Ah, baby is one. I remember when mine was -- complete with an over-the-top celebration for an infant who had no idea what was going on and would remember nothing of it. The food, the drink, the fancy cake, the ridiculous crown… I chalk it up to a rite of passage for a parent to throw at least one of those unnecessary first birthday parties. On this, Dodd-Frank’s first birthday, I’m not so sure those who birthed it are donning hats, eating cake and sipping champagne in celebration.

On July 19, the Government Accountability Office (the “GAO”) published an 83 page report entitled “MORTGAGE REFORM Potential Impacts of Provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act on Homebuyers and the Mortgage Market.” The report addresses the potential impact on the mortgage market of qualified mortgage (“QM”) criteria, the credit risk retention requirement, provisions concerning homeownership counseling and regulation of high-cost loans. By examining mortgage loans made from 2001 through 2010 in CoreLogic, Inc.’s database, the GAO has drawn some practically meaningless conclusions about the mortgage market. For starters, the GAO acknowledges that the data used for its examination was not necessarily a representative sample. Furthermore, on several occasions throughout the report, the GAO hedges its analysis to the point of, well, uselessness.

In the realm of mortgage reform, the Dodd-Frank Act was designed to prohibit lenders from steering any consumer toward a residential mortgage loan that the consumer cannot repay or that has predatory characteristics and from steering consumers away from QMs and toward non-QMs. Under the Dodd-Frank Act, a mortgage lender is presumed to have satisfied the ability-to-repay requirement and receives some protection from liability when it originates a QM (and exactly how much protection is still open to debate). (See our OnPoint explaining the difference between the proposed safe harbor and rebuttable presumption alternatives for QM).

The GAO analyzed a proprietary database of loans originated from 2001 through 2010 from CoreLogic, Inc. to assess the potential impact of mortgage-related provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act on the availability and affordability of mortgage credit. The GAO notes up front that such analysis may not be fully representative of the mortgage market as a whole. It also reviewed housing and mortgage market research and interviewed mortgage industry stakeholders - including those representing mortgage lenders, securitizers, investors and consumers.