Gee, I’ve sure missed a lot today.
Stupid caller—get ‘im, Rush!
Obama regime loves stealth incrementalism. GOP is always blind-sided.
CFPB begins oversight of payday lenders (Cordray starts work today- attacks private student lenders)
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 to come from one of the businesses coming under new scrutiny, which could claim the CFPB doesn’t have the legal authority to regulate them.
Senate Republicans had been refusing to approve Cordray on grounds that the agency was too powerful, structurally flawed and lacked accountability to Congress.
Until Cordray was approved, no regulator had oversight authority over a large cross-section of the consumer-credit-product industry known as “non-banks,” which, in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, escaped regulation of any sort.
These nonbank firms include payday lenders — which offer cash loans at steep fees to typically low-income individuals — mortgage-modification consultants and smaller state and local mortgage brokers, many of which originated “toxic” subprime mortgages that set the stage for the crisis of 2008.