Household HSBC Watch

Finally after years of advocating for consumers and performing watchdog functions Household - HSBC Watch is proud to announce that there will be oversight and monitoring of HFC, Beneficial Finance, and other HSBC holding companies.

Federal and state banking regulators on Tuesday said they would step up their scrutiny of lenders that make home loans to people with shaky credit, focusing on companies that operate outside federal banking oversight. The pilot program announced by the Federal Reserve, two other federal agencies and state banking officials is scheduled to start in the fourth quarter and affect about 12 lenders. It will be designed to examine firms that account for the majority of subprime loans, a category that has experienced a surge of defaults in recent months.

Foreclosures were up 87 percent last month from year-ago levels, real estate information company RealtyTrac said last week.

Only about a quarter of subprime loans in 2005, the most recent year available, were made by federally regulated banks, according to the Fed. Instead, they were made by state-licensed lenders and subsidiaries of federally regulated banks that operate with limited federal regulation.

According to Household - HSBC Watch “Now we will see if changes mandated after Household International’s $484 predatory lending settlement were really enforced by HSBC, and we see sad faces at the OCC as they can no longer protect some of their banks when there is clear evidence of wrong-doing.”