Richard Cordray is appearing before a House Financial Services subcommittee at this hour, and I’m not available to watch the testimony. However, I do have Cordray’s written testimony, which he will presumably deliver in a truncated form. It’s pretty good, actually. I especially like how Cordray frames his mission as protecting honest businesses. Second, the [...]

Richard Cordray spoke at the Brookings Institution today, on his first day as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He laid out the mission of the agency as he sees it, and how it will use its expanded authorities over non-bank financial institutions. Cordray started by bearing witness to financial predators who have destroyed [...]

I think we have found the unifying thread on the President’s recess appointments yesterday. He did not decide to make appointments on key financial regulatory positions, like OCC or FDIC or the Federal Reserve, and some worry that those nominees will now get blocked from confirmation as a result, though they are seen as uncontroversial. [...]

When I saw President Obama miss his chance to use the “Roosevelt precedent” to appoint Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or make any recess appointment, I considered the matter closed. The other two options for Obama to recess-appoint would set new precedents for the Presidency, and I didn’t think he would [...]

During the recess, the President has a number of opportunities to make recess appointments. He could simply determine that the pro forma sessions being used to keep Congress active were insufficient to prevent recess appointments. He could use his Constitutional power to adjourn Congress. But both of those would fly in the face of recent [...]

Describing the blockade of Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a form of nullification sounds accurate to me. Cordray is almost an afterthought to this issue. Republicans disagree with the concept of a federal agency that looks out for consumers. So they plan to stop any effort to staff the agency [...]

Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unveiled a prototype credit card agreement designed to ease understanding of obligations. The CFPB will test the statement with the Pentagon Federal Credit Union, one of the largest in the nation. Raj Date, the acting director of the CFPB, unveiled the draft in Cleveland today. It’s just two pages [...]

The President clearly tried to channel Theodore Roosevelt in his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas today. He focused on fairness and the need to prevent financial elites from ripping off consumers. In one policy recommendation, he demanded that the Senate confirm Richard Cordray on Thursday to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureay, the new federal agency [...]

The Obama Administration is making a futile push this week to confirm Richard Cordray as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, even though 44 Republican Senators have asserted they will not confirm anyone to that position unless the agency gets a radical transformation to reduce its effectiveness. In a weekend conference call, White [...]

We’re going to see a vote in the next two or three weeks on the confirmation of Richard Cordray for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that’s paradoxically a pretty bad sign for his confirmation. Indeed, this feels exactly like the unsuccessful confirmations of Dawn Johnsen or Goodwin Liu: a snap confirmation vote that fails, [...]

Eric Schneiderman’s profile lately has been to go where federal regulators fear to tread, to actually do the jobs of the federal government when they fail to do so. In foreclosure fraud, he undertook the investigation that the feds would not. Now he is applying that to military foreclosures, although the authority here is a [...]