Pretty much everything at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual event this year was geared around the upcoming Qualified Mortgage regulations, set to go into effect early next year. The industry is concerned that QM might take the legs out from underneath a nation's housing recovery by further restricting lending activity.
The hand-wringing has gone too far, accoding to loan originator Mark Green in a column appearing at Forbes:
For the record, I am a "mortgage industry participant," a retail mortgage loan originator, and I am not a fan of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, but contrary to many of my peers, I rate QM and QRM no more than a shrug and a yawn, except for one thing.
Greene argues that the QM standard has largely already been set into motion with the industry's own lending standards in recent years, but takes issue with the DTI ration ceiling of 43% associated with the new regulations:
With the housing markets struggling for sure footing in a somewhat less than robust recovery, the CFPB is engineering a 20% +/- reduction in the strength of an economic engine that otherwise deployed, will lead to real, measureable growth in our economy and our recovery.
Which, to those of us at HW, merits more than simply a "yawn."
