Elizabeth Warren posts on her new job
Elizabeth Warren posts on the The White House Blog on her new job:
Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection.
The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB started—right now. The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done.
President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again for families and creating protections that work not just for the wealthy or connected, but for every American. The new consumer bureau is based on a pretty simple idea: people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn’t learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them—way too late for them to do anything about it. The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market. The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over. This new bureau is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what’s going on, they will have better tools to make better choices.
If the CFPB can succeed at leveling the playing field, we can go a long way toward repairing a gaping hole in the budgets of millions of families. But nobody has ever thought or argued that the consumer bureau can fix everything. Lost jobs, stagnant incomes, rising costs for college, dwindling retirement savings—there’s a lot of work to be done.
When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush. Her mother had died, so she was up front with her little brothers and sisters bouncing around in the back. When I was growing up, she talked about life on the prairie, about marrying my grandfather and making a living building one-room schoolhouses, about getting wiped out in the Great Depression. She was hit with hard challenges throughout her life, but the moral of her stories was always the same: she would solve her problems one at a time by pulling up her socks and getting to work.
It’s time for all of us to pull up our socks and get to work.
so we’re going to make it more difficult and more expensive to get consumer credit and mortgages and then ask you to thank us for it.
want to bet that 5 years from now this same woman is going to be complaining that minorities and poor people can’t get credit?
isn’t that what this same gang was arguing 5 years ago?
i run an investment fund.
i have no dog in the “making loans” fight. i’m not invested in the space.
i just find it interesting that a price hike and greater difficulties in getting credit are being marketed by folks like ms warren as a consumer benefit.
generally, hard to get and expensive are not things you look for as features.
your ideas about cheap money seem pretty questionable.
cheap money benefits anyone who uses it for a good purpose. you act like the banks made people borrow too much. that’s like blaming the supermarket for making people fat.
i’d lay the blame for the loan debacle on interest rate policy and the actions of the GSE’s (and under the CRA), not regulation.
anyone who signs a $200,000 contract they don’t understand and didn’t bother to spend the $200 to have a lawyer explain to them is cruising for a bruising and probably deserves one. regulating away stupidity always punishes everyone else. shall we ban steak knives if someone cuts themself?
So much for advice and consent. And I thought the Obama regime was going to end “business as usual” in DC.
goodrich-You should send some money to James Dobson. He wants to go back to the 50’s as well.
Elizabeth, please protect me against the bad people! Oh and I want a pony too!
Yeah…me too!
No, your description is silly.
Credit that is hard to get is a product of the blow up of the economy, not ms warren.
No protection might be your goal but it is valuable to a lot of people.
“your description is silly.”
Why?
A new agency that envelops older ones, and that has more power than all of them put together with a new leader that has been a long advocate against Wall Street, and some say the Capitalist System itself with a 500 Million dollar budget…..Gee What could go wrong?
As much as the left is trying to hide the real power of this Bureau, attempting to sell it as a bureau thats sole task is to make credit card contracts more understandable, I mean give us a break…that’s why the left is losing it’s power so quickly…they think everybody is an idiot…..the reality will reer it’s ugly face eventually.
Protections are fine but paternalism isn’t. I guess the mandarins of Harvard Law are going to make sure “the playing field is level” for all the peons. Ms. Warren’s blogpost is just a sophisticated recitation of Alan Simpson’s recent remarks about the “little people”.
From the government and here to help, yep. Just ask any of the people evacuated from Houston and Galveston during Ike, when federal, state, and local officials went door-to-door to inform people, get them out, provide transport if they didn’t have it, shelters, and the government-funded weather observation apparatus that let everybody know in detail where the danger areas were.
Next time you parrot absolute tripe like that, think of how often you take a hot shower first thing in the morning, with clean water, and enjoy a nice cold beer at night out of your fridge, with the power going.
think of how often you take a hot shower first thing in the morning, with clean water, and enjoy a nice cold beer at night out of your fridge, with the power going.
Hot Shower = private enterprise
Clean Water = Public, but could easily be provided by private enterprise
a nice cold beer = private enterprise, most definately
your fridge = private enterprise
the power = private enterprise
So, no, I don’t see the government as all that.
RR,
Terrifying……………..
Particularly if you are in Afghanistan , Iraq, or anywhere else the neocon empire intrudes and are confused with a terrorist and enjoy extraordinary rendition devised by the fascists who are strong on war machine security, the PNAC crowd.
And a trillion dollars a year in welfare for the US “welfare for war” (or is it war for welfare) industry is munificence ” from the government” and all those make work jobs and socialist profits would not be there, another million or so good guys to add to the ranks of the poor.
BTW nice deficits……………………………………
That you are not speaking German= FDR
That you are not speaking Japanese= FDR
That the Soviets are gone= Pope John Paul II
That $10T in wealth is evaporated GW Bush
That USD went from 400Yen to 85 Yen= voodoo economics and your savior GW Bush
My consumer protection is having them issue credit that doesn’t blow up the economy.
