“The biggest concerns that we see with the CFPB today is they are holding the hands of the payday lenders,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform. “That means that the debt trap will continue and people will continue to lose their cars and their bank accounts as a result of the continued destruction of payday loans.”
Under the rule, a borrower would have to sign a notice authorizing the lender to withdraw from the account after those two consecutive failures. “If I was smart, I would only sign that if there was money in there,” says Linda Jun, a policy counsel with Americans for Financial Reform, a regulatory and consumer protection coalition. “Aside from getting charged more for a negative balance, banks close bank accounts over this stuff, you could lose access to banking entirely.”
In Mick Mulvaney’s final hours as acting director, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed two policies that put consumers at gravely increased risk of the very harm the CFPB is supposed to prevent.
The CFPB is exceeding its authority under the law that created the agency and would set a dangerous precedent with its “disclosure sandbox” policy, its label for granting companies exemptions from disclosure rules. The CFPB would allow firms to obfuscate or eliminate important information in the name of “financial innovation,” a label often applied to defend practices in mortgage lending that led to the 2008 crisis.
The President should have nominated someone with a commitment to that mission months ago, not waited until the last minute to reveal a nomination designed to keep Mick Mulvaney in charge. This nomination is a move to keep the CFPB hobbled and under the thumb of the payday lenders and Wall Street law breakers.
Mick Mulvaney has been doing the bidding of payday lenders for years, but putting the CFPB’s weight behind a joint legal motion with their lobbyists is a new low, even for him. Mulvaney is now openly making common cause with payday lenders to gut the CFPB’s common-sense protections for borrowers
Wall Street pumped $719 million into the political process in 2017, a rate that puts it on pace to outstrip the record $2 billion it spent during the 2015-2016 campaign cycle, according to a new report by Americans for Financial Reform.
In the first twelve months of the 2017-18 election cycle, Wall Street banks and financial interests have reported spending $719 million to influence decision-making through campaign contributions and lobbying. That total works out to about $2.0 million a day. The financial sector is by far the largest source of campaign contributions in federal elections, and the third largest spender on lobbying
Making the database public makes it more useful and more visible, which in turn makes it more likely to be used, and to provide more valuable information to the Bureau and the public about consumer financial services.