Tag: CFPA

Sam Brownback’s Staff Are Amateurs

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 on how the House Financial Services Committee was loaded with moderate Democrats who are weak on financial reform. (That amendment was introduced by John Campbell, a former auto dealer who is no longer an auto dealer but who owns real estate that he rents to auto dealers.)

The argument for the exemption is that regulating auto dealers will — you guessed it — reduce access to credit.* The arguments against are: (a) auto loans are a major source of financing for consumers, along with mortgages and credit cards, so people need to be protected; (b) auto loans provide even more opportunities for ripping off customers than most bank loans, because of the auto dealer’s privileged market position and its ability to shift money back and forth between the sale price and the loan fees;  and (c) if you open up this loophole, you will have regulatory arbitrage.

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The Other Battle

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 of the reviewers of 13 Bankers have seized on the call to break up big banks, few have discussed the first part of that chapter, which argues for strong consumer protection. Simon and I wrote an op-ed in The Hill to reiterate the point and warn against some of the tactics opponents may use.

Now We Are “Ill-Informed and Under-Educated”

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 can. They just want to be mad and don’t know what they’re talking about and want to be outraged.”

“When I read this, I giggle a little bit. Because $50 billion is a s—load of money, but in the grand scheme of things, $50 billion is a drop in the ocean.”

“Yappers who don’t know anything.”

Well, the commercial bankers are not taking this lying down. They are out trying to prove that they can be just as offensive.

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The Ongoing Battle Against Error and Hypocrisy

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 Neal Wolin’s speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week, in which he called out his hosts with fighting words: “the Chamber of Commerce – funded, no doubt, with a good deal of your money – has launched a lavish, aggressive and misleading campaign to defeat the proposed independent agency.”

Elizabeth Warren, who has never minced words when it comes to enemies of consumer protection, steps up today with an even more withering attack on the flip-flopping of the American Bankers Association, which was for the separation of consumer protection from prudential regulation before it was against it. As Warren says:

“ABA lobbyists now aggressively insist that separating consumer protection and safety and soundness functions would unravel bank stability. Yet just a few years ago, they heatedly argued the opposite—that the functions should be distinct.

“In 2006, the ABA claimed to act on principle as it railed against an interagency guidance designed to exercise some modest control over subprime mortgages.  It criticized the proposal for ‘combin[ing] safety and soundness guidance with consumer protection guidance, creating confusion that is best addressed by separating them.'”

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Business Economists on the CFPA

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 on financial services regulatory reform has been the establishment of an independent agency focused on consumer financial protection. Fifty-four percent of survey respondents feel that creating such an agency would not impair safety and soundness regulation; 25 percent believed it would be detrimental.  On a related issue, 43 percent of respondents indicate that a consumer financial protection agency would not impair access to credit while 39 percent believed it would.”

The financial sector has been demanding that any new consumer protection agency be made subservient to the traditional safety and soundness regulators, and has also been threatening that greater regulation will make credit harder to come by. Apparently the business community–a group that is pretty skeptical about government, judging by some of the other survey responses–isn’t buying it.

Uncontrolled Lending to Consumers Spawned the Financial Crisis

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, which would create an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  Some of the research on which this essay is based is drawn from an article by Professor Sovern.

Did under-regulated lending to consumers play a big part in destabilizing the financial system? Many knowledgeable people say yes, but Professor Todd Zywicki disagrees. (“Complex Loans Didn’t Cause the Financial Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2010).  He claims that the present troubles resulted from the “rational behavior of borrowers and lenders responding to misaligned incentives, not fraud or borrower stupidity.”

Professor Zywicki’s argument enjoys, at least, the modest virtue of technical accuracy, because many objectionable misleading sales practices and agreements that lenders used were, and continue to be, unfortunately, quite legal.  Lending practices may have been regularly misleading and confusing and reckless-but fraudulent?  Well, no, usually not unlawful by the remarkably low standards of the day.   But that in itself is an argument for saying consumer protection laws failed.

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Krugman: No Bill Is Better Than a Weak Bill

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 lost. The question now seems to be whether we’ll get a watered-down bill or no bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the second option is starting to look preferable.”

