Today, federally required Mortgage disclosures make lenders look like they’re trying to hide fees. Fixing this is the CFPB’s first big test.

When you apply for a mortgage, you get Good Faith Estimate (GFE) and Truth In Lending (TIL) disclosures which show you fees and rates respectively. They’re both a joke because the GFE doesn’t show line item-specific fees and the TIL doesn’t show your actual Note rate. In May the CFPB set out to fix this [...]

In May, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted new Good Faith Estimates for public and industry feedback. Today they posted the second draft of the new consumer mortgage disclosures after receiving more than 13,000 comments. These are what consumers will be given by lenders to explain loan terms and quote rates, so consumers and industry [...]

So much effort has gone into discrediting and dismantling the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, you start to believe it after awhile. But as a mortgage insider, I have to say their first big splash looks ok. Today, they posted proposed disclosure forms for mortgage consumers and pros to comment on. They’re a big improvement [...]

Fed Board of Governors member Elizabeth Duke gave a speech today at the Consumer Banker’s Association annual conference in Hollywood, and like a lot of other content emerging from that region, her comments about mortgage lending were “based on true events” but far from reality. Here’s the full speech, and below is an excerpt about [...]

This picture on ‘How To Complete The New Good Faith Estimate’ was making the email rounds this week. Laugh-out-loud funny for most mortgage professionals, but also any borrowers who’ve seen this new form effective January 1, 2010 will see the humor.

What Economic Stats Are Doing To Rates Are we heading for lower rates, or higher rates? Certainly there is no inflationary pressure, although GDP for the fourth quarter (generally thought of as “old news”) was revised slightly higher, and was the strongest quarter of economic growth in more than six years. But Existing Home Sales [...]

Loan Agents Comment on New Good Faith Estimate I didn’t plan on yesterday’s Real Words From a Real Agent to incite such a firestorm of e-mails. But first, some “Good Faith Estimate chatter.” The grace period of the new GFE is set forth pretty clearly. But lenders are finding out that what HUD allows and [...]

Comeback For Jumbo Loans What is the American Securitization Forum? Darned if I know, exactly, but they were meeting in Washington DC and came out with a statement conjecturing that non-agency product (a $1.2 trillion market 4-5 years ago, $25 billion in ’08 and $44 billion in ’09) may start to be securitized again later [...]

On the possibility of Fannie and Freddie going away, one clever rep wrote to me and asked, “Do we really need FNMA, FHA, and FHLMC when it is all government run anyway? They could start a new entity named “Federally Regulated Committee to Normalize Mortgage Securities”, or “FRCNMS” – pronounced “FRICKEN MESS”. IRS Definition of [...]