Fighting Discrimination Has To Be At CFPB’s Forefront Says Elizabeth Warren And Agency’s Leader

Fighting racial discrimination has to be a top priority for the CFPB, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said … [+] Monday
Getty Images

Fighting racial discrimination needs to be at the forefront of everything the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and the agency’s current head CFPB Acting Director David Uejio said Monday.

Their assertions came at a webinar on the agency’s 10th anniversary hosted by a number of groups that helped lobby it into being including Americans for Financial Reform, U.S. PIRG, the Consumer Federation of America, and the National Consumer Law Center.

Discrimination gets to the heart of the bureau, said who came up with the idea for the consumer bureau when she was a Harvard University law professor.

She asserted one of the principal reasons the CFPB needs to exist is to make financial products work for all Americans, including consumers of color.

“When we focus our attention to minorities, we help everyone,” said Uejio.

They both mentioned one of the near-term missions of the agency will need to be to help many minorities and other renters from being improperly evicted when pandemic protections end soon.

Warren added the agency also needs to be attentive to auto lenders which regularly pull financial tricks on people of color and overdraft fees where there is a lot of predatory behavior by giant banks.

She added the CFPB needs to be at the table with other financial regulators in drafting cryptocurrency protections.

Looking back at the 10 years of the agency, the Senator said its crown jewel is its consumer complaint hotline which gives the bureau data to monitor what’s going wrong and to take enforcement actions along with increasing the CFPB’s visibility.

Over the years, the hotline has helped the CFFP receive close to three million complaints and generate $14.4 billion in consumer relief and stop many of the most egregious practices in the marketplace,

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) praised the CFPB during the session for doing a tremendous job for putting consumers first.

She was on the committee when it passed the agency as part of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Noting, as Senator Warren did, the leadership of the CFPB under the Trump Administration tried to roll back and undermine the agency, she said: “I’m excited about the change we can create.”

Republicans have continued to fight the bureau into its Biden Administration present.

Last Thursday, House Financial Services Committee Republicans led by Ranking Minority Member Patrick McHenry accused Uejio in a letter of taking actions Congress did give the agency the power to do including establishing a usury limit on consumer credit, supervising financial institutions for compliance with the Military Lending Act (MLA).

The letter also charged the CFPB under him of taking purely political and grounded in the strategy of “regulation by enforcement” that it had not done in the only time the agency existed when a Republican was president.

Read More