The Trump administration’s deregulatory fervor has stirred expectations for a pullback in the enforcement of laws aimed at preventing discrimination in lending, a shift that has banks hopeful and consumer advocates on guard, the New York Times reported today. Bankers have been frustrated by what they perceive as overzealous enforcement of fair lending rules over the last few years, while at the same time consumer watchdogs and regulators have raised serious concerns about biased lending in some communities after banks pulled back from mortgage lending because of the financial crisis. During the housing bubble before the crisis, discriminatory lending was not a focus of regulatory efforts. The Justice Department pursued just a handful of cases each year, many of which were settled for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But regulators stepped up their enforcement in more recent years, and the Justice Department even set up a separate fair lending unit in 2010. From 2010 to 2014, the Justice Department won $1.4 billion in fair lending settlements, according to a report to Congress that was submitted last August. In 2015, it opened 18 investigations, filed eight cases and settled nine, which led to another $82 million in relief, the report said. That tally includes several prominent cases, including a $33 million consent order involving accusations of redlining against Hudson City Savings Bank, which neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing. The Hudson City case, the federal government’s largest redlining settlement, was filed jointly by the Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
