Republican lawmakers have recently made efforts to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Bureau was formed after the 2008 Recession by Barack Obama to protect consumers from abuse by banks and other financial institutions. On Thursday, the courts granted a request of the Consumer Financial Bureau for a review by a broader and larger set of judges. A lawsuit was filed in 2014 and a judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals found the agency's structure to be unconstitutional. In addition to these efforts in court to abolish the agency, in Congress legislation is being introduced to replace the director and scale back its authority. Also, just last week a group of lawmakers introduced a bill that would change the agency's funding from the Federal Reserve to Congress. This is just one of many fights going on in Congress to change and reverse the last administration's impact. It will be interesting to see where this goes and what comes of it. More importantly, it will be important to take notice on what effect it will have on consumers.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/16/courts-just-threw-a-lifeline-to-the-consumer-financial-protection-bureau.html
2 comments:
Killing the CFPB is an ill-advised and dangerous move, and one that will backfire on Republicans in the long run. I don’t know how else to view the willful misunderstanding of what the CFPB actually does, which is simple: It demands accountability from financial institutions. If you take away that regulation than you'll have financial institutions most likely get back into bad habits and create another bubble that could hurt the economy in a large way. Hopefully the judges can overturn any efforts to eliminate the CFPB.
I agree with Q in that the complete dissolution of the CFPB would be an incredibly detrimental move. I also believe that the shift from Fed control to Congressional control would be an absolute headache. However, I would like to learn a little bit more about what exactly the lawmakers find unconstitutional about the structure of the CFPB itself; the article doesn't go into too much detail. Personally, I do not think a slight scale-back of the authority or an internal reorganization of the CFPB would be immediately and completely destructive. May government bureaus are known for a lack of efficiency and transparency; I might be able to get behind some measures enacted to improve these aspects. However, I don't think that's exactly what our Republican lawmakers have in mind...
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