hypercrites

If there's one part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that nearly all liberals like, and nearly all conservatives hate, it's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, the new federal watchdog is tasked with regulating everything from mortgages to payday loans. Barack Obama began his reelection campaign vowing to defend the agency; Mitt Romney has promised to gut it.

But is the CFPB really such a BFD?

In the first in-depth look inside the new agency since it began operating a year ago, Washington Monthly's John Gravois reports that the answer is an emphatic yes. The CFPB is taking shape as one of the federal government's most powerful, innovative, and economically important agencies. It's become a magnet for some of the brightest minds in and out of government -- "a McKinsey and Company for the 99 percent." It has armed itself with the same sophisticated data-mining tools private sector firms use to pick the pockets of consumers. And it has begun deploying those resources to craft regulations aimed, eventually, at forcing financial services firms to change their predatory lending practices or go out of business.

Predatory lending is endemic to the business model of American finance, and until that changes, it's hard to see how the economy can once again provide broad prosperity. Moreover, not even the financial services industry itself will prosper in the long run unless it adopts a business model that helps build, rather than erode, the wealth of average Americans. The CFPB is the best hope we currently have of reshaping the market along these lines. The only question is whether the bureau will be allowed to do its job, or will get strangled in its crib come November.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust_2012/features/too_important_to_fail038413.php
 

CFPB panders to liberals' sensibility, but it is far from the worst aspect of Dodd-Frank.  The entire regulatory scheme misses the mark, encumbering business without even addressing the main problem, the fact that so many banks have been allowed to grow "too big to fail".