Fair Lending Fade-out

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Bloomberg BNA quoted me in In 2017, Look for Pullback on Fair Lending Enforcement (behind a paywall). It opens,

Expect a pullback in fair lending enforcement in 2017, and especially less focus on disparate impact discrimination as the Trump administration takes office.

That’s the assessment of banking attorneys and others weighing the role of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Justice Department in the uncertain year ahead.

Although a recent court ruling raises questions about CFPB Director Richard Cordray’s tenure, several said they expect the CFPB to be less assertive no matter who heads the agency.

Meanwhile, new leadership at the Justice Department and HUD means that disparate impact claims—allegations of discriminatory effect, without regard to subjective intent—will get less attention than in recent years.

David Reiss, professor of law at Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, N.Y., summed up the assessment of several interviewed by Bloomberg BNA on the picture ahead for 2017.

“I would guess that disparate impact won’t be a priority for the Trump administration,” Reiss said.

New Leadership Ahead

In November, Trump said he’ll nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as attorney general. The president-elect also Dec. 5 named Ben Carson, the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, as his candidate to lead HUD.

Alan S. Kaplinsky, a partner in Philadelphia who leads the consumer financial services practice at Ballard Spahr, said he doesn’t expect Sessions “to be a strong advocate for pushing the legal envelope on fair lending issues.”

And Carson might not use what some have called an “enforcement by litigation” approach to housing policy, according to Joseph Pigg, the American Bankers Association’s senior vice president for mortgage finance.

“Returning to a more normal enforcement regime should be a positive for borrowers and lenders alike,” Pigg told Bloomberg BNA. HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan declined to comment on the fair-lending outlook at HUD.

A Well-Known Unknown

Carson, a well-known physician and education reform advocate, took on an even higher profile by entering the 2016 White House race. But on lending, housing and other matters likely to come before him should he take the helm at HUD, Carson’s record is sparse.

One exception is a July 23, 2015, opinion piece in the Washington Times, where Carson criticized HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. Although HUD has a distinct regulation that governs disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act, the AFFH rule has a different focus. The regulation, drawn from language in the Fair Housing Act itself, lays out a new process that HUD says “promotes housing choice and fosters inclusive communities free from housing discrimination.”

Carson criticized the AFFH rule, saying it would inject too much government decision-making into local housing policy. The rule, issued in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a major 2015 case on disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act, might actually frustrate efforts to develop new housing, he said.

Reiss predicted that Carson will either try to get rid of the AFFH rule, or decide not to enforce it. But he also said Carson’s stance on the regulation probably is somewhat nuanced.

“He’s acknowledged the history of redlining, restrictive covenants, and other problems,” Reiss told Bloomberg BNA. “He doesn’t seem to be denying a history of structural racism in the housing market. He seems to be saying the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule goes too far.”

Carson and Fair Housing

photo by Warren K. Leffler

President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (also known as the Fair Housing Act)

Law360 quoted me in Carson’s HUD Nom Adds To Fair Housing Advocates’ Worries (behind a paywall). It opens,

President-elect Donald Trump’s Monday choice of Ben Carson to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development added to fears that the incoming administration would pull back from the aggressive enforcement of fair housing laws that marked President Barack Obama’s term, experts said.

The tapping of Carson to lead HUD despite a lack of any relative experience in the housing sector came after Trump named Steven Mnuchin to lead the U.S. Department of the Treasury amid concerns that the bank for which he served as chairman engaged in rampant foreclosure abuses. Trump has also nominated Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to serve as attorney general. Sessions has drawn scrutiny for his own attitudes towards civil rights enforcement.

Coupled with Trump’s own checkered history of run-ins with the U.S. Justice Department over discriminatory housing practices, those appointments signal that enforcement of fair housing laws are likely to be a low priority for the Trump administration when it takes office in January, said Christopher Odinet, a professor at Southern University Law Center.

“I can’t imagine that we’ll see any robust enforcement or even attention paid to fair housing in this next administration,” he said.

Trump said that Carson, who backed the winning candidate after his own unsuccessful run for the presidency, shared in his vision of “revitalizing” inner cities and the families that live in them.

“Ben shares my optimism about the future of our country and is part of ensuring that this is a presidency representing all Americans. He is a tough competitor and never gives up,” Trump said in a statement released through his transition team.

Carson said he was honored to get the nod from the president-elect.

“I feel that I can make a significant contribution particularly by strengthening communities that are most in need. We have much work to do in enhancing every aspect of our nation and ensuring that our nation’s housing needs are met,” he said in the transition team’s statement.

