Subprime Mortgage Crisis: Congressional Developments

As surely as shorter days and cooler nights color the leaves, so the subprime mortgage crisis has brought interesting stirrings in Congress, both legislative and investigative. Here are two of the developments we are following:

On October 22, the chair of the Committee on Financial Services of the House of Representatives and co-sponsors introduced the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2007, H.R. 3915. The bill would reform the residential mortgage origination process in a number of ways, including by requiring all originators to be licensed or registered under state or federal law (§ 104). Among other things, it would amend the Truth in Lending Act ("TILA") to provide that —