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Mick Mulvaney Plans To Take Down Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Public Complaint Database
Congressional Republicans have fought unrelentingly for years to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, put into place under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The purpose of the CFPB is to promote fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services. The CFPB was created to provide a single point of accountability for enforcing federal consumer financial laws and protecting consumers in the financial marketplace.
The destruction of the CFPB took a terribly large step in early December when Mick Mulvaney became its acting leader, named by Trump. Trump’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is effectively complete.
Mick Mulvaney, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Tuesday [April 24, 2018] said he might remove a database of complaints to the agency from public view. “I don’t see anything in here that says I have to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government,” Mulvaney said, referring to the Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law that established the bureau.
Why? To please the banks and financial institutions who hand him money to work for their instead of for the American people.
Bankers visiting Washington to push for rollbacks to Dodd-Frank gave Mulvaney a standing ovation as he promised to end the CFPB’s record of “regulation by enforcement.”
....reflect his earlier pledges to make the CFPB more receptive to the concerns of banks.
Most of us have never heard of this database so here's a brief summary.
The CFPB’s consumer complaint database has registered more than 1.5 million reports from consumers accusing a bank, lender or other financial services firm of abusive or fraudulent actions. The database is hosted publically on the CFPB’s website and specifies which companies are the subject of complaints.
.... advocates for closer oversight of the financial sector say the database is an essential tool for consumers to learn more about abusive companies while keeping firms accused of wrongdoing on notice.
As has been well-documented on Smart Dissent (here, here, and here), some of the most aggregious offenses have been at the CONSUMER Financial Protection Bureau. Not a week goes by without a blistering report of Mick Mulvaney's destruction of the CFPB, truly one of the most infuriating results of this presidency.
Nowhere is Trump’s deregulatory efforts more evident than at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent watchdog agency established after the financial crisis that has delivered more than $12 billion in consumer relief to more than 29 million people.
He installed White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, who once compared government regulations to a “slow cancer” and called the bureau a “joke,” as the bureau’s interim leader last November.... has not filed any new enforcement cases since he took charge, would increasingly defer to state regulators and attorneys generals rather than file its own lawsuits, he told a group of state attorneys general also in Washington last week for a conference.
Last week, Mulvaney told a gathering of credit union executives what many had been clamoring to hear: “We are not going to bend over backward to try to come up with creative ways to sue people just because we have the authority to do that.”
Already, Mulvaney has bolstered the hopes of payday lenders.... in January dropped a nearly four-year-old investigation into a subprime lender that allegedly charged customers exorbitant interest rates. It also dropped a lawsuit against four payday lenders that charged interest rates as high as 950 percent.
Sources:
http://smartdissent.com/article/trump-administration-systematically-ending-consumer-protections
http://smartdissent.com/article/destruction-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-disgusting