Senator asks Regulators for Consistency between Qualified Mortgages and Qualified Residential Mortgages

Corker said that since the rule carves out loans sold to the GSEs and FHA, if the QRM rule is written differently than the QM rule most lenders will only originate loans intended for sale to those institutions and to the Veterans Administration.  "As such, a perverse outcome of a QRM rule that is different than the QM rule would be that we might permanently enshrine the GSEs and other government agencies as the only large-scale source of mortgage credit in our country. With the federal government now standing behind over 90 percent of home loans originated in the United States, a situation that is simply not sustainable, such an outcome would not at all be healthy for our financial system.

Corker told the regulators that matching CFPB's version of a safe loan for any borrower with the regulators' definition of what constitutes a loan that is safe for securitization makes sense for the system, and would be wholly consistent with the statute.