Banking News
Legislation pending in Congress to expand credit unions’ business-lending powers poses a genuine threat to the nation’s community banks, according to the latest in-depth article on Community Banker Today.
Bankers rank fair-lending issues as their most demanding compliance challenge in 2012, followed by mortgage-related TILA/RESPA, and Bank Secrecy Act issues, according to early results in the weekly ABA Center for Regulatory Compliance survey.
Late Friday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a final rule requiring remittance-transfer providers to disclose to consumers information on fees, the exchange rate and the amount that will be received. It also requires providers to investigate if a consumer reports a problem with a transfer.
This week, President Obama installed former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without Senate approval by using a questionable recess appointment. Republican senators, who had vowed to block the confirmation of any CFPB director unless the bureau’s structure and funding are changed, have been holding pro forma sessions to prevent such an appointment.
Today’s Nashville Business Journal reports that bank lending grew faster than it has in three years, increasing at an annual rate of almost 10 percent in the third quarter, according to data from the US Federal Reserve.
The Senate Banking Committee today is scheduled to vote on Thomas Hoenig’s nomination to become FDIC vice chairman, according to ABA’s Daily Newsbytes. Hoenig, the former president and CEO of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank and a frequent critic of Fed policies, was nominated by the Obama administration in October.
Taxpayers have made more than $13 billion in profit so far from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program through repayments, dividends, interest, and other income from banks, the agency said yesterday in its monthly TARP report. “As of today, taxpayers have recovered over $258 billion from TARP’s bank programs … over $13 billion more than the $245 billion invested in banks,” the report said.
While a bill (H.R. 1723) designed to stop regulators from assigning “nonaccrual” status to performing amortizing loans has worthy goals, ABA cannot support it, the association said yesterday in a memo to the House Financial Institutions Subcommittee.
The ABA Education Foundation is sponsoring a free, financial education solutions webinar at 3:00 pm EST on November 16.
Simplifying checking account disclosures -- as Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) urged last week -- would be a valuable but challenging task, ABA EVP Wayne Abernathy said on Friday.
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