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Republicans in Congress have moved closer to rolling back an Obama-era regulation designed to prevent racial discrimination in auto financing, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Senate yesterday voted to proceed with legislation to overturn the 2013 guidance addressing lending practices at auto dealerships, one of the most controversial policies implemented by the Obama-era leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The procedural vote, approved 50-47 largely along the party lines, is seen as a proxy for the success of the final vote slated for tomorrow, according to congressional aides. The House is expected to approve its version of the legislation shortly thereafter. The lawmakers are targeting a CFPB regulation that curbed auto dealers’ ability to charge extra interest on certain loans. Alleging that some minority borrowers were charged more than white borrowers through a practice called “dealer markups,” the CFPB used the policy to impose tens of millions of dollars in fines on several auto lenders between 2013 and 2016, including Ally Financial Inc. and Toyota Motor Credit Corp.

The Trump administration yesterday announced plans to make it easier for permanently disabled military veterans to have their federal student debt wiped away, the Washington Post reported. People with severe disabilities are eligible by law to have the government discharge their federal student loans, but the benefit has not been widely publicized. Working with the Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Education will begin identifying eligible veterans who will receive an application for loan forgiveness. Disabled veterans must sign and return the application to complete the process. The program builds on an effort started during the Obama administration to help severely disabled Americans. In 2016, the Education Department partnered with the Social Security Administration to identify borrowers receiving disability payments with the designation of “Medical Improvement Not Expected,” an indication they may be eligible to have their loans discharged. The agencies found 387,000 matches in their first review, of whom 179,000 were in default on their loans and at risk of having their Social Security benefits garnished.

Judges on a federal appeals court panel yesterday appeared hesitant to overrule President Trump and install the deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the agency's temporary leader, the Los Angeles Times reported. But two of the three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit indicated they had a problem with the person Trump selected to take the position, Mick Mulvaney, because he also heads the White House Office of Management and Budget. The 2010 law that created the bureau as an independent federal agency specifically said OMB should not have oversight or jurisdiction over it. That raised the possibility that the legal battle over the future of the watchdog agency could end with Mulvaney's removal as acting director — a move that would be cheered by Democrats and consumer advocates who have complained about his public opposition to the bureau's existence.

More Americans are stretching to buy homes, the latest sign that rising prices are making homeownership more difficult for a broad swath of potential buyers, the Wall Street Journal reported. Roughly one in five conventional mortgage loans made this winter went to borrowers spending more than 45 percent of their monthly incomes on their mortgage payment and other debts, the highest proportion since the housing crisis, according to new data from mortgage-data tracker CoreLogic Inc. That was almost triple the proportion of such loans made in 2016 and the first half of 2017, CoreLogic said. Economists said rising debt levels are a symptom of a market in which home prices are rising sharply in relation to incomes, driven in part by a historic lack of supply that is forcing prices higher.