Financial deregulation already in progress

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Nooo, consumers don't need protection from Wall Street nor banks..

When residents of Puerto Rico funneled their life savings into funds that were largely made up of the island's bonds, they were told their money would be safe. They were told that they would receive interest payments that were higher than many comparable opportunities. They were told income would be tax exempt. And when those investments began to evaporate four years ago, they were told not to sell, that the market would rebound, and they would recoup their losses — eventually.

"To have this type of carnage being born on this small of a population in this small of a geographic territory is something that we'll likely never see again," said attorney Jeffrey Erez, whose law firm Sonn and Erez has filed hundreds of securities cases on behalf of Puerto Rican investors. "You have the complete investing class on a very small island having lost 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent of their retirement savings within a few years." A CNBC investigation found that UBS was not forthcoming about the extent of the risks of those bond funds from both its clients and brokers, even as the values of the funds plummeted. By the end of 2012, more than $10 billion in assets were invested in UBS' bond funds. That represented about 10 percent of the island's gross domestic product at the time. Today, those investments have been nearly wiped out.

Broken bonds: Wall Street's role in wiping out Puerto Ricans' savings

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Scammers get a free reign..

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is taking it easy on payday lenders accused of preying on low-income workers. In the agency’s first report to Congress since Mick Mulvaney took the helm in November, the CFPB said it is dropping sanctions against NDG Financial Corp, a group of 21 businesses that the agency, under President Obama, had accused of running “a cross-border online payday lending scheme” in Canada and the United States. “The scheme primarily involved making loans to U.S. consumers in violation of state usury laws and then using unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices to collect on the loans and profit from the revenues,” the CFPB lawyers argued in the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York in 2015..

CFPB Payday Loans: payday lender is accused of stealing millions from customers. Trump’s CFPB is now letting them off the hook. - Vox

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President Trump's administration has been spearheading a loosening of Dodd-Frank, the law passed after the financial crisis to tighten financial regulatory loopholes. The 2010 law was designed to make the US financial system more stable and help avoid another crisis. The rules dictate that banks with over $50 billion in assets are considered systemically important so became subject to tighter restrictions. In March, Congress voted to expand this limit to $250 billion, complaining that the lower limit had restricted lending. But Paulson, Geithner, and Bernanke warned that loosening this legislation could endanger the economy. "We let the financial system outgrow the protections we put in place in the Great Depressions and... made the system very fragile and vulnerable to panic," Geithner said. "One of the most powerful lessons from this crisis should be that you want to work very hard to make sure that your defenses are robust."

Paulson, Geithner, and Bernanke warn on growing financial crisis risks - Business Insider

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Payday lenders won a major victory on Wednesday after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau moved to gut tougher restrictions that were to take effect later this year. The industry has spent years trying to fend off the new rules, which were conceived during the Obama administration. The regulations were intended to prevent spiraling debt obligations by limiting the number of consecutive loans that could be made and requiring lenders to verify that borrowers could pay back their loans on time while still covering basic living expenses.. 

A payday loan customer who borrows $500 would typically owe about $575 two weeks later — an annual percentage rate of nearly 400 percent. If borrowers cannot repay their loans on time, they often borrow more and deepen their debt. It is a hard cycle to break: Half of all payday loans are part of a sequence that stretches at least 10 consecutive loans, according to the consumer bureau’s data..

Consumer Protection Bureau Cripples New Rules for Payday Loans - The New York Times

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Thanks to the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Shirley Banks of Greenville, Miss. received a $1,000 check in the mail in 2016. Hundreds of thousands of other people got help from the CFPB, too. But today’s leadership of this vital agency is demonstrating how government can abandon the goals Congress set out for it, and betray the people it should protect. Kathleen Kraninger, who has helmed CFPB for a scant four months, is unfortunately already making a name for herself as someone willing to let the bad guys off the hook. She is a protégé of Mick Mulvaney, who spent much of 2018 doing his best to lay waste to the CFPB’s work and structure as its acting director.

CFPB chief must pick a side: Consumers or scammers | TheHill

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday issued a final rule on payday lending, rescinding Obama-era provisions that would have required lenders to ensure borrowers could repay their loans before issuing cash advances. To help ensure borrowers were not getting sucked into so-called debt traps, the CFPB released a new, multi-part payday loan regulation in 2017 that, among other things, required payday lenders to check that borrowers could afford to pay back their loan on time by verifying information like incomes, rent and even student loan payments. But the Trump administration blocked those rules from going into effect and called for a review. On Tuesday, the CFPB — under new leadership — released a finalized rule that doesn’t require lenders to check that borrowers can afford to pay.

New payday loan rules could leave millions 'exposed' to debt trap

[Admin]

People are facing a period of nearly unprecedented uncertainty, and a series of recent decisions from financial regulators are making it easier for those in need to be drawn into a spiral of debt that they can’t pay off. Regulators have loosened restrictions around small-dollar, high-interest loans, giving vulnerable people more access to loans that will cost them money they don’t have and allowing outfits such as payday lenders to send money to borrowers without checking whether they’ll be able to ever pay that money back.
“It is shameful that some of the regulatory changes that the agencies have made under the Trump administration have made it easier for lenders to take advantage of people in difficult and really unprecedented circumstances,” said Jeremy Kress, an assistant professor of business law the University of Michigan. “When people are desperate, some lenders will take advantage of that desperation.””

CFPB and bank regulators make life easier for payday lenders in the Covid-19 pandemic - Vox