Since opening in July, the agency has received thousands of comments about problems such as exorbitantly expensive payday loans and abuses by mortgage servicers. LOS ANGELES TIMES ADVERTISING WASHINGTON — The new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wasted
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON — The new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wasted little time getting to work Thursday, using the agency’s new powers to start supervising payday lenders and other firms outside the conventional banking system.
The bureau’s main goal will be ensuring that consumer loans, mortgages and other financial products are easier to understand, but the new director, Richard Cordray, warned companies that “transparency alone is not enough.”
“The consumer bureau will make clear that there are real consequences to breaking the law,” Cordray said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
It will be a few weeks before the agency has supervisors ready to go into companies to examine their practices. But the preparations began Thursday, to the satisfaction of consumer advocates who have pushed for mortgage brokers, debt collectors and others to face the same federal oversight as banks.
The consumer bureau now is allowed to regulate debt collectors and many other companies because it finally has a director.
The agency was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and took responsibility from other banking regulators last summer for previously existing consumer protection laws. And last year it began supervising large banks for compliance.
But the bureau had been unable to exercise new powers under the law, including the oversight of nonbank financial firms, until a Senate-confirmed director was in place.
Frustrated by Republican opposition to filling the position, President Barack Obama broke with two decades of precedent Wednesday and installed Cordray while the Senate was in a short recess. The appointment is expected to lead to legal challenges.
Cordray said Thursday that his appointment was valid and the controversy won’t slow down the agency.
“The most important thing we can do as a bureau is keep our nose to the grindstone and keep doing our work,” Cordray said. “I think the work that we’re doing is so important and can make such a difference for people in this country that as we attack this problem … we will prove our own case both to the people who represent the public and to the public at large.”
In his first full day on the job, Cordray talked tougher than he did during his Senate confirmation hearing last fall.
He promised then to use government lawsuits judiciously after learning in two years as Ohio attorney general that they can be a “very slow, wasteful and needlessly acrimonious way to resolve a problem.”
Cordray said Thursday that some problems brought to the consumer bureau might be resolved “through cooperative efforts.” But others might require enforcement action.
He noted the bureau has taken over some investigations from other banking regulators and has started some of its own. It also has given whistle-blowers and informants “direct access to us.”
Since opening in July, the agency has received thousands of comments about problems such as exorbitantly expensive payday loans and abuses by mortgage servicers.
