Category Archives: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

NerdWallet Article Explores What CFPB Has Done to Help Consumers

Brad Wolverton's article, Your Wallet Will Suffer If This Agency Is Gutted, is an excellent roundup of the Bureau's accomplishments that cuts across a variety of areas, including student loans, credit cards, debt collection, mortgages, payday loans, credit reporting agencies, auto lending, consumer complaints, military protections, and arbitration. Excerpt: Collectively, for every $1 in federal spending on […]

Trump Seems Uninformed During Discussions of CFPB, Firing Cordray with Community Bankers

by Jeff Sovern The American Banker article is headlined Trump discussed Cordray's future in community bank meeting (free content).  Excerpt: At one point, Trump expressed to the group that many had urged him to oust Cordray, but the president was not sure it was worth the political backlash. But Trump was apparently under the impression that […]

New CFPB Report Details Problems and Recent Reforms at Consumer Reporting Companies

A March 2017 report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sets out serious problems uncovered by examinations at the Big Three consumer reporting companies (Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax) and details significant new reforms that these companies must implement to protect consumers.    This article by National Consumer Law Center staff attorney Chi Chi Wu walks through […]

Bloomberg’s Gregory Roberts: CFPB’s Assault on Arbitration Stuck Between Rock, Hard Place

Here.  Excerpt: Any move by the CFPB to adopt a final version of its rule would almost certainly prompt Republican lawmakers to overturn it, with a long-term chilling effect on future regulation of the clauses used by banks and other financial services providers. But if the CFPB does not put out a final rule before […]

Chris Peterson’s Important Defense of the CFPB

It's titled Will Congress Remove Consumer Credit “Seat Belts”? and is in Democracy. The whole piece is worth reading if you care about the CFPB, but here's an excerpt to whet your appetite: [I]f the CFPB really were a “runaway agency,” we should expect to see banks running from it. In every law enforcement case, […]

House Passes Bill to Require OMB to Review Some CFPB Regs Before Issuance

by Jeff Sovern As an independent agency, the CFPB can issue regulations without approval from the Office of Management and Budget.  But the House has now passed a bill that would require OMB to review major regulations promulgated by independent agencies, including the CFPB and the FTC (though the FTC seldom produces regulations, a topic […]

Bloomberg: Dismantling Dodd-Frank May Have to Wait

Here.  Excerpt: Hensarling does already have a bill in the House, the Financial Choice Act, that’s being given long odds. “We think the chances that the bill becomes law are less than 20 percent—maybe as low as 10 percent,” Brian Gardner, Washington analyst at the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, wrote to clients on […]

CFPB Director Cordray’s CNBC Interview

Here.  Excerpt: [John] Harwood: The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial, said your agency is lawless. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who is an independent-minded senator, refers to you as King Richard. People say, "He's a dictator." What do you say? Cordray: First of all, I think it's completely ill-founded. There's never specifics in those kinds […]

WSJ: Key GOP Lawmaker: Commission Could Be Compromise in CFPB Overhaul

Remember how House Financial Services Committee Chair Jeb Hensarling said last month that he wanted to change the CFPB's structure to one headed by a single director reporting to the president?  Well, now the WSJ is reporting that Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, chair of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer […]