Government

Greek citizens delivered a surprising response to Europe’s leaders on Sunday, when a majority of voters rejected a deal offered by the country’s creditors. In this historic turn of events, the Interior Ministry reported that with more than 90 percent of the vote tallied, 61 percent of the voters said no to bailout terms offered by the country's international creditors, while 39 percent voted yes to these terms. Media outlets and industry experts gauged the connection that the Greece crisis can have on the U.S. mortgage industry finding that much of the issue rests with interest rates.

The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) has asked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to delay implementation of the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) Rule, also called the Know Before You Owe Mortgage Rule, until January 1, 2016. CUNA, which represents America's credit unions and their more than 100 million members, issued their request in the form of a comment submitted via email on CFPB's proposal that would delay the effective date of TRID until October 3, 2015.

In order to provide a clear time frame for claim payments, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) recently announced its proposal to establish a maximum time period for lenders to file insurance claims. The FHA also intends to revise its policy on reimbursement of eligible expenses and debenture interest when foreclosure and claim filing deadlines are missed.

Dedicated, visionary, and optimistic about the future of homeownership, Golding has spent more than 25 years in mortgage finance in both the public and private sector. Prior to joining HUD in 2013, he held several senior positions during a 23-year tenure with Freddie Mac—where he served as SVP of Economics and Policy, Program Executive of Making Home Affordable, SVP of Economics and Strategic Analysis, and SVP of Capital Oversight and Economics. Despite his busy schedule shaping the future of American homeownership, Golding sat down with us this month to address your pressing questions on the FHA, mortgage insurance, housing, down-payment assistance, and more. Editor's note: This select print feature appeared in the July 2015 edition of MReport magazine, available now.

Job gains totaled 223,000 in June as the unemployment rate dipped to 5.3 percent, according to the June 2015 Employment Situation released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Thursday. With June's payroll increase, the average monthly job gain for the last 12 months in the United States is 250,000. Job gains in April and May were revised downward to 187,000 and 254,000, respectively, which was a combined 60,000 lower than previously reported.

More money is being put into construction to meet constant demand from consumers. The U.S Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced today that construction spending for May reached an estimated amount of $1,035.8 billion, 0.8 percent increase from the revised April figure of $1,027 billion. Residential construction was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $359.5 billion in May, 0.3 percent above the revised April estimate of $358.5 billion.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has issued a request for information regarding its consumer complaint database after going live with an enhanced version of the database last week, according to the CFPB. The CFPB's new enhanced public-facing consumer complaint database, which went live on June 25, included more than 7,700 consumer accounts of complaints that consumers have had with financial companies with regards to the way their mortgages, accounts, credit cards, debt collection, and other services are handled.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac CEOs are expected to get multimillion-dollar increases to their paycheck approved by the GSE’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), according to recent 8K Filings (Mayopoulos and Layton) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). On June 29, 2015, the FHFA approved changes to the compensation of Fannie Mae’s CEO Timothy J. Mayopoulos, and Freddie Mac’s CEO Donald H. Layton to address recent objectives outlined by the FHFA. Both salary adjustments will go into effect on July 1, 2015.

Following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling legalizing same sex marriage nationwide, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has recently announced that it will offer home loans and other benefits to the spouses and children in all same sex veteran marriages. The U.S. Supreme Court announced on June 26, 2015 in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) listed interest rate, underwriting, strategic, compliance, and cybersecurity as the top supervisory concerns in the Semiannual Risk Perspective for Spring 2015 released Tuesday. Based on data that covers risks to banks and federal savings associations through the end of 2014, the report, which focuses on issues that post threats to the safety and soundness of OCC-regulated institutions, noted an overall decline in revenues in profitability for all OCC-supervised institutions. The four main areas of data presented in the report are operating environment, bank condition, key risk issues, and regulatory actions.