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WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — One day after being appointed through a controversial presidential maneuver, the new head of a consumer watchdog agency announced he is launching a program immediately to supervise a broad new swath of businesses including payday lenders, private student lenders and local mortgage lenders. “We will begin dealing face-to-face with payday lenders, mortgage servicers, mortgage originators, private student lenders, and other firms that often compete with banks but have largely escaped any meaningful federal oversight,” said Richard Cordray, the newly appointed chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. [Snip] Any legal challenge to the Obama appointment is likely...

One Senate Republican says that President Barack Obama's installation of Richard Cordray as Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head without Senate confirmation is irrelevant — and that he may not have all the new powers granted to the office under the law that created the agency. "The irony is that while this recess appointment may advance the White House's political goals, it does nothing to advance the work of the CFPB. The statute creating the CFPB makes clear that only Senate confirmation of a director — not a recess appointment — can activate the new powers of this agency," Sen. Rob...

I'm no lawyer, but: As someone who strongly supported a recess appointment for Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I'm confused as to why President Obama chose to act today. Had he appointed Cordray yesterday, during a brief period when the Senate was technically in recess, the action would have been supported by precedent. Apparently, though, that appointment would have lasted only through 2012. By appointing Cordray today, Obama can keep him at CFPB through 2013. The trouble is that the Senate isn't in recess. For complicated reasons the Republicans have the ability to prevent the Senate...

Senate Republicans have tried to prevent the White House from acting by keeping the Senate technically in “pro forma” session until senators return to Washington later this month. One way around the GOP maneuvering would have been for the White House to appoint Mr. Cordray during the short window in between congressional sessions. That window was open Tuesday morning, and some expected Mr. Obama to act then. But he didn’t, and administration officials maintained that they still have all options on the table. That’s because the White House has concluded that it can make the appointment even if the Senate...

Richard Cordray's 'Heroes' Occupy Banks and Private Homes By John Berlau on 12.5.11 @ 6:09AM Obama consumer nominee's long support of radical East Side Organizing Project. When asked about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement in October, Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren praised it to the hilt. "I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do," she told the Daily Beast. Yet when pressed in November on the OWS adherents' increasingly violent tactics, she told a Boston TV interviewer: "Everybody has to follow the law. There's no exception on that." But Warren's apparent disavowal of the tactics of OWS...

Think Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is just non-peaceable assembly of malcontents and miscreants literally infesting American cities? Think again. The OWS agenda is now law of the land in the form of a government agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB was created under the Dodd-Frank financial -- ahem -- "reform" legislation when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress in 2009. The law was signed by President Obama, who simultaneously manages to be Goldman-Sachs’ best friend and an OWS sympathizer. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the senate seat held by Sen. Scott...

In President Obama’s recent address to the nation, he pledged to cut costly regulations to help promote economic growth. Of course, Obama had no intention of reducing government red tape. That is why he continues to demand the installation of a new regulator – Richard Cordray – to head the powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB was created by the Dodd-Franks financial reform bill. Sen. Dodd described the Bureau as a regulatory agency “one like we have never seen before.” The Bureau was given huge power to regulate much of the economy at the whims of its Director...

As their efforts to get the super-regulatory agency known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) off the ground are stifled by Senate Republicans, Democrats are continuing to seek new avenues to pressure the Republican Leadership to capitulate. The latest scheme is a hearing on “Consumer Protection and the Middle Class Wealth Building in an age of Growing Household Debt” whose purpose is the highlight the “need” for more regulation on the economy governed by the CFPB. The hearing will feature a variety of guests who will predictably call for more regulations that the unaccountable CFPB could provide. But perhaps...

Noman's problem with the governance and politics that Warren typifies is their leap from an undeniable problem, to a tendentious attribution onto some demonized boogie man, to a federal agency or some variant of big government empowered to do social justice. Noman further chaffes at the abysmal track record and waste of all such public initiatives. Finally, he resents the Liberal business model, which is to appropriate and amass all moneys perceived necessary to insulate the salvific initiative in ways not enjoyed by the taxpayers (debtors) footing the bill. Statist problem-solving inverts Christian charity, which teaches that Jesus fed the...

Poor President Obama just can't catch a break. Earlier today, the president entered the White House Rose Garden to announce that he'd tapped Richard Cordray to head the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But then he told a bad joke about Cordray's past as a Jeopardy! contestant. And nobody laughed. And it was sad.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama intends to nominate former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to lead a new consumer financial protection bureau that was a central feature of a law that overhauled banking regulations. Obama plans to announce the nomination formally on Monday, the White House said in a statement Sunday. Republicans immediately threatened to block his Senate confirmation. In choosing Cordray, Obama bypassed Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of consumer groups, who has been assembling the agency as a special adviser to the White House and to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The agency will officially begin its oversight and...

Obama is appointing Elizabeth Warren to head the new and possibly most powerful government agency ever created: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which will oversee and approve every single credit transaction in America. Check out the link provided. Here is another link to a video of House Republicans attempting to stop her nomination. Video

Many conservatives and even some liberals have complained about Obama’s penchant for appointing “czars” in order to avoid accountability under law. One of his most notorious is the Consumer Czar, Elizabeth Warren, who was appointed by Obama to help set up and, many fear, to eventually run the monstrous new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We recently uncovered documents indicating the CFPB has been intensely involved in a 50-state settlement discussion underway with the nation’s largest mortgage lenders regarding alleged improper foreclosure procedures. (Anti-business zealots in the Obama administration and state attorney general offices are trying to extract a $20...

President Obama has used recess appointments in the past to get controversial nominees into the positions he chose for them. So the Republicans employed a little used legislative gambit to block the president's expected recess appointment of Elizabeth Warren to head up the new Consumer Finance Protection Board. The Hill: GOP opposition is preventing the Senate from completely adjourning for the Memorial Day recess. Instead, the chamber will come in for three pro-forma sessions over the next 10 days. The cursory sessions are a formality that will ensure President Obama does not make recess appointments, a prospect that was considered...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Elizabeth Warren, the Obama administration's defender of financial consumers, will venture into the corporate lion's den this week, along with Jamie Dimon, CEO of banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. The two will be speakers at an event set for Wednesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country's largest business lobbying group, in its Corinthian-columned headquarters situated within view of the White House. Warren, 61, is an earnest Harvard Law School professor brought up in Oklahoma, while Dimon, 55, is a consummate New York City insider and one of Wall Street's richest CEOs. He was once...

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Wis., plans to introduce legislation repealing the Dodd-Frank financial services law, calling it “misguided” and a “blatant abuse of power.” A key criticism by Rep. Bachmann is a provision in the law that allows the federal government to take over failing non-bank institutions, such as American International Group, according to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and a prime architect of the legislation. In a statement, Rep. Frank said another key objection to the legislation by Rep. Bachmann and her conservative supporters is the creation of the independent Consumer Financial Protection...