Krugman says he would be satisfied with the House bill, but that the need to bring moderate Democrats and at least one Republican on board in the Senate could lead to a severely watered-down bill, in particular one without a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Instead of accepting such a deal, he says:

“In summary, then, it’s time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic reform that just covers up failure to act.”

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Banker for the CFPA

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 can be the vehicle that restores consumer confidence in our products, our services and our institutions. The customers we serve will always need credit and other banking products . . . What they want is simple, clearly explained products and the comfort that someone is looking out for their best interests when financial products are developed and marketed. . . .

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Elizabeth Warren Calls Out Wall Street

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. For most of the past two decades, many Americans trusted the banking industry–not necessarily to be moral exemplars, but they trusted that the banks were basically doing what was right for customers and for the economy. Then in 2007-2008 that mood abruptly reversed, as it became apparent that unscrupulous mortgage lenders, the Wall Street banks that backed them, and the credit rating agencies had been ripping off mortgage borrowers on the one hand and investors on the other.

The big banks face a choice. They can agree to sensible reforms that protect consumers and rein in the excesses of the past decades. Or they can simply decide to screw customers, but do it openly this time, since they have so much market share it almost doesn’t matter what customers think. How else do you explain, say, Citigroup’s concocting a new credit card “feature” explicitly to get around a new requirement of the Credit CARD Act? Or Jamie Dimon saying that financial crises are something to be expected every five to seven years, so we should just get over it?

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When a 79.9% APR Is Good?

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 Bank currently offers a card with a $250 credit line, $124 in up-front one-time fees, a $48 annual fee, and a $7 monthly fee. Oh, and a 9.9% APR on purchases. That adds up to $179 that gets billed immediately, and a total of $256 over the first year–more than the credit line. Because this card will become illegal in February, they are test-marketing a new card that has a $300 credit line, $75 in up-frontfees (to conform with the law; there could be a monthly fee in addition), and a 79.9% APR.

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Auto Race to the Bottom

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 debated ways to strengthen and rationalize consumer protection in financial services.  Central to that debate is the proposed creation of a new agency focused exclusively on this issue, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (the “CFPA”).

Even among proponents, however, there are varying conceptions of the scope and function of the CFPA.  For example, the CFPA as envisioned by the House Financial Services Committee would exclude auto dealers from the CFPA’s coverage.  The Administration’s original proposal would have included them.  Starting this week, the Senate Banking Committee will have to wrestle with the same question.

They shouldn’t have to wrestle long:  Even by the low analytical standards applied to hastily arranged, crisis-driven corporate welfare initiatives, the exemption of auto dealers from the CFPA appears profoundly ill conceived.  Exempting auto dealers would simultaneously be bad for consumers, bad for industry stability, and bad for what remaining sense of free-market integrity we still have.

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Revisiting the Crime Scene

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 to announce what these products are and who sold them, and could then take corrective action to restrict those products.

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What Is Consumer Freedom?

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 business lobbyists and conservatives on the idea of consumer protection.  This organization’s motto — Promoting Personal Freedom and Protecting Consumer Choice — defines consumer freedom as “the right of adults and parents to choose how they live their lives, what they eat and drink, how they manage their finances, and how they enjoy themselves.”

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The CFPA and Small Banks

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 banks, which should be customer service and local underwriting. But I’m still in favor of the CFPA even if it doesn’t help small banks.

John Pottow (hat tip Mike Konczal) agrees on the small bank point. His main argument is that the CFPA should lower fixed regulatory costs by making it easier to get approval for basic products. He also adds this point:

“The current credit market, with its indecipherable multi-page contracts, is not competitive. Actually, that’s not true: It’s perniciously competitive — the competition focuses on better hiding fees in small print. Burying terms in legal documents is an activity where larger banks again hold the advantage. By contrast, a true plain vanilla market would remove the obfuscation and refocus the competition on price. Once more, smaller lenders would benefit from this increased transparency and leveled playing field.”

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CFPA and Non-Banks

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 combined with prudential regulation, so that one agency should be both making sure that a bank doesn’t collapse and that it isn’t abusing its customers. Many people have pointed out the flaws with this argument: first, consumer protection invariably slips down on the priority list; second, regulators become hesitant to crack down on abusive practices because those abusive practices generate the profits that make the bank “healthy” to begin with.

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