As you may know, Capital One recently applied to regulators to acquire ING Direct. The deal would create the fifth-largest bank in the country and raises substantial concerns about how the deal would impact communities.

The CFPB is soliciting a third round of comments on its Know Before You Owe project to simplify disclosure forms used in the mortgage process.  The agency last week extended the deadline to this Wednesday.

As the number of foreclosure filings continue to outpace loan modifications and other foreclosure prevention strategies, more and more homes are becoming vacant in the Chicago region. More than 95 percent of completed foreclosures in the six-county region in 2010 became owned by their lenders and likely remain vacant, data from Woodstock Institute show. Moving families back into these homes would counteract the destabilizing influences of vacancy and set neighborhoods on the path to recovery. While new household formation is on the rise and should contribute to an increased demand for homeownership, access to mortgage credit has become sharply constricted.

We’ve been pushing for stronger protections on overdraft protection loans for years, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a federal bank regulator, recently released a proposed guidance that would eliminate some of the worst features of overdraft programs-such as ordering transactions to maximize fee income.  However, the proposed rule has a glaring flaw—it puts  bank-based payday loans, also known as deposit advance loans, in the same category as overdraft loans. Bank payday loans and overdraft loans are entirely different beasts—they’re structured differently, used for different purposes, and have different risks. The two products need regulations tailored to their unique characteristics. We recently submitted our comments on these rules; you can send regulators your thoughts until August 8, 2011.

When it takes a long time to create a problem, it often takes even longer to fix it. In Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro illustrated how various American tax, property and financial policies and practices precluded generations of African Americans from building wealth and created intergenerational poverty, the effects of which continue to reverberate today. The gains that some African Americans and other people of color made in wealth creation through home ownership, small business development and educational attainment during the late 1990s and early 2000s were all but wiped out by ongoing the financial and foreclosure crisis. If left unaddressed, the racial wealth gap will continue to grow.

An amendment to the Economic Development Revitalization Act (S. 782) appeared yesterday that would essentially disarm consumers’ cop on the beat, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Amendment #391, proposed by Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), would seriously weaken the CFPB’s ability to protect consumers—its only mandate. It puts the same regulators who failed to restrain the reckless subprime lending that led to the housing crisis in a position to paralyze the CFPB’s ability to take action against financial institutions who are harming consumers.