The first piece of legislation passed by the 114th Congress is the reauthorization of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which cleared the House and then was approved by the Senate on Thursday and now awaits the president’s signature.
Included in the bill is an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act providing a technical clarification to the end-user rule on some nonfinancial institutions that are applied to big banks.
The reauthorization of the act was met with support from the industry. Both the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) and the American Land Title Association (ALTA) had urged passage of the bill before Congress ended its 2014 deliberations.
David H. Stevens, President and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), released the following statement on the United States Senate’s vote today in favor of reauthorizing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA): “MBA commends Senate leadership and the strong bipartisan coalition of senators who spearheaded the effort to reauthorize this critical program,” MBA President and CEO David H. Stevens said in a news release. “This legislation reauthorizes TRIA for six years, keeping terrorism insurance available and affordable for the $2.6 trillion commercial and multifamily real estate finance sector and the economy as a whole.”
ALTA had joined 55 other organizations in writing to the Senate in December, urging passage of the bill. “TRIA is a critical public-private partnership that facilitates a private insurance market for terrorism risk insurance,” that letter stated. “The program has enabled economic development and supported job growth by assuring that lenders, borrowers and developers have the protection needed to proceed with existing and new projects. TRIA likewise ensures economic resiliency in the event of a terror attack on our nation, while simultaneously protecting taxpayers via a mandatory recoupment mechanism.”
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling said he was pleased to see the Senate pass the bill after failing to do so in December.
“This very same TRIA bill could have and should have passed the Senate last month,” he said. “Thankfully, now that the Senate is under new management, the days of such pointlessly partisan obstruction and gridlock are over.”
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