TRUMP GOES TO WAR AGAINST AGENCY PROTECTING YOUR WALLET
Once again, the Trump administration is putting you second. Last week, President Trump appointed his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney, you can be sure, will go at it like a wrecking ball. He has called the agency “a sick, sad joke.”
The CFPB was created seven years ago to protect average Americans against the kinds of rapacious financial practices that led to the economic crash of 2007. Never again, so the thinking went, should working people have to worry about losing their life savings to “liar loans” and imploding subprime mortgages.
Since then, the CFPB has been a stout guardian of your personal financial balance sheets. It has put $ 12 billion back into the pockets of 29 million victims of shady practices. It has drawn the line against sneaky credit card policies and financial institutions that direct customers into overpriced loans and mortgages.
To Trump, this is a “total disaster.” Bad for the “job creators.”
But to us, the CFPB looks like an obvious success story, one that in no way threatens the bottom line of any honest business that treats its customers fairly and squarely. Consumer borrowing was at a record high in the first quarter of 2017. The banks are doing fine.
Mulvaney’s appointment is being challenged in the courts. The previous CFPB director, Richard Cordray, appointed top staffer Leandra English as acting director before he resigned, and there is a credible question as to whether Trump has the authority to appoint Mulvaney or anybody else instead. There is no doubt Trump has the authority to name a permanent replacement on July 1 or anytime after.
But however this appointment shakes out, Trump has again made clear his priorities — Wall Street over your street.
This is all part of a bad pattern. The president has repeatedly attempted to subvert the legitimate and necessary work of federal agencies and departments by appointing administrators who openly oppose the agency or department’s very mission. He has done so, most notably, at the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department and the Education Department.
The CFPB has a big job to do, but it won’t get done under Mulvaney. Unethical financial practices of the sort that led to the agency’s creation continue, and somebody must ferret them out. Who can forget how Wells Fargo in just the last few years quietly opened up more than 1.5 million bogus bank accounts in its customers’ names, running up $ 2 million in unauthorized fees?
They’re all still out there, folks: the shady debt collectors and the high- tech loan sharks, the predatory home mortgages and the exorbitant retirement fund fees.
No joke, Mr. Mulvaney. Sick, sad or otherwise.
However this appointment shakes out, Trump has again made clear his priorities — Wall Street over your street.