The Tragic Downfall of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

[GURPS]

The Tragic Downfall of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau


Over the next two years, the economy collapsed, Democrats gained control of Congress and the White House, and Warren grew famous criticizing big banks in congressional hearings. She lobbied Democrats to include her agency in their Wall Street–reform legislation, arguing that effective enforcement of consumer-protection laws required a regulator independent from politicians beholden to the financial industry. The Democrats had a better idea: They would make her agency independent from Republicans.

Circumventing the Constitution took two steps. First, Democrats inserted a few clever workarounds into the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the CFPB on July 21, 2010. Commissions such as the one Warren first proposed are ostensibly bipartisan, so a president-appointed director would lead the new agency. Since there might be a Republican president one day, the director would be practically irremovable after Senate confirmation to a five-year term that could extend indefinitely until the next director’s confirmation. To prevent future Republican-led Congresses from cutting the bureau’s budget, funding would be guaranteed through Federal Reserve profits rather than taxpayer dollars.

Next, the enlarged new agency would be staffed with Democrats, top to bottom. There would not be a Republican director nominee for at least five years, and if one was ever confirmed, entrenched left-wing managers could undermine “attempts to weaken consumer protection.” The plan wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good.

 

[GURPS]

Wells Fargo agrees to $3.7 billion settlement with CFPB over consumer abuses​

The company was ordered to pay a record $1.7 billion civil penalty and more than $2 billion to customers with 16 million accounts, the CFPB said in a statement. The San Francisco-based bank said in a separate statement that many of the “required actions” tied to the settlement were already completed.

“The bank’s illegal conduct led to billions of dollars in financial harm to its customers and, for thousands of customers, the loss of their vehicles and homes,” the agency said in its release. “Consumers were illegally assessed fees and interest charges on auto and mortgage loans, had their cars wrongly repossessed, and had payments to auto and mortgage loans misapplied by the bank.”

The scope of wrongdoing detailed by the CFPB shows that Wells Fargo had problems servicing customers well beyond its 2016 scandal involving millions of fake accounts. Unlike rivals JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, Wells Fargo, the fourth-biggest U.S. bank by assets, has a relatively small Wall Street business, meaning that ordinary Americans are its bread-and-butter customer.