Share this article!

Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) President and CEO Bob Broeksmit criticized the Biden administration for working against the best interests of housing market professionals, observing that “it sometimes feels like it is attacking you directly and injuring the Americans you serve.”

In prepared remarks delivered before the MBA’s 2024 Secondary and Capital Markets Conference and Expo, Broeksmit stated his organization was “committed to working with regulators and lawmakers to benefit Americans, and we know from experience that collaboration gets results.” He called out a “regulatory crisis” that metastasized since the Great Recession, but he noted how Biden administration policies made the situation worse with a series of “regulatory knots” that create more problems than solutions.

Broeksmit faulted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for its announced “junk fees” targeting of mortgage costs, even though these costs don’t meet the Biden administration definition of “junk fee” and are also mandatory as per the guidelines of other regulatory agencies. Broeksmit then noted how the CFPB began a “campaign” against title insurance one day after Biden began speaking against the product.

“Such confusion poses a serious threat to a smoothly functioning and sustainable market,” he continued. “And even if it’s just a political stunt, it betrays a lack of knowledge about a critical part of our economy. Blog posts and the bully pulpit are no substitute for real, thoughtful, informed regulation. We need commonsense rules of the road. We don’t need regulators to build the car as they drive it at a hundred miles an hour.”

Broeksmit also warned against the Biden administration’s embrace of Basel III as working against the housing market.

“Basel III will destabilize the housing finance market by pushing banks even further away from mortgages,” he said, noting how “after decades of drafting housing regulations, our regulators have now outsourced a key part of the job to Europe by trying to push through the Basel Committee’s European-style capital regulation here in the U.S. Why on earth would we let European bureaucrats call America’s shots? Their housing market looks completely different. They don’t have mortgage servicing rights. They don’t have our culture of homeownership. And they definitely don’t have a pre-payable 30-year fixed-rate mortgage—the crown jewel of the American system. The last thing we should do is let them write the rules that govern us, layering their red tape on top of our own. If we go down that road, we’ll create a regulatory knot so tight, it can never be unraveled.”

However, Broeksmit offered a strategy to add a new regulatory position in Washington with the creation of a “National Housing Policy Director” that would “stop agencies from making regulatory knots worse and start the long overdue process of unraveling them.”

“A Housing Director is a basic matter of good government, and there’s precedent,” he said. “The Director of National Intelligence was created two decades ago to address similar concerns. At the time, in the wake of September 11th, the intelligence community was overseen by fragmented and often competing agencies. The Director now makes them work together, ultimately strengthening national security. We need the same kind of streamlined, collaborative, and commonsense leadership in the housing market. The current approach is clearly failing the American people. The costs are too high, and so are the stakes. We need to encourage a new era of safety, trust, and innovation, not continue this slouch toward stagnation and discontent.”

Photo courtesy of the White House