November 30, 2015
The Semi-State of the CFPB
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its Semi-Annual Report for the period ending September 30th. I think that it is a dog-bites-man type of report as far as mortgages are concerned. A lot of the heavy lifting on mortgages has already been done over the last few years with the issuance of various major rules, although the Bureau did issue a lot of proposed mortgage rules with smaller scopes during this period (see pages 89-90). The Bureau now seems to be mostly in an enforcement mode as far as mortgages are concerned (see pages 103-119 for an overview of 45 recent enforcement actions). The report also provides pretty comprehensive lists of its significant activities in its appendices:
- Appendix B: Statutory reporting requirements
- Appendix C: Significant rules, orders, and initiatives
- Appendix D: Actions taken regarding rules, orders, and supervisory actions with respect to covered persons which are not credit unions or depository institutions
- Appendix E: Significant state attorney general and regulator actions
- Appendix F: Reports
- Appendix G: Congressional testimony
- Appendix H: Speeches
I leave you with an interesting chart from the report:
Types of Mortgage Complaints (from about 50,000 total) %
- Problems when you are unable to pay (e.g., foreclosure) 45%
- Making payments (e.g., loan servicing) 37%
- Applying for the loan (e.g., mortgage broker) 9%
- Signing the agreement (Settlement process and costs) 5%
- Receiving a credit offer (Credit decision/Underwriting) 3%
- Other 2%
Total mortgage complaints 100%
November 30, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Monday’s Adjudication Roundup
- BNY Mellon files a brief on writ for cert with the Supreme Court warning the potential for “warping” the residential mortgage-backed securities market if it overturns the Second Circuit’s decision finding that provisions of the Trust Indenture Act did not apply to the securities at issue.
- Investors of Citibank file a class action in NY state court claiming that Citibank ignored toxic residential mortgage-backed securities causing $2.3 billion in losses.
- Investors sue RAIT Financial Trust and its trustees alleging that the trust knew about subsidiary pocketing fees leading to a $21.5 million SEC settlement.
November 30, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
November 27, 2015
The Marvel of NYC’s Water Supply
Another school holiday, another museum. The family and I went to the Queens Museum. Although I am a lifelong New Yorker, I had never been there before. It is a great, small museum, with just a few galleries. It is right smack in the middle of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The museum is a stone’s throw of the majestic Unisphere, which is even more amazing from close up. We had gone to see the survey of Zhang Hongtu‘s work, which was very good. But readers of this blog would likely be more interested in two exhibits on long-term loan to the museum. The first is From Watersheds to Faucets: The Marvel of New York City’s Water Supply System:
For the 1939 World’s Fair, city agencies were invited to produce exhibits for the New York City Pavilion, now the Queens Museum. Each exhibit shared “what the various branches of municipal government are doing to serve the citizens of today.”
To educate New Yorkers about the water supply system, the Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity, created the relief map now displayed at the Queens Museum. A team of cartographers began work in 1938 with a depression-era budget of $100,000, roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars. But at 540 square feet, the model was too big for the allotted space. Ten years later, it made its only public appearance in the City’s Golden Anniversary Exposition at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace.
In 2008, after decades in storage, the 27-piece relief map was in desperate need of conservation. The model was sent to McKay Lodge Fine Arts Conservation Lab in Oberlin, Ohio and restored to its original brilliance. In collaboration with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, it will now remain on long-term loan in its originally intended home in the New York City Building.
The second exhibit is pretty famous and it is very cool to see up close: the Panorama of the City of New York, the biggest full-scale architectural model in the world. The Panorama was commissioned for the 1964 World’s Fair. The museum has kept the Twin Towers on the Panorama, which is pretty powerful, once you notice it.
The two exhibits together give you a sense of the grandeur of a world-class city both in itself and within its broader physical context. Another thing to put on your NYC bucket list.
November 27, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Friday’s Government Reports
- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released its Annual Report to Congress on the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund, an independent actuarial analysis that found capital reserves at 2.7%. Congress mandates a minimum 2% reserve. The findings also reveal a 3rd consecutive year of growth for the fund which is now worth 23.8 Billion (up 19 billion from 2014).
November 27, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
November 26, 2015
Thanks
A poem, by Garrison Keillor:
I am thankful for ATM machines
For the smell of coffee beans
For the dishwasher and for the GPS
Thought up by the Pentagon, a great success
That makes it unnecessary for us men
To ever need to ask for directions again.