The problem that many are having with this nomination is that Carson has little to no experience with federal housing policy. A renowned neurosurgeon, Carson’s presidential campaign website made no mention of housing, and there is little record of him having spoken about it on the campaign trail. One Carson campaign document called for privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-run mortgage backstops that were bailed out in 2008.

The nomination also comes in the weeks after a spokesman for Carson said that the former presidential candidate had no interest in serving in a cabinet post because he lacked the qualifications. That statement has since been walked back but has been cited by Democrats unhappy with the Carson selection.

“Cities coping with crumbling infrastructure and families struggling to afford a roof overhead cannot afford a HUD secretary whose spokesperson said he doesn’t believe he’s up for the job,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. “President-elect Trump made big promises to rebuild American infrastructure and revitalize our cities, but this appointment raises real questions about how serious he is about actually getting anything done.”

HUD is a sprawling government agency with a budget around $50 billion and programs that include the Federal Housing Administration, which provides financing for lower-income and first-time homebuyers, funding and administration of public housing programs, disaster relief, and other key housing policies.

It also helps enforce anti-discrimination policies, in particular the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule that the Obama administration finalized. The rule, which was part of the 1968 Fair Housing Act but had been languishing for decades, requires each municipality that receives federal funding to assess their housing policies to determine whether they sufficiently encourage diversity in their communities.

Carson has not said much publicly about housing policy, but in a 2015 op-ed in the Washington Times compared the rule to failed school busing efforts of the 1970s and at other times called the rule akin to communism.

“These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse. There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous,” wrote Carson, who lived in public housing for a time while growing up in Detroit.

That dismissiveness toward the rule has people who are concerned about diversity in U.S. neighborhoods and anti-discrimination efforts on edge, and could put an end to federal efforts to improve those metrics.

“If you’re not affirmatively furthering fair housing, we’re going to be stuck with the same situation we have now or it’s going to get worse over time,” said David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School and research affiliate at New York University’s Furman Center.

New FHA Guidelines No Biggie

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(Original Purchases in Levittown Funded in Large Part by FHA Mortgages)

Law360 quoted me in New Guidelines For Bad FHA Loans Won’t Boost Lending (behind paywall). It opens,

The federal government on Thursday provided lenders with a streamlined framework for how it determines whether the Federal Housing Administration must be paid for a loan gone bad, but experts say the new framework will have limited effect because it failed to alleviate the threat of a Justice Department lawsuit.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provided lenders with what it called a “defect taxonomy” that it will use to determine when a lender will have to indemnify the FHA, which essentially provides insurance for mortgages taken out by first-time and low-income borrowers, for bad loans. The new framework whittled down the number of categories the FHA would review when making its decisions on loans and highlighted how it would measure the severity of those defects.

All of this was done in a bid to increase transparency and boost a sagging home loan sector. However, HUD was careful to state that its new default taxonomy does not have any bearing on potential civil or administrative liability a lender may face for making bad loans.

And because of that, lenders will still be skittish about issuing new mortgages, said Jeffrey Naimon, a partner with BuckleySandler LLP.

“What this expressly doesn’t address is what is likely the single most important thing in housing policy right now, which is how the Department of Justice is going to handle these issues,” he said.

The U.S. housing market has been slow to recover since the 2008 financial crisis due to a combination of economics, regulatory changes and, according to the industry, the threat of litigation over questionable loans from the Justice Department, the FHA and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

In recent years, the Justice Department has reached settlements reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars with banks and other lenders over bad loans backed by the government using the False Claims Act and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act.

The most recent settlement came in February when MetLife Inc. agreed to a $123.5 million deal.

In April, Quicken Loans Inc. filed a preemptive suit alleging that the Justice Department and HUD were pressuring the lender to admit to faulty lending practices that they did not commit. The Justice Department sued Quicken soon after.

Policymakers at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which serves as the conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and HUD have attempted to ease lenders’ fears that they will force lenders to buy back bad loans or otherwise indemnify the programs.

HUD on Thursday said that its new single-family loan quality assessment methodology — the so-called defect taxonomy — would do just that by slimming down the categories it uses to categorize mortgage defects from 99 to nine and establishing a system for categorizing the severity of those defects.

Among the nine categories that will be included in HUD’s review of loans are measures of borrowers’ income, assets and credit histories as well as loan-to-value ratios and maximum mortgage amounts.

Providing greater insight into FHA’s thinking is intended to make lending easier, Edward Golding, HUD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for housing, said in a statement.

“By enhancing our approach, lenders will have more confidence in how they interact with FHA and, we anticipate, will be more willing to lend to future homeowners who are ready to own,” he said.

However, what the new guidelines do not do is address the potential risk for lenders from the Justice Department.

