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Bronx / SDNY, Jan 5 –  With US Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting on December 12 formally moving along with the FDIC to undermine the  Community Reinvestment Act, on December 16 Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch filed a CRA protest with the FDIC to Flushing Bank's application to acquire Empire National Bank, see below.

 Now the House Financial Services Committee has set a hearing for "January 14 at 2:00 PM – The Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Financial Institutions will convene for a hearing entitled, 'The Community Reinvestment Act: Reviewing Who Wins and Who Loses with Comptroller Otting’s Proposal.'"

  Be aware: even before Otting's proposal he has been hiding merger applications (one of the Weekly Bulletins now is off line), rejecting timely comments, refusing comments on charter conversions like Fifth Third's and applications like Chinatown FSB, and denying FOIA fee waivers previously granted by the OCC. Otting is a rogue regulator.

  In other fair lending bank violation news, now Wells Fargo has settled discrimination charges by the Philadelphia government. The case is City of Philadelphia v. Wells Fargo & Co. et al., 17-cv-02203, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia said Monday it has reached a deal with Wells Fargo Bank to settle the city's charges of discriminating against minorities in its home loans in exchange for $10 million toward city programs to promote homeownership and cleaning up vacant lots.  Philadelphia filed suit in 2017, detailing that from 2004 to 2014, Wells Fargo targeted minority homeowners in the city with high-risk, high-interest mortgages even when their credit qualified them for better offers, which allegedly led to higher rates of foreclosures on those loans: predatory lending. $500,000 will go to the Philadelphia Horticultural Society's "LandCare" program, which clears and cleans vacant lots, then sets up basic plantings that can be mowed and maintained by local landscape contractors or neighbors.

  As if a parallel universe on December 12 in a badly-webcast FDIC meeting Director Jelena McWilliams said that where she was born there is a phrase about if you can't go to the Hill, the Hill comes to you - the reference was to Rep. Maxine Waters - the FDIC sold its credibility to Otting. And why then are the regulators like the FDIC, now with the connivance now only of the OCC but also CFPB, making it harder for the public to enforce CRA?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 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

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