Obama's CFPA: The Next Great Leap Backwards for Consumer "Rights"

Is your mortgage confusing to you? Are you bewildered by credit card offers? Do you crave the simplicity of "plain-vanilla" financial vehicles whose complete terms can be read in less than four minutes?

Be careful what you wish for: The Obama administration and members of Congress are pushing legislation that will create a new agency, The Consumer Financial Protection Agency, whose job would be to simplify and police all manner of financial transactions, from what sorts of mortgages could be offered to what sort of credit cards would be in your wallet to whether Wall Street could create new ways of buying and selling stocks. In the name of making your life easier and avoiding the next financial meltdown, the CFPA might just harshly limit how you spend your hard-earned (and dwindling!) dollars.

Would the CFPA do anything other than add another layer of bureaucracy and regulation on top of what already exists? Are consumers too bewildered by competing credit cards to make a rational choice? Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie recently sat down with George Mason University law professor, Volokh Conspiracy blogger, and Mercatus Center scholar Todd Zywicki to get answers.

"The agency is one of the centerpieces of the Obama regulatory reform act[s]," says Zywicki, "It goes far beyond how we've thought about consumer credit regulation for the past 30 or 40 years." More importantly, it will do nothing to address pernicious incentives that encouraged banks and consumers to take on more debt than was prudent.

For more videos and downloadable versions, go to http://reason.tv

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• todd zywicki
• barack
• obama
• credit
• cards
• mortgages
• volokh conspiracy
• gerge mason
• mercatus center

[98nafets]

I'm so sick of liberals saying deregulation is what caused the economic crisis. America has to realize that it was the government setting up perverse incentives that brought the downfall.

[POLYMORPHLEGION]

love the book over the shoulder "the decline and fall of the roman empire"... . a little synchromystic wink...

[fantom58]

More pro-banker, pro-wall-street capitalist twaddle. The tea baggers will lap this up though. Sad.

[rxcapo]

Credit card companies aren't competing for your business. They're competing for the business of people who can't pay off their credit card debt.

[johnrhenrysr]

The bankers and the fed caused all the trouble. Inflation the fed derivatives created by crooked bankers. aka the fed. job loss and economic blight thr bank,globalists and the fed. so you are to blame us. for letting it happen

[BbdHome]

@anniei12

And don't forget the educated bankers are the victims of the $27.7trillion bailout into their wallets.

Educated Banker Says: "The government should stop enforcing laws which force us to lend trillions and keeps harming us with bailouts into our wallets"

[benqw]

We want more than we can afford. Let me have it all and THEN put in place an agency that helps me deal with my issue's of wanting it all.

[anniei12]

This video is pompous and condesending and gives very little information about the topic. Message I get is that our whole economic crisis is the fault of "uneducated" people with bad credit who knowingly worked the system. Yet these same people were obviously smart enough to put one over on the "educated" banking system. lmao.

[trepidity23]

Here is the secret with credit cards. Don't use them to extend your budget outside your means. You can use them to help your credit score and not have to have cash or a load of debit transactions to keep track of daily. Keep track of your spending of course though. Don't focus on your set limit by the credit card company, instead set yourself a limit built into your monthly budget, pay every bill off 100% each month, if you cannot, your overspending. If can't stop yourself, get rid of the cards.

[trepidity23]

READ BEFORE YOU SIGN ANYTHING.

If you don't understand the agreement. Don't sign it until you do and from your understanding of the agreement are willing to agree. If you sign an agreement you don't understand it's not the other party's fault you don't understand it. It's your fault for agreeing to it. Take some personal responsiblity. Essentially Obama by things like this is saying, "Ok look, the people are stupid and uneducated. Therefore they are not responsible for their own actions." FAIL

[Silvsilvchan]

You carry four credit cards in your wallet.

I carry zero.

But that's your choice. Personally, I dislike going into debt of any sort, and every time you charge something you are going into a form of debt. *shrugs*

[wimscheers]

I love the tone used while saying 'The Repbulican program is Actually worth looking at'