“This taxonomy is not a comprehensive statement on all compliance monitoring or enforcement efforts by FHA or the federal government and does not establish standards for administrative or civil enforcement action, which are set forth in separate law. Nor does it address FHA’s response to patterns and practice of loan-level defects, or FHA’s plans to address fraud or misrepresentation in connection with any FHA-insured loan,” the FHA’s statement said.

And that could blunt the overall benefits of the new guidelines, said David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

“To the extent it helps people make better decisions, it will help them reduce their exposure. But it is not any kind of bulletproof vest,” he said.

Monday’s Adjudication Roundup

Reiss on $1.5B S&P Settlement

Westlaw Journal Derivatives quoted me in S&P Settles Fraud Suits for $1.5 Billion. The story reads in part,

Standard & Poor’s has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, 19 states and a pension fund that accused the ratings agency of damaging the economy by inflating credit ratings in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

According to a statement issued Feb. 3 by S&P, a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill Cos, the ratings agency will pay $687.5 million each to the DOJ and the states. It also will pay $125 million to settle a lawsuit filed by California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Cal. Pub. Employees’ Ret. Sys. Moody’s Corp. et al., No. CGC-09-490241, complaint filed (Cal. Super. Ct., S.F. County July 9, 2009).

The parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on Feb. 4.

“After careful consideration, the company determined that entering into the settlement agreement is in the best interests of the company and its shareholders and is pleased to resolve these matters,” McGraw-Hill said in the statement.

S&P did not admit to any wrongdoing in agreeing to settle.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the settlement for the Justice Department and states.

“On more than one occasion, the company’s leadership ignored senior analysts who warned that the company had given top ratings to financial products that were failing to perform as advertised,” he said in a statement.

*     *     *

David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, also said the settlement closes an important chapter of the crisis.

“S&P would have faced a lot of unquantifiable risk if it had to admit wrongdoing in the settlement,” he said. “It is unclear that the Justice Department would have wanted to expose one of the three major rating agencies to such a risk because it could have destabilized the rating agency industry.”

Reiss added that the $1.5 billion settlement should have a deterrent effect.

”[It] likely gives ratings analysts some firm ground to stand on if they are pressured to lower their standards by others in their organizations,” he said. (1, 18-19)

The article also has a sidebar that reads,

Ratings agencies had avoided liability for their actions for quite some time based on the theory that they were First Amendment actors who dealt in opinions.

Recent cases have held that the rating agencies can be held liable for some of their ratings notwithstanding the First Amendment. United States v. McGraw-Hill Cos. et al., No. 13-CV-0779, 2013 WL 3762259 (C.D. Cal. July 16, 2013) and Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston v. Ally Financial Inc. et al., No. 11-10952, 2013 WL 5466631 (D. Mass. Sept. 30, 2013).

For instance, if the rating agency did not follow its own rating procedures, it could be held liable for fraud.

David Reiss, Brooklyn Law School (18)

Reiss on Financial Crisis Litigation

Law360 quoted me in Feds’ Moody’s Probe Marks Closing Of Financial Crisis Book (behind a paywall). It opens,

A reported investigation into Moody’s Investors Service’s ratings of residential mortgage-backed securities during the housing bubble era could be the beginning of the last chapter in the U.S. Department of Justice’s big financial crisis cases, attorneys say.

Federal prosecutors are reportedly making their way through the ratings agencies for their alleged wrongdoings prior to the financial crisis after wringing out more than $100 billion from banks and mortgage servicers for their roles in inflating the housing bubble. But the passage of time, the waning days of the Obama administration and the few remaining rich targets likely means that the financial industry and prosecutors will soon put financial crisis-era enforcement actions behind them, said Jim Keneally, a partner at Harris O’Brien St. Laurent & Chaudhry LLP.

“I do look at this as sort of the tail end of things,” he said.

With the ink not yet dry on a rumored $1.375 billion settlement between the Justice Department, state attorneys general and Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, prosecutors have already reportedly turned their attention to the ratings practices at S&P’s largest rival, Moody’s, in the period leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The federal government and attorneys general in 19 states and Washington, D.C., had launched several suits since the financial crisis accusing S&P of assigning overly rosy ratings to mortgage-backed securities and other bond deals that ended up imploding amid a wave of defaults, causing a cascade of investor losses that amounted to billions of dollars.

Although S&P originally elected to fight the government, it ultimately elected to settle. The coming $1.375 billion settlement arrives on top of an earlier $77 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts over similar claims.

Moody’s is reportedly next in line, with Justice Department investigators reportedly having had several meetings with officials from the ratings agency that looked into whether the Moody’s Corp. unit had softened its ratings of subprime RMBS in order to win business as the housing bubble inflated.

