The community bank segment has struggled since the crisis to gain momentum in an evolving mortgage market. While drastic changes, such as bank failures and mergers, were not unexpected outcomes from the mortgage crisis, community banks were especially hard hit compared to their larger competitors during the recovery. Specifically, the myriad new regulations born out of the crisis – such as the new HMDA collection requirements, application responsiveness, capital requirements and credit evaluation standards – may have placed community banks at a competitive disadvantage. In an article posted on BloombergView, the editors lay out some ideas on how to modify several rules that have caused community banks to “suffer unduly from some of the rules aimed at large institutions.”
