The dangerous Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

What was called the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill was the progenitor of what is now known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB. I see little in the news that actually tells us how horrific the powers are that were granted to it. I dug up a couple of old posts of mine when I was on the band wagon of trying to stop this bad boy.Recall the Third Circuit has ruled against the agency.

PHH wins landmark victory: CFPB ruled unconstitutional | 2016-10-11 …

What was once unthinkable actually happened, as the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed an earth-shattering victory to PHH, declaring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership structure unconstitutional and vacating a $103 million fine against PHH.

Here tis some of my oldie moldies.:

Dodd’s Bank Bill- It’s Nationalization worse than Obamacare

May 11, 2010 

To put it bluntly but absolutely accurately, this bill sets up a mechanism for the Treasury Secretary, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to nationalize virtually any business they deem to be a threat to American “financial stability.”

Among its horrors are a massive new consumer agency with the power to track virtually every financial transaction to share with other big agencies like the IRS, onerous new restrictions on angel investorsand venture capital that greatly delay funding promising startup firms, proxy access provisions that would federalize state incorporation laws and empower unions and other progressive shareholders to wage director campaigns at the company and other shareholders’ expense, and no attempted reform of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the center of the financial mess.

It is clear that the bill’s “orderly liquidation authority” would facilitate outright government seizure of a wide variety of firms with very limited judicial review.

The first clue of what the bill would do in this regard comes from one of the bill’s architects. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, author of the similar financial bill that passed the House in December, has freely used the term “death panels” to describe the new powers the bills give the government over firms. In response to charges of “death panels“ in the health care bill, Frank responded that the panels were in the wrong bill. “Yes, we have death panels, but they got the death panels in the wrong bill,” Frank said on the House floor. “The death panels are in this bill.”

Defending against charges that the bills’ new mechanism to wind down firm will lead to taxpayer bailouts, Frankwrote in the Huffington Post that under this authority, “Shareholders are wiped out, unsecured creditors are out of luck, management and every employee that is not required to shut down the company is fired.” What Frank and other of the bills’ architects don’t say — not even in liberal venues like the Huffington Post — is that the bills also give the government these same powers to take over firms not seeking any kind of government aid.

Section 203 of Title II of the bill empowers the Secretary of Treasury, with a two-thirds vote from the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to take into government “receivership” any “financial company” whose failure he determines “would have serious adverse effects on financial stability in the United States. “

Once the Treasury Secretary puts the company into “receivership” of the FDIC, the government may — under Section 210 — “take over the assets of and operate the covered financial company with all of the powers of the members or shareholders, the directors, and the officers of the covered financial company, and conduct all business of the covered financial company,” “perform all functions of the covered financial company, in the name of the covered financial company,” and “ provide for the exercise of any function by any member or stockholder, director, or officer of any covered financial com1pany for which the Corporation has been appointed as receiver under this title.” http://biggovernment.com/jberlau/2010/05/11/dodds-bank-bill-worse-than-obamacare-its-the-nationalization-stupid/ It wasn’t enought that Dodd and his buddy Barney Frank required Fannie and Freddie Mac to cover loans to those who could never pay. Let’s finish private enterprise once and for all.

Dodd-Frank Financial “Reform” Violates Property Rights and Equal-Protection Guarantees

January 12, 2011 — bunkerville

Here is a superbly documented post regarding the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill. While our attention is diverted these days, good news is that that portions of this  bill are being challenged in the Courts. We can only hope for some good smack downs soon. Here tis:

Last week, I described how the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law passed last summer violates constitutionalseparation-of-powers safeguards by giving unaccountable bureaucrats the power to seize companies and legislate through administrative fiat.  But that is not the only way Dodd-Frank violates the Constitution.  It also violates property rights and equal-protection guarantees.

For example, it contains racial preferences that were criticized by members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. It “imposes race and gender employment quotas on the financial industry,” noted economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth in the Washington Examiner. Its ”Section 342 states that race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.”

This unconstitutional requirement is the brainchild of Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the Castro-loving, left-wing ideologue who earlier praised the Los Angeles race riots that destroyed scores of Korean-owned businesses as an “uprising” against injustice. Waters once told a CEO in a public Congressional hearing, “This liberal will be all about socializing . . . .uh, uh . . . would be about, basically, taking over and the government running all of your companies.”

Law Professor Richard Epstein notes that Dodd-Frank is also an unconstitutional “taking” of private property, since it deliberately forces certain banks to process debit card transactions at a loss. (That provision is being challenged in a lawsuit called TCF Bank v. Bernanke. Debit cards did not contribute to the financial crisis in any way, but Dodd-Frank regulates them at the behest of large businesses that objected to being charged any fee by banks for processing debit card payments. Thanks to Dodd-Frank, some customers will now be charged annual fees for their debit cards.) More here at Open Markets

Dodd: Finance Reform – “No one knows how it will actually work”

June 25, 2010 — bunkerville

“It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here,” said a teary-eyed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done.” Right, never let a crisis pass you by.

Read the sorry tale here at the Washington Post

Filed under: Government Tagged: CFBP, Dodd, Dodd-Frank, RICHARD CORDRAY