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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

It says they want to replace the head guy and restructure the agency. This is why:

> A 2013 press release from the House Services Committee (HSC) criticized the CFPB for what was described as a "radical structure" that "is controlled by a single individual who cannot be fired for poor performance and who exercises sole control over the agency, its hiring and its budget." Moreover, the HSC alleged a lack of financial transparency, lack of accountability to Congress or the President, and expressed particular concern about excessive travel costs and a $55 million renovation of CFPB headquarters that was more costly than "the entire annual construction and acquisition budget for GSA for the totality of federal buildings".

Of course it sounds bad that they want to shut down a 'consumer protection' agency. But those sound like legitimate concerns. At a minimum a restructuring sounds like a good thing.

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And then we look at the chairman of the committee, Jeb Hensarling, when the report was released:

>A vocal critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), he has received $183,400 from the payday lending industry since the beginning of 2013 (directly and through his political action committee), according to a report from the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform.

Why does Wikipedia mention his bribes from the payday lending industry? Because the CFPB is trying to make payday lenders not knowingly put their customers in inescapable debt[2,3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Hensarling

[2] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-f...

[3] http://www.consumerreports.org/consumer-financial-protection...

How surprising. Not sure if that disproves the entire contents of the study done by the bi-partisan committee, but it's not adding any credibility.

Which saddens me as there are legitimate problems in many of these regulatory agencies, but sadly the guys who fight against this stuff are often merely pawns for the interests of mega-corps. Rather than the interests of the general public and small/medium businesses owners who are most affected by bad policy. There's a reason only 6 mega banks are left following the 2008 crisis and hardly any small regional banks any more :/.

its not even a little surprising

The reason there aren't more regional banks is precisely because of all the regulations. I have represented numerous small banks over the last decade. Every single one of them has been sold to larger banks because they cannot compete due to the regulations, which require at least one, and more typically two compliance officers just to deal with the red tape created by the CFPB. These people don't contribute anything to the bottom line. The only way to become profitable is to get big enough that these compliance costs can be spread over more borrowers/account holders.

> The reason there aren't more regional banks is precisely because of all the regulations. I have represented numerous small banks over the last decade. Every single one of them have been sold to larger banks because they cannot compete due to the regulations, which require at least one, and more typically two compliance officers just to deal with the red tape created by the CFPB. These people don't contribute anything to the bottom line. The only way to become profitable is to get big enough that these compliance costs can be spread over more borrowers/account holders.

Counterpoint, a bank fraudulently sold a mortgage loan to Fannie Mae on a property I owned and I got it resolved via the CFPB instead of needing a lawyer and a court case.

I'm not sure why "red tape" is a problem when it protects me from having 6 figure sums stolen from me by a private corporation without needing the court system.

There's no question the CFPB has helped some consumers resolve disputes. The parent's complaint was about the death of small banks. That has been caused directly by the cost to comply with new regulations.

Banks (including small banks) frequently make errors that they stubbornly resist resolving without a gun to their head. Hence, the regulation that kills many of them.

If they were capable of self-regulating to a reasonable degree, the political pressure to create those regulations never would have existed. If you can't afford to fix your mistakes, you shouldn't be in business in the first place.

That is the fatal flaw in many of these anti-regulation arguments. Self-regulation doesn't exist in capitalism outside of the court system and you can't expect poor people to afford to fight in court every time there is a problem.

That's certainly an interesting take. In all of my dealings with small banks, it was always easy to get an EVP on the phone to sort out problems. That's now virtually impossible dealing with large banks. Frequently I find that even people whose titles indicate they should have power to solve small problems frequently don't. They need to get committee approvals for anything that isn't already governed by their procedure manual. As with any organization, as banks get bigger and bigger, they have less ability to self-regulate and quickly fix mistakes.

BTW, it's not that anyone who has problems with things like the CFPB is necessarily ANTI-REGULATION. It's just hard to grasp how much regulation exists if you're not involved in this industry. And you need to consider the consequences of this kind of regulation. You can't complain that banks are too big to fail if you're simultaneously implementing regulation (even with the best of intentions) that is directly driving banks to get bigger and bigger.

