Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Storage Wars and the Credit Practices Rule

05/15/12

A few times I have caught Storage Wars, a television show on A&E. When storage units customers do not pay their fees, the contents are auctioned off by the storage unit company. The show follows professional treasure hunters who bid at these auctions. The catch is that the treasure hunters are purchasing the unit without full knowledge of the unit's contents.

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CFPB to Share Information with Attorneys General

03/06/12

Carter Dougherty of Bloomberg reports this morning that  the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is entering into an  information-sharing agreement with state attorneys general, that will help states enforce consumer protection laws.

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The CFPB Gets a Director

01/04/12

The CFPB is finally getting a Director, which enables it to exercise its full range of powers. It's good to see this Administration show some backbone. Better late than never, I guess, and Rich Cordray is a great pick.

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OCC Servicing Settlement--Will Homeowners Get Screwed (Again)?

10/04/11

The WSJ reports on the latest development in the implementation of the OCC's mortgage servicing fraud consent orders.  It seems that the banks will have OCC approved "independent" foreclosure review consultants (chosen and paid by the banks) review foreclosure files from 2009-2010 and pay homeowners damages if there are any problems found.  

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The Slips Go to Capitol Hill

10/03/11

Tomorrow, Katie Porter and I will be testifying at a subcommittee hearing for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. The title of the hearing is "Consumer Protection and Middle Class Wealth Building in an Age of Growing Household Debt." More information on the hearing is available here, which is also the same place the written witness statements and a link to streaming video eventually will appear.

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Consumers, Cast Your Vote

08/10/11

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched the first project in its "Know Before You Owe" initiative with the release of proposed mortgage disclosures. While the CFPB did its homework in designing these forms, including getting feedback from a wide variety of sources, it is taking field-testing to a new level by asking American consumers to review two proposed forms.

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Warren's Farewell Letter to CFPB Staff

08/02/11

Over at American Banker is the text of Elizabeth Warren's farewell e-mail to the staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. My favorite line: "An honest market will give companies that provide fair value to their customers a chance to flourish, free from competition with cheaters." The whole thing is worth a read.

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Fed to Wells: $7000 for Wrongful Foreclosure

07/21/11

Yesterday the Fed announced a settlement with Wells Fargo of claims that its subprime unit had 1) deliberately steered prime borrowers into higher-cost subprime mortgage refinancings and 2) falsified income documents to put subprime borrowers into unaffordable loans.  The settlement provides for an $85 million fine, plus an elaborate claims-based compensation procedure for victims, who may number 10,000 or more.  Notably, families who lost their hom

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Plain Vanilla? A Retro Flavor

07/11/11

The Obama adminstration's CFPB proposal took a lot of flak (and almost cratered) because of the inclusion of the "plain vanilla" provision (from the work of Profs. Michael Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir), which would have required financial service providers that offered "alternative" products to also offer borrowers "standard" plain vanilla products. The typical example given was that if a lender offered a payment option ARM, it would also have to offer a 30-year fixed rate mortgage.

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Is Asbestos Defense Anti-Consumer?

07/05/11

The Boston Herald has a piece questioning Elizabeth Warren's consumer bona fides because she worked on a 2008 Supreme court appeal for Traveller's Insurance involving the validity of Traveller's settlements for asbestos liability relating to Johns Manville's bankruptcy in the 1970s.

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