Posts Tagged ‘Consumer Protection’
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 [...]
For your Labor Day reading enjoyment, we bring you this guest post by Lawrence B. Glickman, who teaches history at the University of South Carolina and is the author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America. “We’re proposing a new and powerful agency charged with just one job: looking out for ordinary [...]
The Wall Street Journal has a story about Vermont and subprime loans: …For the past five years, as home loans went to even Americans with poor credit and no proof of steady work, Ms. Todd couldn’t get a mortgage in spite of her good credit and low debt. Vermont banks told the self-employed landscaper that [...]
I want to point out this research brief on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (pdf file) from Law Professor Adam Levitin. At 16 pages, it’s the best one-stop paper I’ve seen for understanding why CFPA needs to pass. As opposed to specific practices, Levitin focuses on four key structural issues that are broken with our [...]
With the anniversary of the Lehman-AIG-rest of the world debacle fast approaching, it seems fair to ask: Who accepts any blame for creating our excessively crisis-prone system? Friends and contacts who work in the financial sector freely discuss their participation in activities they now regret. But where is the mea culpa, of any kind, from a public figure – our [...]
Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, insists that the Fed can protect consumers effectively against defective or dangerous financial products. He and his allies are therefore signaling opposition to – and even defiance of – key parts of the Treasury’s plan for regulatory reform, which involve setting up a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. [...]
Even some of our most sophisticated commentators doubt a link between consumer protection and any macroeconomic outcomes. Consumer protection, in this view, is microeconomics and quite different from macroeconomic issues (such as the speed and nature of our economic recovery). Officially measured interest rates are down from their height in the Great Panic of 2008-09 and [...]
Last week, Simon criticized Jeb Hensarling’s article on the Republican approach to consumer financial protection, saying “the only tools they propose are those that have been tried and failed, repeatedly, in the recent past.” However, Simon couldn’t get a copy of the Republican plan at the time, so he asked for help. Sean West of [...]
Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute accuses the Consumer Financial Protection Agency of being a liberal plot to restrict good financial products to sophisticated elites. Mike at Rortybomb does a point-by-point takedown complete with actual data, so I can stick to the high level (not to be confused with the high road). Wallison’s op-ed [...]
In mid-March, the administration proposed that toxic assets could and would be safely removed from banks balance sheets. We were skeptical, and the the PPIP now seems to have slipped into irrelevance (loans; securities). But the administration still put an impressive effort into persuading independent analysts, and broader public opinion, that they should do something clearly beneficial for banks. [...]
Richard Thaler has a simple argument for plain-vanilla financial products. Mike at Rortybomb deals with some of the predictable objections. This is also similar to Adam Levitin’s position on credit cards, which I wrote about a while back. I’m in favor, although I don’t think it will be enough to simply make the vanilla offering [...]
There are three views on who exactly is behind financial regulatory reform package that will be officially presented Wednesday lunchtime (update: NYT.com has the draft). Each view has distinct implications for political dynamics going forward. The first view is that Tim Geithner and Larry Summers have genuinely become radical reformers. They see the error of [...]
I took three points away from yesterday’s hearing in the House of Representatives. We need layers of protection against financial excess. Think about the financial system as a nuclear power plant, in which you need independent, redundant back-up systems - so if one “super-regulator” fails we don’t incur another 20-40 percentage points in government debt through direct [...]
Congressman Brad Miller has some interesting ideas about how to respond to the financial crisis; not exactly on the same page as Treasury. He’s called a hearing for this morning to talk about, in the first instance, how to assess insolvency in the banking system – and what to do about it (he chairs the [...]
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Good-Bye, Vanilla Option
September 30, 2009 in Commentary
Tags: Consumer Protection
I realized I didn’t say anything about the death of the vanilla option from the Consumer Financial Protection Agency proposal. I was going to right something targeted and biting, but it ended up as a much broader column for the Washington Post about the Obama Administration’s commitment to regulatory reform. Mike Konczal, fortunately, has two [...]