 Hi, I'm Reed Kramer. I direct the asset building program here at the New America Foundation. And I'm here with John Gravois, who's an editor at Washington Monthly Magazine. And we're here to talk about their latest issue this month, hitting the newsstands, which almost entirely is devoted to exploring how the future of success in America is going to require a lot more than just jobs. As the articles reveal, it's going to depend on enabling families to save, to rebuild and stabilize their balance sheets, and to build up a broad array of assets, both human and financial. And it would also help a great deal if we could prevent, collectively, people from getting ripped off in the financial services marketplace. And that's where John's article comes in. He took a close look at the startup phase of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which I think was one of the most significant pieces of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, passed two years ago. So you entitled your article, Too Important to Fail. Tell us a little bit about what the CFPB is and why we all have a stake in its success. As you said, the CFPB is a new agency created under the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act. Its mission is to protect the American consumer from financial practices that are abusive and deceptive, and to keep the market fair, transparent and competitive. That's the statutory language. And people before thought that maybe we had that in place already, the other banking regulators were supposed to protect consumers. Right. Consumer protection was a kind of second or third-tier concern spread out among a handful of banking regulators. And in my reporting, when I asked people about the old days, they called that mission a bastard-stepped child mission. It took a backseat and conflicted sometimes with the prime mission of most banking regulators, which was to ensure the safety and soundness of banks. Right. So there was conflict now. We've created a new entity, and its primary mission is protect consumers. Protect consumers. Be a cop on the beat, which is a phrase that Elizabeth Warren, who is sort of the architect of the agency, uses a lot. But it also has this dual mandate to keep the market safe, reshape the marketplace, but also reshape it in such a way that it doesn't cut off access to financial products. Right. So it can create access for existing consumers. What about the level playing field? This has been opposed by a lot of the financial sector apparently. I see there's an upside for them, too. They don't have to compete with some of the nefarious actors that are outside of the scope. You see some accounts of the financial crisis as saying that a lot of the subprime practices sort of percolated up in the unregulated parts of the financial market, the non-bank actors. And once they started to sort of flourish there, the virus couldn't help but spread into the big guys because they had to compete. And so you had a kind of race to the bottom out in the marketplace. And then you also had this at the same time, this kind of race to the bottom in the regulatory landscape where a lot of the financial regulators were kind of competing with each other on offering laxity in regulation. And if you can cut off those kind of unsavory characters that have been unregulated, that have been providing products that aren't appropriate for people, that their business model was trapping people into debt, or they didn't have any kind of skin in the game for someone succeeding, if you cut them out, the existing, the ones that are left to compete could actually do so fairly and competitively. They would refine their product offerings. You would think that there would be at least some case for the banks, for regulated financial institutions to feel like this is a good thing. So far that's not the line. The culture of the agency is really interesting. It's not drawn from the sort of typical talent pools that Washington draws from. It's got a lot of people working in government for the first time. We have, sometimes people describe Washington as a giant sort of battlefield between lawyers and economists. I thought you were going to say cesspool, but that might be the same thing, go on, okay. Battlefield adjacent to a cesspool. Yes, okay. But I think the CFPB is maybe a little tilted on the lawyer's side, but it's interesting. They have this whole research mission, and there's economists there, but they're also talking about bringing in psychologists. There's a lot of, and marketing people, there's a lot of interest in behavioral economics there as there is across the Obama administration. And I think because of the association with Warren and her profile as a sort of, I mean, she's kind of become a folk hero. She drew, being associated with her drew a lot of folks who you wouldn't normally see in government. So there's a real sense of mission, and the culture is pretty high-minded. I think that's going to be important as the bureau becomes two, three, four, if it survives years old. A bureaucratic culture that has a lot of self-respect is going to be a lot more, is going to be a lot less easy to co-opt, I think. Yeah, no, it's a really interesting endeavor. And of course, as you're looking at the way families access a whole range of financial services in the marketplace, I mean, this is going to possibly affect how people access mortgages, credit cards, how they cash checks, what the terms and conditions are in every kind of savings account, checking account that's out there. So it really has the ability to really potentially reshape these basic relationships with the financial sector. Right. I mean, these are services that are ubiquitous. We all use them, it's an industry that includes how we store our money, how we make payments, how we save, how we get credit. And the marketplace for its ubiquity is sort of remarkably opaque to people. And a big part of the mission, what all the sort of the talent, the sort of the bright folks at the CFPB will be trying to make this marketplace send clear signals and have institutions in that marketplace compete on value to the consumer instead of what happened in the run up of the financial crisis and really it was building for a long, long time, where institutions were at times competing on how best to hide the ball from the consumer, how best to bury costs in the back end and sort of lure people in with teasers. Yeah. No, I mean, hidden fees is not a great business model and we should be looking ways to kind of shut those kind of practices down. What I think is interesting about the agency is its potential to really become setting standards and expectations for the consumer, shutting out some of the nefarious practices that don't belong in the marketplace and creating opportunities for both the providers of financial services to thrive and also families to access services that make a difference in their lives. I think that the CFPB has a lot of potential in its ability to reshape the marketplace if it is able to articulate the standards and expectations that helped achieve the principles that was part of their founding for transparency, matching people with appropriate products that meet their circumstance and that they're fair and not getting ripped off. And I think if they do that and gets rid of some of the nefarious actors that are on the side, it can potentially come up with a way of meeting exactly both of those pieces. Yeah. The question is whether the Bureau survives and then whether it can really maintain the kind of independence vis-a-vis the marketplace it regulates to really keep on the bright side of that equation. Yeah. Well, there's a lot for them to pursue, a lot more to be told. It's a great piece and you can turn it into the Washington Monthly website to read more of John's article on the CFPB and its unfolding startup phase. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. Okay.