Legal Research

The White House has sent a plan to create a new agency, to be known as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to Congress.  Whereas now, the enforcement of consumer protection measures is fragmented among the agencies which regulate the various financial institutions, this agency would have sole responsibility for protecting consumers from practices such as predatory lending, arbitrary changes in credit card rates and other deceptive financial practices.  It would be charged with looking out for consumers' financial interests across the board, whether the financial institution involved was a bank or a mortgage broker or a credit union.  Predictably, the very financial institutions we are propping up with our collective taxes are opposed to anything that interferes with their ability to extract more profit from each individual taxpayer.  See this story in The New York Times.