The following post comes to us from Karen Petrou, co-founder and managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, Inc., and is based on a FedFin white paper by Ms. Petrou.
In this post, Federal Financial Analytics, Inc. (FedFin) recommends steps the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and other regulators can and should take to make their rules simpler, clearer, less burdensome and—critically—more enforceable. This paper is not a call for “cutting the red tape,” a mantra that has all too often meant eviscerating critical consumer protections. It is, rather a how-to on ways to cut through the daunting morass of consumer-protection standards that have only grown worse in the wake of the financial crisis.
We note not only ways to restructure rules to meet these goals, but also how to do so without losing the clarity essential to legal integrity and supervisory effectiveness. We also describe recent efforts by U.S. bank regulators to curtail problematic products (e.g., payday lending) by limiting it at banks, leaving wide swaths of the financial sector (sometimes called “shadow banks”) free to engage in predatory practices unless the bank-centric rules choke them off (uncertain), state regulators intervene (problematic) or federal rules across the sector are quickly enacted (so far unseen).