SEC in-house administrative law judges are unconstitutional, rules 10th Circuit, creating circuit split [ABA Journal, Jonathan Adler]
  • “Dear Sen. Warren: If we care to share our policy views, we’ll let you know. Otherwise MYOB. Signed – 33 firms” [Elizabeth Warren letter demanding to know what financial firms think of delay in Labor Department fiduciary rule, coverage WSJ/MarketWatch]
  • New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s grab for more regulatory power over financial institutions would erode due process protections [New York Post quoting Mark Calabria]
  • “Supreme Court Probes Whether Miami Can Sue Banks Over Foreclosure Crisis” [Daniel Fisher, earlier on Bank of America v. Miami here, etc.] Arnold Kling’s prescriptions for getting the government out of the mortgage market;
  • Mini-symposium on the personal benefit standard for insider trading in the recent Supreme Court case of Salman v. U.S. [Bainbridge]
  • India’s devastating crackdown on cash [Cato Daily Podcast with Jim Dorn and Caleb Brown]

About that “Mnuchin’s bank foreclosed on widow over 27 cents” tale

Last month Politico reported that Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin’s bank “filed to take a 90-year-old woman’s house after a 27-cent payment error.” Ted Frank writes that four minutes of fact checking would have shown the story wrong. “A. Widow was never foreclosed on and never lost her home. B. It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit….The story on its face made no sense. No court permits that kind of foreclosure, and banks lose money on the deal.” The story was widely spread in the media (CNN, Vanity Fair, The Hill) and popped up again at Mnuchin’s confirmation hearing for Treasury secretary.