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The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is gearing up to propose the first overhaul of a landmark anti-redlining law in decades, a plan expected to broaden the definition of the communities a bank serves in the digital age and to create new ways to measure lenders' compliance, Politico reported. The OCC plans to release its proposed rule on the Community Reinvestment Act on Dec. 13, though it could come a day earlier if the FDIC signs on at a board meeting, according to people familiar with the matter. FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams said last week that she would likely agree to the proposal this week. Both banks and community groups have long called for modernizing the CRA, a 1977 law that was written decades before the advent of digital banking. The law, aimed at combating redlining, or racial bias in lending, requires banks to meet the needs of local communities where their branches are based, including low- and moderate-income borrowers. Comptroller Joseph Otting said that it is his aim to “encourage banks to do billions more in lending and investment in communities that desperately need more capital and economic opportunity.” But some consumer groups worry that the end result will instead be to dilute the process so that banks can receive credit without doing much to help the law’s intended beneficiaries.

Some of the biggest names in finance are warning that the government’s plan to return Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private ownership risks disrupting a market critical to the U.S. housing system, the Wall Street Journal reported. The investors, including BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Investments and Pacific Investment Management Co., have told the Trump administration that any move to privatize Fannie and Freddie should include an explicit guarantee of the $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities they issue, which only Congress can provide. The Trump administration, by contrast, says that it is willing to move forward without such a guarantee, arguing that it is past time for the government to reduce its role in housing. To prevent a collapse of the mortgage-finance giants during the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. government agreed to absorb unlimited losses at the companies and ultimately provided nearly $190 billion in taxpayer money. Eleven years later, the Trump administration has outlined plans to put the companies back into private hands—and the way in which taxpayers could be on the hook to bail out the institutions has emerged as a stumbling block.

The Masons won an auction for the bankrupt College of New Rochelle’s campus with a $32 million offer, $11 million more than the opening bid, Lohud.com reported. The trustees of the Masonic Hall and Asylum Fund beat out two others for the 15.6-acre property after eight rounds of bidding over two days last week. The 115-year private Catholic college ended academics over the summer after years of struggles and a scandal that led to criminal charges against a former top finance official. It declared bankruptcy in September. A sale conference is set to be held today in bankruptcy court in front of Judge Robert Drain, who’d have to approve the deal before the sale moves forward. It isn’t clear exactly what the Masons’ plans for the campus are, but court records describe all of the bidders’ intentions as being “for educational and/or institutional purposes.” An email to the Masonic Hall through its New York City website wasn’t immediately returned Saturday night.

A group of investors is raising money to bail out RAIT Financial Trust, a commercial real-estate investment trust headed to a bankruptcy auction, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Once known as Taberna Funding, RAIT Financial filed for chapter 11 protection in August touting an offer for its office property assets from Fortress Investment Group LLC that would deliver more than $174 million to creditors. That offer is due to be tested at an auction, if competing bidders step forward. On Monday, a committee of preferred shareholders filed court papers advancing a competing restructuring strategy based on a $50 million infusion of cash. Preferred shareholders Ramat Securities Ltd. and Kenneth Grossman are leading a group of nine hedge funds, family trusts and individuals that argued that the sale to Fortress is good for Fortress, but bad for RAIT and its creditors. The shareholders are proposing to reorganize the business instead of selling it. Based in Philadelphia, RAIT Financial filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection owing about $160 million in debt. RAIT’s chapter 11 plan said its sale to Fortress would go a long way toward paying down bond debt, compensating senior creditors in full while junior bondholders would get from 46 cents on the dollar to 77 cents on the dollar.

The value of Hudson’s Bay Co.’s Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store has plummeted over the last five years, pulled down by retail woes and sliding rents in a high-profile Manhattan shopping district, Bloomberg News reported. The building at 611 Fifth Ave. was recently appraised at $1.6 billion, according to a filing by the Toronto-based company, dropping almost 60 percent from about $3.7 billion five years ago. The reasons for the decline include “the performance of the store relative to expectations in 2014, changes in market rents on New York’s Fifth Avenue, and the changes in the retail landscape,” the company said. Last month, Hudson’s Bay agreed to go private at a valuation of $1.45 billion in a deal that was put together by Chairman Richard Baker, who wants to reinvigorate the struggling retailer. But the proposal requires the approval of shareholders, and there’s been debate among investors about the value of the company’s real estate. Activist investor Jonathan Litt has argued that the company is undervaluing its “exceptional assets” and last year he said that the Saks Fifth Avenue building should be sold.

