Here, at Penn’s Regulatory Review. The entire piece merits reading, and is short, but here’s my favorite paragraph:
The primary reason the CFPB gave for pulling the guidance documents back is its “current policy to avoid issuing guidance except where necessary and where compliance burdens would be reduced rather than increased.” In a very real sense, this is saying the quiet part out loud: The CFPB is saying explicitly that it is now more concerned with protecting big businesses and corporations than it is with helping people. What other explanations could there be for only issuing guidance that reduces “compliance burdens”?
Here’s my take on a related withdrawal of guidance, as reported in Dan Novak’s Hollowed-Out CFPB Issues Guidance Challenging States’ Authority to Pick Up Slack for the National Law Journal:
University of Maryland School of Law professor Jeff Sovern said the new guidance, like the old, is not legally binding on any court and does not actually change the law.
“So I’m not sure how helpful this step is to the financial industry, other than setting a tone,” Sovern said in an email. “And the Trump administration has already very much set a tone as to consumer financial regulation: that it sides with the financial industry at the expense of consumers.”
