In the audience at the House Financial Services Committee’s semi-annual CFPB review hearing this morning, you’ll see a delegation of community leaders and consumer advocates from around the country wearing lime-green t-shirts and signs that say, “The CFPB Has Our Back.”
“Repeat a preposterous story often enough, and maybe someday you’ll get a few people to believe it. That could be the theory behind the campaign to depict the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as an NSA-style spy agency and a threat to liberty.”
“We support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) acquisition and analysis of commercial databases to help it ensure the public is fairly treated by the financial marketplace.
As leaders of consumer and privacy organizations, we agree that the CFPB needs to use the wide range of data available to financial institutions and services in order to identify best practices and necessary safeguards.”
“Those who backed the CFPB’s creation and support its work overwhelmingly agree that one director is the preferred structure. Those who push hardest for a change to a commission opposed the creation of a consumer protection agency at the outset. Consumer advocates are united in their support for the current structure. This is not a case of the public demanding “reform.” Rather, it is a campaign manufactured by the very Wall Street banks, payday lenders, and other financial firms the CFPB was created to regulate. We urge you to defend a strong CFPB and to reject proposals to change the leadership structure, weaken the funding, narrow the authority, or otherwise hobble the effectiveness of this crucially important agency.”
Today, CREDO Action, Americans for Financial Reform, Public Citizen, USAction and USPIRG delivered petitions in which more than 200,000 Americans told Congress not to let the budget process be used as a vehicle for backdoor financial deregulation.
“Supporters of the “Reforming CFPB Indirect Auto Financing Guidance Act,” which passed by a vote of 332 to 96, have tried to hide behind a smokescreen of baseless questions and false claims supplied to them by industry lobbyists. But the clear intent of this bill is to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from taking action to combat lending practices that lead to African-American as well as Hispanic and Asian-American borrowers being charged higher interest rates on auto loans.”
“‘Car dealers and lenders are attacking the guidance because they do not want the CFPB to enforce antidiscrimination laws in car lending,’ the nonprofit group Americans for Financial Reform wrote in a September letter to lawmakers. ‘They have known for decades that car dealer markups lead to discriminatory lending, and they would prefer the CFPB ignore this particular injustice.'”
“”The industry’s agenda is far-reaching,” [AFR’s Jim] Lardner wrote in U.S. News & World Report. ‘But the riders all share a common purpose: They would make it easier for banks and financial companies to exploit us, whether by cheating consumers, engaging in reckless bets or using taxpayer subsidies to generate windfall profits for a handful of giant institutions and a narrow financial elite.'”
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced yesterday that it has finalized a set of updated HMDA rules that should significantly improve the quality and value of this data, deepening public understanding of the mortgage market and advancing efforts to make credit available fairly, safely, and broadly.”
“These are matters of vital public significance, and it is a sign of progress that they are on the public agenda for the 2016 election… In a number of important areas, however, the plan largely restates existing law or practice, or reiterates commitments that regulators have already made. As a totality it does not go far enough to address the scale and scope of the problems of our financial system. “