Thank you thank you thank you thanks a lot
For what we have and for some things that we do not
I am thankful for macaroni and cheese,
Of mac and cheese I have only good memories
Boil water. Put the macaroni in. It’s
A very nice meal in about ten minutes.
And speaking of food of low status,
Thank you for instant mashed potatoes
Which is simply dehydrated potato flakes.
Mashed potatoes in one-tenth the time it takes
To boil one and whip it up nice and smooth.
And if you want to know the absolute truth
That dry organic peanut butter I hate it.
I like the kind with sugar and fat, saturated.
Thank you thank you thank you and merci
Peanut butter has always been merciful to me.
And for the U.S. Postal Service I say thanks
Delivering mail from Florida to Fairbanks,
I am grateful for blogs and other new media
And of course for the miraculous Wikipedia
Which puts information at your fingertips
An innovation as great as sailing ships,
Or putting a steam engine on the rails,
So thank you Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.
And thank you Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Who in 1997 launched a search engine
Google, which simply is superb
A noun that quickly became a verb.
November 26, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
November 25, 2015
Affordable New York
I just came back from a great couple of exhibits at the Museum of the City of New York that would be of great interest to the readers of this blog. The first, Affordable New York: A Housing Legacy, provides a history and education of affordable housing programs that have been integral to the development of the City:
New York City has a long history of creating below-market housing for its residents. Today the city offers subsidized housing to families across a wide economic spectrum; more than 400,000 in public housing, and many more in privately or cooperatively owned apartments. With affordable housing a cornerstone of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, New York’s housing legacy—often overlooked and little understood—is more relevant than ever.
Affordable New York traces over a century of affordable housing activism, documenting the ways in which reformers, policy makers, and activists have fought to transform their city. A focus on current and future housing initiatives demonstrates how New Yorkers continue to promote subsidized housing as a way to achieve diversity, neighborhood stability, and social justice.
The exhibit has a lot of good pictures that give a sense of the range of options that exist for affordable housing development. It also provides a condensed history of the NYC experience with subsidized housing.
The other exhibit, Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, is a bit more somber, but when viewed in the context of the first it shows the great progress we have made in providing decent housing to a broader range of City residents:
Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a pioneering newspaper reporter and social reformer in New York at the turn of the 20th century. His then-novel idea of using photographs of the city’s slums to illustrate the plight of impoverished residents established Riis as forerunner of modern photojournalism. Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half features photographs by Riis and his contemporaries, as well as his handwritten journals and personal correspondence.
This is the first major retrospective of Riis’s photographic work in the U.S. since the City Museum’s seminal 1947 exhibition, The Battle with the Slum, and for the first time unites his photographs and his archive, which belongs to the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.
The pictures of the homeless kids are heartbreaking — Newsies without the songs — and the recreation of one of Riis’ public talks is pretty extraordinary. The shows are running for a few more months, so there is still plenty of time to see them.
November 25, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- Demand and Supply of Mortgage Credit, Alex van de Minne & Federica Teppa, De Nederlandsche Bank Working Paper No. 486.
- How Auctions Amplify House-Price Fluctuations, Alina Arefeva.
- Low-Income Housing Policy, Robert A. Collinson, Ingrid Gould Ellen & Jens Ludwig, Kreisman Working Papers Series in Housing Law and Policy No. 29.
- Do Increases in Subsidized Housing Reduce the Incidence of Homelessness?: Evidence from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, Osborne Jackson & Laura Kawano, FRB of Boston Working Paper No. 15-11.
- Housing, Poverty, and the Law, Matthew Desmond & Monica Clarice Bell, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Vol. 11, pp. 15–35, 2015.
- Local Government Finance as Integrated System: The Uneasy Case for Using Special Districts in Real Estate Finance (A Response to Odinet’s Super-Liens to the Rescue? A Case Against Special Districts in Real Estate Finance), Darien Shanske, Washington and Lee Law Review Online, Vol. 72, No. 191, 2015.
- Household Formation Over Time: Evidence from Two Cohorts of Young Adults, Daniel Cooper & María José Luengo‐Prado, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Paper Series Current Policy Perspectives Paper No. 15-4.
- Inequality, Financial Frictions, and Leveraged Bubbles, Julien Bengui & Toan Phan.
November 25, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