Both the Justice Department and Moody’s declined to comment for this story.

The pursuit of Moody’s as the S&P case wraps up follows a pattern that the Justice Department set with big bank settlements for the financial crisis.

“You would expect that they would sweep through, so to speak,” said Thomas O. Gorman, a partner with Dorsey & Whitney LLP.

After reaching a $13 billion deal with JPMorgan Chase & Co. in November 2014, the Justice Department quickly turned its attention to Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., which reached their own multibillion-dollar settlements last summer.

Now prosecutors are in talks with Morgan Stanley about another large settlement, according to multiple reports.

All of those deals follow the $25 billion national mortgage settlement from 2012 that targeted banks’ pre-crisis mortgage servicing practices.

Time may be catching up with the Justice Department more than six years following the height of the crisis, even after the Justice Department began employing novel uses of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, a 1989 law passed following the savings and loan crisis, Keneally said.

Using FIRREA extended the statute of limitations on financial crisis-era cases, allowing for prosecutors to develop their cases and take a systematic approach. Even that statute may have run its course, as it pertains to the crisis.

“The passage of time is such that you have evidence that no longer exists,” Keneally said.

Politics may also play a role as the financial crisis recedes from memory and the next holder of the presidency potentially looks to move forward, he said.

“We’re getting to the end of the Obama administration,” Keneally said. “I think it’s going to be hard for any administration to ramp things up again.”

And that has some wondering whether the Obama administration and the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder followed the correct path.

“The Justice Department and the states’ attorneys general collected far more in their penalties and settlements than anyone could have imagined before the financial crisis,” said Brooklyn Law School professor David Reiss.

Those large settlements may give investors and top management pause when it comes to questionable activity. However, because no traders or other top banking personnel went to prison, questions remain about what deterrent effect those settlements will have on individuals.

“Big institutions are now probably deterred from some of this behavior, but are individuals who work on these institutions deterred?” Reiss said.

Reiss on FIRREA Penalties

Bloomberg quoted me in S&P Faces Squeeze After $1.3 Billion Countrywide Fine. It opens,

Standard & Poor’s (MHFI)’ chances of settling the government’s lawsuit over mortgage-bond ratings for less than $1 billion may have slipped away after Bank of America Corp.’s Countrywide unit was socked with a $1.3 billion fine.

The Countrywide ruling was the first to lay out what penalties financial institutions could face under a 1989 bank-fraud law the Obama administration is using against alleged culprits of the subprime mortgage crisis. It has boosted the government’s hand against McGraw Hill Financial Inc.’s S&P, said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University.

“If the starting negotiation point for the Justice Department to settle was $1 billion before, that number has just gone up,” Henning said in a phone interview.

The U.S. sued S&P and Countrywide under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, a law passed by Congress in the wake of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. The administration, which seeks as much as $5 billion from S&P, is using the law to punish alleged misconduct in the creation and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities blamed for the financial crisis two decades later.

For the Justice Department, the case against S&P goes to the heart of the financial crisis, attacking the company’s claims that its ratings — relied on by investors worldwide — were honest and neutral. S&P has countered that the case is really retribution for it downgrading the U.S. government’s own debt and it has subpoenaed officials including former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in an effort to prove that.

Hearing Today

A hearing on the company’s request to force Geithner and the government to turn over records is scheduled for today in federal court in Santa Ana, California.

Countrywide was found liable by a federal jury in Manhattan for lying about the quality of the almost $3 billion in mortgages it sold to Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FMCC) in 2007 and 2008. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan agreed with the Justice Department that the penalty should be based on how much money the mortgage lender fraudulently induced the companies to pay for the loans.

“The civil penalty provisions of FIRREA are designed to serve punitive and deterrent purposes and should be construed in accordance with those purposes,” the judge said in his July 30 ruling.

S&P is accused of defrauding institutions that relied on its credit ratings for residential mortgage-based securities and collateralized debt obligations that included those securities. The government claims S&P lied to investors about its ratings on trillions of dollars in securities being objective and free of conflicts of interest.

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Appeal Probable

The judge’s analysis, using the nominal value of the transactions as a starting point to determine the penalty, was “out of whack” and will probably be appealed by Bank of America to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, said David Reiss, a professor at the Brooklyn Law School.

“The Second Circuit has no problem reversing Rakoff,” Reiss said in in a phone interview. “The ruling pushes the balance of power in favor of the government by expanding the definition of a civil penalty.”

While other judges aren’t obliged to follow Rakoff’s reasoning, they will pay close attention to the decision because the federal court in Manhattan is the leading business law jurisdiction in the country and the ruling was clearly explained, Reiss said.