consumer financial protection bureau

Headless paper tiger
Republicans block the U.S.consumer financial protection bureau

New York - you should be the core of financial reform. They should do away with teaser offers and other debt traps. You should create the basis for a competition that is not only free but also fair. But entitlement and reality separates the ideological gap that pervades American politics.

Wanted to call the new independent consumer financial protection bureau that President Barack Obama comes to life, not to resume work. For months, Republicans in the Senate to use its blocking minority to prevent the appointment of Richard Cordray, who will conduct at the request of the Government's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). On Thursday, stopped the opposition to the recent attempt by the Democrats to break the blockade. Without a boss, the authority may not impose regulations. She is powerless - and is torn ever deeper into the beginning of the campaign.

This Cordray, who has established himself as Attorney General of Ohio, a name is itself a compromise candidate. Actually, the Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, the lead agency. The consumer financial protection bureau was her idea. But since Warren has an icon of the Left and thus a hate figure of the right, saw Obama on her nomination. Now the president must recognize that the Republicans are not about people went, but the principle.

For the opposition, the Bureau expressed that consumer activist style of government, they have made a major point of criticism of the government. The authority violates fundamental democratic principles, they complain, because they deprive themselves of control through Congress and get their budget from the central bank. Their powers are also so broad that it could destabilize the entire financial system.

Obama drives the attitude of refusal to despair: 'Does anybody that too much control over real estate finance and debt collectors have led us into the financial crisis?', He is angry. For the president and the Democrats is the consumer financial protection bureau, perhaps the most important lesson from the Great Crash of 2008. The bad loans that led the global financial system to the brink of collapse, spread beyond the powers of scrutiny of the existing supervisory authorities. Loan sharks who operated outside the regulated banking system, chattering families on overpriced loans and nurtured so that the debt bubble that America brought the deepest postwar recession. The consumer financial protection bureau to illuminate this shadowy realm and throw hard and fast rules.

After re-vote defeat in the Senate, the Democrats, the Republicans from liberal states want more than ever under pressure. With targeted campaigns to the Senators are caricatured as a lackey of Wall Street. But the strategy has little chance of success. The interest in an agreement disappears. Both sides realized that the dispute is ideal as a campaign issue. The Republicans can denounce the government of regulations. And the Democrats can attack an opposition, which refused the recognition that free markets need fair rules.

Obama determined without Senate
U.S. consumer advocates can start right now

New York - Six months was the blockade, now it is broken: Against the fierce resistance from the opposition Republicans, President Barack Obama on Wednesday, former Attorney General of Ohio, Richard Cordray, was appointed to head the new consumer protection agency. The so-called Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is at the heart of U.S. financial reform, but it was in the past few months, condemned to inaction, because first of its statutes demanded the appointment of a chairman.

Obama originally wanted the summer lift Cordray took office. But the Republicans use their blocking minority in the Senate. You see in the consumer financial protection bureau a bureaucratic monster that prevents innovation and strangle the flow of credit. Now it gave the president: He made use of his right to appoint top officials personally, as long as the Congress is not in session. The Republicans, who wanted to prevent this maneuver with procedural tricks foamed with rage: 'President Obama has circumvented the American people arrogantly', Mitch McConnell, leader of the opposition complained in the Senate. Cordray was supposed to be a compromise candidate. Initially it was envisaged that the Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren to head the agency. But Warren had made himself unpopular with scathing remarks for the Republicans, so Obama refrained from nominating her.

The president has high hopes of the new Authority. Nothing less than a reordering of the financial system, he hoped. Costs and risks, ought to be instantly recognizable to every American who takes a new mortgage or applying for a credit card. Treaty texts should be written in simple terms. Of them could now be no question. Only experts could understand the paragraph. Among the first tasks will include Cordray compete to set uniform rules to level the playing field of the market in which banks, credit card companies and mortgage companies. The best products will prevail - not the most refined by a consumer financial protection bureau. In league with the Republicans had also Wall Street bucked the authority. The banks are afraid for their profit margins in the consumer business.