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Wells Fargo agreed to pay a $250 million fine after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) charged the company with failing to improve oversight of its mortgage business and comply with a 2018 agreement to fix decades of internal lapses, The Hill reported. Under a consent order issued by the OCC, the bank agreed to take several steps to improve risk management and customer protections within its home lending operations, three years after Wells Fargo paid a record-breaking fine for a series of damaging lapses. Wells Fargo agreed to a consent order in 2018 with the OCC and agreed to pay a $1 billion fine after failing to make promised adjustments to customers’ interest rates on mortgages and automobile loans, and forced millions of auto loan customers to buy unnecessary insurance products. Those lapses cost Wells Fargo customers millions of dollars and in some cases their cars or homes. “Wells Fargo has not met the requirements of the OCC’s 2018 action against the bank. This is unacceptable,” said acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael J. Hsu in a statement. The consent order also bans Wells Fargo from transferring any of the mortgages it collects payments on out of its portfolio. It also bars the bank from acquiring the rights to service residential mortgages, with few exceptions, until the OCC is satisfied with its progress.

The House Financial Services Committee will be holding a hearing at noon EDT today titled "Protecting Renters During the Pandemic: Reviewing Reforms to Expedite Emergency Rental Assistance." Committee members and witnesses will testify on H.R. 5196, the "Expediting Assistance to Renters and Landlords Act of 2021," and H.R. 3913, the "Renter Protection Act of 2021." For more information, including the full witness list and a link to the live webcast of the hearing, please click here.

New York lawmakers extended the state’s eviction and foreclosure freeze through Jan. 15, providing relief to renters, homeowners and small businesses that have struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. Newly appointed Governor Kathy Hochul called the state legislature into a rare extraordinary session on Wednesday to renew the ban on residential and commercial evictions and foreclosures, which ended on Aug. 31. The legislation increases the amount of hardship funds available to tenants and landlords to $250 million from $100 million and creates a $25 million fund for legal services for renters facing evictions. The legislation also aims to get around a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down a federal rent relief program that would have protected most New Yorkers who couldn’t pay their rent until at least October. The ruling cited “irreparable harm” suffered by landlords and the lack of authority afforded to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to impose a rental moratorium under a decades-old federal law. To comply with the ruling, New York’s legislation provides more relief funds for landlords and allows them to evict renters under certain circumstances.

About 750,000 renter households will likely lose their homes this year after the Supreme Court blocked the federal eviction moratorium, according to Goldman Sachs economists, Politico reported. Analysts at the investment bank estimate that tenants owe between $12 billion and $17 billion to landlords as COVID-19 cases surge, with about 2.5 million to 3.5 million households behind on rent. The findings that Goldman released late Sunday mark one of the first comprehensive estimates of what could happen in the absence of the eviction moratorium, which was stopped as state and local governments continued to experience bottlenecks in the delivery of $46.5 billion in federal rental assistance. Given the slow pace of rental aid disbursement, Goldman's analysts expect that between 1 million and 2 million households will remain without support and at risk of eviction when the remaining state and local eviction bans expire at the end of September. The economists based their findings on rent delinquency data from real estate companies, the National Multifamily Housing Council and the U.S. Census Bureau.