Paved highway system fpor the beer trucks to get t0o the market= government enterprise
School buildings for educating all of the kids= public enterprise, though woefully underfunded.
Safe and protected shorelines all around the country=government enterprise.
Dams and levees to hodl and direct the rivers and golfs= government enterprise.
I could go on, but having to explain to a fool that people form their governments out of the necessity to protect and care for themselves as a group so that they can then indulge in their private enterprise. Oh, lest we forget a system of laws and courts and agencies to assure that private enterprise is carried out in an orderly fashion.
Jimi because he makes no arguments at all. Why would simplified credit card agreements make credit more expensive and harder to get? Because the companies will no longer get to use the most vulnerable sectors of the population as victims? Is that the tradeoff we really want to get useless credit card points to get us ‘discounts’ on overpriced junk? 30% effective interest rates on junk cards? And business practices that deliberately manipulate the order of processing transactions so as to maximize overdraft fees? Not to mention that TT is obliquely recycling the tired ‘CRA caused the housing meltdown’ canard.
Instead of challenging Dan how about you putting up a coherent defense of TT’s argument for once. Because frankly you have not established the authority to demand answers from anyone here.
Christ Jimi hyperbole much?
What agencies are being enveloped? In what ways does this one have more power than say the SEC? Given that Wall Street destroyed close to $10 trillion in household wealth while coming out smelling like a rose why wouldn’t we want an advocate against it? And frankly the record of the Capitalist System itself shows that it doesn’t when left on its own produce any kind of greatest good for greatest number solutions, instead it rewards sociopathy. Do you believe in democracy? Yes or no? Do you believe that we should structure the economy in ways that promote the general welfare? Or do you think that is just constitutional window dressing and the reality is ‘Greed is good’ and ‘Every man for himself’. And if you believe the latter why would you expect a Democratic society to facilitate your own sociopathy?
Plus it is pretty fucking incoherent to claim that we just set up a bureau with the power to wreck capitalism and that demonstrates why the left is losing it’s power. Huh what? Pick one or the other dude, you really can’t have it both ways.
I would amend the post, the power is possibly private and more expensive or public and less expensive. This was precisly the arguement in the 1920s and one of the arguements around building Hoover Damn. After all the government would get in the power business, and the Ken Lays of this world could not make their money!! Back then as today the small customer got the shaft on power while the big guy got the discounts. This is why LA siezed Southern Calif Edisons power lines in the city to set up the DWP. A lot of smaller cities had their municipal power utilities, in Southern Ca at least Pasadena, Burbank, and Glendale. Then there were the large stretches of the rural areas the private folks did not want to serve thus the REA.
If I were Warren I wouls start public service adds pushing two points. 1 If you don’t understand ask until you do, if they can’t explain it, just say no. Not understanding something is not stupidity! Perhaps as suggested go back to the old advice that having a lawyer at closing is a good idea, (or perhaps furnish all closing docs in an email 2 days before so that one can inspect the docs with sufficient time to do so or consult a laywer at their office.
On this topic as an aside, I had an office mate at one time who had a Phd in math, who called a finance company about the rule of 78 (sum of digits method). The person said well you’d have to be a mathematician to understand that, and he gave the rejoinder that he was!
2. If it sounds to good to be true it probably is.
Jeez Little John ‘paternalism’ seems to work for corporations when they appeal to Uncle Sam’s civil courts to enforce their contracts. Why should Citicorp be able to rely on the protection of government while being backed up by scads of the most expensive legal talent they can buy but their customers are just are on their own? Maybe we should just scrap Gideon vs Wainwright and let criminal defendants just wing it against the criminal courts system just like the good ol’ days.
Anyone who doesn’t recognize the power imbalances that exist in this country between the rich and the poor, between the connected and the disconnected is willfully blind. We have judges and referees for a reason, the expressed belief by Greenspan that fraud is simply impossible in a free market being so delusional in the face of human history as to defy description.
Plus Simpson didn’t say “little people”, that would have been defensible in explaining the power imbalance involved. Instead he slipped and revealed the real truth, people expecting Social Security were the “lesser people”, just 310 million sucking on tits, apparently just parasites gulping down the goods of producers. What you are calling ‘paternalism’ is what is actually the police powers of the state to protect the majority from the ruthless majority. Because as Don Corleone explained: “You can steal more money with a briefcase than a gun.” Boy howdy, how right he was
Well it was worth saying thrice. But I am guessing the triple post was inadvertent and so did some cleanup. But I can’t agree more. When I did my last re-fi I looked at each page to see what it was I was signing, but that was because as a licensed agent I knew what the content of each disclosure was and where the landmines might have been hiding. It would take the average homebuyer not in the industry a couple of days to actually read through the typical signing package and even a careful reading wouldn’t enable you to unpack the technical jargon involved. I mean when was the last time you actually read all the way through a typical SLA before clicking ‘Agree’. The game is openly rigged by the lawyers and only glibertarians fool themselves into thinking there is really any such thing as a free contractual agreement.