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As CFPB Shirks Public Process With Advisory Opinions Its Whitewash of Mortgage Continues With Attack on CRA

By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon
Honduras - The Source - The Root - etc

South Bronx, June 18 – With the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency now under Brian Brooks formally undermining the  Community Reinvestment Act, Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch filed a number of CRA protests, and requests with bank- and non-bank lenders for their PPP information.

  On June 18 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced "a pilot advisory opinion program designed to provide additional protections for financial institutions at the expense of consumers. Under the CFPB pilot, itself issued without notice and comment, financial institutions are invited to submit requests for regulatory clarifications in areas of “substantive importance.” The advisory opinions will then be issued by the CFPB, without notice-and-public comment, on the basis of confidential information submitted by the financial institution. Only entities subject to the CFPB’s jurisdiction may request these advisory opinions, and the advisory opinions will provide safe harbor protections for financial institutions under all major consumer protection laws. One of the priorities of the pilot program is to identify outdated, unnecessary or unduly burdensome regulations in order to reduce regulatory burdens on companies." This is a pattern.

The CFPB under Kathy Kraninger issued 2018 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data - with an interface without any racial or ethnic information unlike 2017 and every previous year, undermining the entire purpose of the HMDA law. See this page and this December 16 filing with FDIC, cc-ed to the CFPB:

December 16, 2019  Via e-mail

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Attn: John Vogel, Regional Director and Doreen R. Eberley, Jim Watkins, Robert P. Cordeiro, Scott D. Strockoz 350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1200 New York, NY 10118-0110  

Re: Timely First Comment on Applications by Flushing Bank to Acquire Empire National Bank 

Dear Regional Director Vogel and others at the FDIC:  

This is a timely first comment opposing and requesting an extension of the FDIC's public comment period on the Applications by Flushing Bank to Acquire Empire National Bank.   

Flushing Bank in 2018, for race specified loans, made six times more loans to whites than to African Americans, entirely out of keeping with the demographics of its market.   

Compare the demographics of its lending to the geography: 68 loans to Queens, 35 in Manhattan, 27 in The Bronx, 35 in Manhattan, five on Staten Island and 24 in Westchester County.    

Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch would like to and has a right to submit more detailed HMDA data. But for the record, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for 2018 data has unilaterally removed the ability of the public to view HMDA data by race on its website, which the FFIEC / Federal Reserve allowed in previous years and the CFBP did even in 2017.

Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch contends that the CFPB's move is both anti-public and illegal.    

For further context, last week the FDIC opted in a party line vote to go with the OCC of ex-banker Otting which is trying to further weaken the CRA, and has already in rogue-like fashion barred the public from comment on charter conversion and even merger applications like that involving Chinatown FSB earlier this year.   

In this context, Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch is demanding an extension of this comment period by the FDIC, its intervention with the CFPB to restore access on the website itself to 2018 HMDA data, a reversal of the FDIC's anti-CRA moves, and on the current record the denial by the FDIC of these application(s).  Thank you for your prompt attention, 
Matthew R. Lee
Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch

cc's incl Brenda.Muniz [at] cfpb.gov

  Watch this site.

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