Federal Housing Finance Agency February 2019 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is issuing this final rule to adopt as its own portions of the regulations of the Federal Housing Finance Board (Finance Board) pertaining to the capital requirements for the Federal Home Loan Banks (Banks). The final rule carries over most of the existing Finance Board regulations without material change, but substantively revises the credit risk component of the risk-based capital requirement, as well as the limitations on extensions of unsecured credit. The principal revisions to those provisions remove requirements that the Banks calculate credit risk capital charges and unsecured credit limits based on ratings issued by a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO), and instead require that the Banks use their own internal rating methodology. The final rule also revises the percentages used in the tables to calculate the credit risk capital charges for advances and non-mortgage assets. FHFA retains the percentages used in the existing table to calculate the capital charges for mortgage-related assets, but revises the approach to identify the appropriate percentage within the table. FHFA also has revised the table numbers in the final rule to align with the Federal Register's new formatting standards, which were revised after publication of the proposed rule.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has adjusted the cap on average total assets that is used in determining whether a Federal Home Loan Bank (Bank) member qualifies as a ``community financial institution'' (CFI) to $1,199,000,000, based on the annual percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers (CPI-U), as published by the Department of Labor (DOL). These changes took effect on January 1, 2019.