> That's certainly an interesting take. In all of my dealings with small banks, it was always easy to get an EVP on the phone to sort out problems. That's now virtually impossible dealing with large banks. Frequently I find that even people whose titles indicate they should have power to solve small problems frequently don't. They need to get committee approvals for anything that isn't already governed by their procedure manual. As with any organization, as banks get bigger and bigger, they have less ability to self-regulate and quickly fix mistakes.

The EVP (or at least someone with that title) basically told me their records were correct and to pound sand. It was escalated pretty quickly when I made it clear I had a full record of my previous contacts with the bank (including a bank employee agreeing in writing I had cancelled the application) and the dollar amount was large enough I was not going to let it go.

> BTW, it's not that anyone who has problems with things like the CFPB is necessarily ANTI-REGULATION. It's just hard to grasp how much regulation exists if you're not involved in this industry. And you need to consider the consequences of this kind of regulation. You can't complain that banks are too big to fail if you're simultaneously implementing regulation (even with the best of intentions) that is directly driving banks to get bigger and bigger.

Honestly, I'd rather have _well regulated banks_ than no big banks. I don't care if some bank has 15% of the market. I care that there are at least enough competitors (10+) in the market for it to be a competitive market.

But yeah, from my perspective the CFPB is really just a separate arbitration process that keeps people from having to go to court to dispute issues + some post-2008-meltdown regulations. Sure, some problem are excessive but 90% of them likely are not.

> with the red tape created by the CFPB

I won't disagree with regulations necessarily, but the rate of small banks closing has actually gone down since 2011 when the CFPB was created. It was higher during 2000-2008.

Bank consolidations predate the CFPB. And some of the banks that seem to have had the most issues would not be called small by anyone (e.g. Santander)

Define "closing". None of the banks I represented "closed". They have all been swallowed up by larger banks.

it sounds a lot like you just regurgitated Republican talking points

This thank you.

Speaking of partisanship, the NPR links above are just as equally regurgitating democrat talking points. Lacking any type of critical analysis of the agency and instead focused entirely on the silly talking points of the republican guy with some added snark.

NPR is hard left, I at least quoted a study from a bi-partisan agency that I found on Wikipedia

> NPR is hard left

you can't be serious. NPR is what the American media complex calls "liberal" which should be translated to "center-right by global and historical standards, but left of the extreme right wing of contemporary American politics".

do you actually listen to NPR? they are hard left. most if not all of their stories are SJW-type stories. I can't even listen to them anymore.

if you think discussion of what is currently fashionable amongst naive Yale undergrads and partisan media sites like Huffington Post constitutes "hard left" you haven't seen "hard left".

It continues to disturb me that there are so many people in America that have no idea what the real political spectrum is. Basically the takeaway should be this: if the discussion is something that was brought up AT ALL by the Clinton campaign it is not "hard left". It's merely to the left of the Republicans, but then, almost everything is.

ok, fair point I guess. I still don't like it. can you give me any examples that in your opinion are "hard left" then?

I'm curious as to how you came to the conclusion that the US was center-right by global standards. Are you genuinely broadly familiar with all the governments of South America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia? Or are you just comparing it to a small handful of governments in North America and Western Europe?

NZ is more left-wing than the US, though my hunch is that the left-wing here is much more US influenced than the right. IE, because the US dominates English-speaking media, and the left dominates US media (or at least the exported US media), that the local left seems to largely be driven by the issues and talking points of the american left. We even studied the US Civil Rights movement in our state run history class.

this might be instructive

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5oczc7g4979s95k/the%20political%20...

now place on Overton Window (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) on that chart such that its left end goes over Steven Pinker and its right end goes over Donald Trump and you have the political spectrum, as it is currently discussed in American mainstream media.

I'm going to go ahead and ignore something so incredibly biased that it places Barack Obama and Joseph Stalin on the "far right". That's la-la land extremist.

it puts Obama on "the right" and Stalin on "the extreme right". that sounds correct to me.

you should actually read it and think about why it is constructed that way. if your first reaction to seeing a perspective you're unfamiliar with is "that's la-la land extremist" then you might have a bias problem.

What makes you think I'm not familiar with the far left perspective? I'm very familiar with it.

