by Jeff Sovern
At Real Clear Politics, by George Masonites Hester Pierce and Vera Soliman. The arguments (with my editorializing on some points) are that the Bureau's payday lending rule would put some such lenders out of business (would those be the lenders that ensnare consumers in a never-ending debt trap?), that the Bureau collects too much information about consumers (would that be the information that the companies that deal with consumers have?), that the Bureau is trying to stop lenders who finance car loans from buying car loans (would those be discriminatory loans?), that the Bureau is exceeding its powers by trying to collect information about for-profit colleges engaging in unlawful acts, that the Bureau violated due process by retroactively changing its interpretation of the law and applying its view to PHH's conduct, that the Bureau politicized consumer protection, that the Bureau was too slow to stop Wells Fargo (perhaps the Bureau should have acted faster but if it had, and if it had made a mistake, wouldn't we now be hearing about that mistake?). I look forward to hearing Bureau critics saying whether the millions of consumers who have been paid billions of dollars in redress because of the Bureau should give that money back and what will happen to such consumers in the future if the Bureau is abolished or neutered. Not to mention the other consumers who won't need redress because financial institutions behave better because of the Bureau's past interventions.
