Tag Archives: Bank of America

Mortgage origination was up in the third quarter, and it looks like there's a little more room at the top.

Bank of America's Merrill Lynch unit lost in an attempt to throw out an action from the Federal Housing Finance Agency over mortgage-backed securities (MBS) sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Merrill's motion to dismiss the case did not hold up under scrutiny from U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, who is overseeing claims filed by FHFA against Merrill and a number of other banks. Only days prior, Cote denied a similar motion filed by JPMorgan Chase.

The Department of Justice sued Bank of America for over $1 billion for alleged mortgage fraud related to the sale of loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) is speaking out in defense of JPMorgan Chase, calling the U.S. government's lawsuit against the financial institution a case of "no good deed goes unpunished." New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a suit against JPMorgan for the alleged misconduct of Bear Stearns & Co. prior to JPMorgan's acquisition of the failing investment bank, but Frank says the bank is being punished for getting involved at the government's request.

A rather rough quarter for Bank of America still resulted in a better-than-anticipated quarterly net income of $340 million, the bank reported.

The legal proceedings between MBIA Insurance Corporation and Countrywide Home Loans turned into a blame game as the companies battled over liability.

Experts across the country wasted no time in responding to Friday's unemployment report, and the responses ranged from celebration to healthy skepticism. As pundits waged a war over the significance of the report, Capital Economics focused its view less on politics and more on its own breakdown of the data, noting that while the growth was modest, the overall report was encouraging. Wall Street also reacted, with banks and construction firms seeing stock upticks.

In her first monthly report as California Monitor, Katherine Porter described the servicers' efforts to reform their practices before the October 2 deadline.

The settlement struck between the nation's five largest mortgage servicers and the U.S. Department of Justice and 49 state attorneys general calls for reforming mortgage servicing practices with the implementation of more than 300 standards. As described by the attorneys general's own negotiating committee, the banks must "accomplish a massive undertaking" to put all the servicing standards into practice as ordered under the agreement. They were given 180 days.

The Justice Department announced Thursday that it has reached a settlement with Bank of America over allegations of loan discrimination against disability income recipients. The bank was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act by asking disabled mortgage loan applicants to provide letters from their doctors to document the income they received from Social Security Disability Insurance. Some applicants were asked to provide more detailed medical information to document their income.