Posts Tagged ‘CFPA’
By James Kwak One battle in Washington — the one that has been in the news this week — is over resolution authority and the supposed “bailout fund” attacked by Mitch McConnell. Another battle will be over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which Republicans are likely to try to cripple behind the scenes. While most [...]
By James Kwak A couple of weeks ago, Max Abelson got some investment bankers who used to work at Lehman to say what they really think about ordinary people: “[Lehman]’s just not that big of an event. But that’s not what people want it to be, so they’ll make it not that way if they [...]
By James Kwak With the financial reform bill out of the Senate Banking Committee last week (another good thing that happened while I was away) and fresh off of victory in the health care war, the Obama administration is upping the rhetorical pressure to pass financial reform. This was most obvious in Deputy Treasury Secretary [...]
By James Kwak The National Association for Business Economics does a semi-annual Economic Policy Survey of its members, who are primarily private-sector economists. The March 2010 survey isn’t up on their site yet, but this is what it has to say about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency: “A key point of discussion in Congressional deliberations [...]
This guest post was contributed by Norman I. Silber, a Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, and Jeff Sovern , a Professor of Law at St. John’s University. They were principal drafters of a statement signed by more than eighty-five professors who teach in fields related to banking and consumer law, supporting H. 3126, [...]
By James Kwak Paul Krugman begins this morning’s column this way: “So here’s the situation. We’ve been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we’ve barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t find jobs or can’t find full-time work. Yet all momentum for serious banking reform has been [...]
American Banker is running an article by Bill Wade (subscription required, but free trial available), a former banker . . . explaining why the banking industry should be in favor of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Wade repeats many of the arguments made by consumer advocates such as Elizabeth Warren: “A Consumer Financial Protection Agency [...]
Although the Consumer Financial Protection Agency made it through the House more or less intact, the banking lobby is taking another, better shot at killing it in the Senate, and is planning to use the magic words: “big government” and “bureaucracy.” Elizabeth Warren wrote an op-ed for Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that lays out the confrontation. [...]
Adam Levitin wrote an informative post on Credit Slips a couple of weeks ago; I missed it but it looks like no one in my RSS reader has mentioned it, so here goes. One provision of last year’s credit card legislation limited up-front fees to 25% of the line of credit being offered. First Premier [...]
This guest post was contributed by Raj Date, head of the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy and a former McKinsey consultant, bank senior executive, and Wall Street managing director. For further information on the auto dealer exemption, see the recent study by the Cambridge Winter Center. Over the past several months, Congress has [...]
Mike Konczal has a post featuring the Grayson/Clay/Miller amendment to the current Consumer Financial Protection Agency proposal. The basic idea is that the agency would be required to do a periodic, statistical analysis to identify those financial products that were most implicated in causing bankruptcies and foreclosures in each state. The CFPA would then have [...]
This guest post was contributed by Lawrence B. Glickman, who teaches history at the University of South Carolina. He put the fight for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency in historical perspective in his previous post on this blog. A recent ad taken out by the “The Center for Consumer Freedom” marks the latest assault by [...]
To be clear, I favor the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. I favor it because I think it will be good for consumers. I also like to think that it will be good for small banks relative to big banks. My main argument for this is that should not harm the main competitive advantages of smaller [...]
Elizabeth Warren has a new op-ed at New Deal 2.0 arguing for, surprise, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, but this time with a different emphasis – non-bank lenders. The opponents of the CFPA – not only banks, but the head of just about every current financial regulatory agency – argue that consumer protection should be [...]

Sam Brownback’s Staff Are Amateurs
May 18, 2010 in Commentary
Tags: CFPA, financial regulation, politics
By James Kwak Senator Sam Brownback has been pushing an amendment in the Senate that would exempt auto dealers from regulation by the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The auto dealer exemption has gotten a lot of press. The House version of the exemption was the focal point of a Huffington Post story back in December [...]