The U.S. housing finance regulator yesterday said that it planned to re-issue new capital rules for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac next year, in a development that is likely to slow the pair’s removal from government control, Reuters reported. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) said that it would again propose the rule first unveiled in July 2018 in light of the administration’s decision to begin rebuilding the mortgage giants’ capital bases as part of a broader plan to ultimately remove them from government conservatorship. The decision means the proposed rule may be changed and would have to be submitted to another round of consultation and public feedback, before being finalized. The entire process could take several months. “In fairness to all interested parties, the comments submitted during the previous rulemaking were submitted under a different set of assumptions about the future of the enterprises,” said FHFA director Mark Calabria in a statement. Fannie and Freddie, which guarantee over half the nation’s mortgages, have been in conservatorship since they were bailed out during the 2008 financial crisis, with their earnings being swept into the Treasury’s coffers. The government has since struggled to agree on a plan to get them back on their feet.

A $285 million loan taken out by the Kushner Cos. will require a renegotiation of terms after the firm’s tenants broke their leases, the real estate company said on Friday, Bloomberg News reported. The loan was issued by Deutsche Bank AG in 2016 to allow the firm to refinance six floors of retail space in the former New York Times building. Rent income at the property is falling short of interest payments, according to an analyst note this week on behalf of Wells Fargo & Co., which is managing the loan. The loan was being transferred to a so-called special servicer, which typically oversees such deal talks, according to the note. The loan isn’t in default and hasn’t yet moved to special servicing, Wells Fargo said in a statement. Months of troubles at the building have taken their toll. Kushner has engaged in legal battles with tenants and also issued significant rent reductions. Last month, one of the largest tenants filed for bankruptcy. Kushner Cos., the family company of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, purchased the space at 229 West 43rd Street for $296 million in 2015. A year later, after signing up new tenants, the company received a $470 million appraisal for it, which underpinned a $370 million loan package that also allowed the family company to take out $59 million in cash. The annual interest payments left the company little room to absorb tenant exits or rent reductions.

Office-space startup WeWork lost $1.25 billion in the third quarter as expenses far outpaced revenue growth, draining the company’s cash ahead of a bailout by SoftBank Group Corp. last month, the Wall Street Journal reported. We Co., as the parent company is officially known, said yesterday in a report to debtholders that revenue surged 94 percent in the three months ended Sept. 30 to $934 million compared with the year-earlier period. The report of the heavy dose of red ink compares with WeWork’s prior record loss of $638 million, posted in the second quarter, and is more than double the $497 million loss reported in same year-earlier period. Behind the ballooning losses were many of the very concerns investors had with the company earlier this fall, when it attempted an initial public offering. Once considered the most valuable startup in the U.S. with a valuation of $47 billion, WeWork’s attempt to go public was widely panned by potential investors given concerns over its mounting losses, as well as the erratic management style of the now-departed chief executive, Adam Neumann. With little apparent demand from investors, the IPO was pulled and Neumann was forced out.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau won a $59 million judgment against a pair of shuttered mortgage relief law firms that the bureau alleged scammed consumers seeking to escape underwater home loans, Bloomberg Law reported. The bankruptcy estates of the Mortgage Law Group and the Consumer First Legal Group, along with the firms’ principle members, will pay a combined $59 million in restitution and civil money penalties, according to a Nov. 4 post-trial order by Judge William Conley of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The two firms had argued that some district court orders and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Kokesh v. SEC limited the CFPB’s ability to collect restitution from companies and individuals that violate federal consumer financial protection laws. Conley found that those rulings did not stop the CFPB from ordering disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, with Kokesh only applying to the statute of limitations for such penalties. The CFPB sued Mortgage Law Group and the Consumer First Legal Group in July 2014, alleging that they had collected more around $22 million in improper advance fees from clients, misrepresenting the types of relief services they provided consumers and other violations. The two law firms and their principles were found liable for most of those claims in a July 2016 summary judgment order. The Mortgage Law Group filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2014, while Consumer First Legal Group stopped operations in 2013.