If you think putting communist dictator Joseph Stalin on the extreme right means you have a nuanced, holistic view of the left-right spectrum then yes, you're a moonbat extremist. You'll note that right wing extremists will do a similar trick, and claim Hitler was a leftist.

please, hear me out. you're already defensive and dismissive and I'm asking you to suspend that for a minute and think about it.

where did you learn that Stalin is left wing? Who told you that? Is it because the USSR was nominally communist (in some strange version of communism in which totalitarian state capitalism is the actual system, anyway) and so any leader of nominally communist nation is left wing because communism is left wing?

Now compare the actual policies and actions of Stalin to the policies and actions of other leaders that he is most similar to. I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that Stalin's regime was a brutal, repressive, totalitarian dictatorship. A lot like Hitler's regime actually.

Now when you're drawing a political spectrum do you think we ought to pay attention to abstract statements about ideology or should we pay more attention to policies and actions? Is a political spectrum best organized by abstract ideology (in which case, yes, Nazism is left wing, it was a socialist party after all) or by what actually happened?

What's more "moonbat"? Putting two similar leaders (Hitler and Stalin) on opposite ends of a spectrum or putting them near each other on that spectrum?

There's really only one flaw with the chart that I linked. It's that it continues to use the terms "left" and "right" even though it has rearranged groupings to match policies and actions. Would you feel differently about it if instead of left it said "liberation" and instead of right it said "domination"?

Compare and contrast to the board of governors of the Federal Reserve...

> Of course it sounds bad that they want to shut down a 'consumer protection' agency. But those sound like legitimate concerns. At a minimum a restructuring sounds like a good thing.

If only the concerns weren't a bad joke disconnected from reality.

He can be fired for poor performance (inefficiency) and the CFPB is hardly the only organization with this structure. So the idea it is radical and he cannot be fired for poor performance are both lies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-13/why-trump...

> Here’s the legal background. Most federal agencies count as “executive,” meaning that their heads serve at the pleasure of the president. But some agencies are “independent” -- meaning that by law, the people in charge of them can be removed only for good cause, which Congress often specifies to mean “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

> The Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are independent agencies -- and so is the CFPB. Under the law, Cordray’s five-year term extends until July 2018.

> Both Republican and Democratic presidents have not loved the idea of independent agencies, operating outside of their daily control. But in 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the Constitution gives Congress the power to create such entities. The court has stuck with that position ever since -- and for decades no president has even tried to remove the heads of independent agencies

----

> Moreover, the HSC alleged a lack of financial transparency, lack of accountability to Congress or the President, and expressed particular concern about excessive travel costs and a $55 million renovation of CFPB headquarters that was more costly than "the entire annual construction and acquisition budget for GSA for the totality of federal buildings".

https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/128814

> GSA Announces $947 Million Courthouse Investment Plan

https://www.gsa.gov/portal/mediaId/128818/fileName/Courthous...

> Toledo, Ohio

> New Courthouse Annex / Ashley U.S.Courthouse Renovation

> GSA’s plan allocates

> $97,784,000

One court house is almost double the quoted number and the "Courthouse construction budget" over 10 years is ~$94.7 million / year.

https://www.gsa.gov/graphics/staffoffices/FY2013_CONGRESSION...

For 2013 btw:

> $ 8,619,098,000

$8 billion dollar budget request

> GSA requests $8,619 million in New Obligational Authority (NOA) for the Federal Buildings Fund.

They had an $8 billion dollar budget and this joker is claiming it was the entire annual budget of the GSA? lol

These "issues" are all bullshit.

It's a presidential appointed position like secretary of state of course it's got no accountability to congress.

Lack of financial transparency? Vague and propogandish. Excessive travel costs? Vague and propogandish.

Expensive renovation of headquarters more than GSA? (Insert random agency that it cost more than here.). THE GSA SAID THE COSTS WERE IN LINE WITH OTHER RENOVATION PROJECTS.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-10/republica...

Take your republican astroturfing brainwashed conservative zombie rhetoric somewhere else or at least have something (non-Breibart) to back up all of your bullshit claims.

The CFPB is critical organization to help the little guy and one of the only resources they have to fight massive organizations taking advantage of them.

I tried to upvote you here but it's not possible.

Thank you!

You're spouting bullsh*t.

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