State and Local Predatory Lending Issues and Developments

摘要

Despite pleas from the mortgage industry for simplification and standardization, the states continue to enact complex and non-uniform laws governing high-cost mortgage loans. In some cases, it appears that these enactments may be an effort to discourage such lending, and that such efforts are bearing fruit, though it remains unclear whether borrowers and society will benefit as a result. Federal anti-predatory lending legislation is likely at least a few years away. Although regulatory preemption is bringing relief to federally-regulated creditors, many of these creditors are hesistant to rely upon this preemption because the preemption may not apply to brokers and others, such as investors in the secondary market. Even this regulation and, if enacted, federal predatory lending legislation, may not effectively preempt all state predatory lending laws. Thus, for the foreseeable future, mortgage lenders will be saddled with the task of differentiating, analyzing, and perhaps complying with, a myriad of nonuniform, and ever-growing, state and municipal threshold-based anti-predatory lending rules.