CFPA Supporters Need a Soundbite; Any Ideas?

by Jeff Sovern

I am convinced that one reason the CFPA has run into trouble in the Senate is that it's an issue that can't easily be boiled down to a soundbite, and hence generates little passion.  By contrast, Congress voted for the Credit CARD Act, despite opposition from the same bank lobby that opposes the CFPA, because voters felt credit card issuers had taken advantage of consumers.  It's harder to generate that same kind of passion about which agency should regulate consumer credit transactions, however, because the connection between who makes the rules and what those rules are, is complex, and explaining how competition between regulators for business generates a race to the bottom, or that the Fed has paid too little attention to consumer protection cannot be explained in a single phrase.  So I'm announcing a contest: if you have a good soundbite for the CFPA, post it in the comments below.  I don't have a prize to offer, except my congratulations.

My own entrant: "The banks have plenty of government agencies looking out for them; consumers want just one."

And now, an update on the CFPA: The Huffington Post reportsthat Senator Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee will unveil his latest Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill later this month, and perhaps as early as this week.  Though HuffPo characterizes the Dodd version of the CFPA as independent in the headline, the article indicates that it will "likely" be housed within the Treasury Department.  Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required) arguing for the CFPA.

Comments

[folliculitis]

Nice try, though, trying to make up your own beme by creating the word itself. But for the reasons I've just given, your attempt at forcing a meme will fail just like everyone else's engineered attempts. I'm not being snarky or trying to give you attitude, but I am being frank and telling you the truth as I see it.

[dental care]

i like this part of the blog:"And now, an update on the CFPA: The Huffington Post reportsthat Senator Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee will unveil his latest Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill later this month, and perhaps as early as this week. Though HuffPo characterizes the Dodd version of the CFPA as independent in the headline, the article indicates that it will "likely" be housed within the Treasury Department. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required) arguing for the CFPA." is very good, you should add some videos....

[online pharmacy]

Committee will unveil his latest Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill later this month, and perhaps as early as this week.

[buy viagra]

But also as a very happy Kindle owner since Dec. 4th, I see no reason why the Kindle would not have served me in the profession of law. Of course I can store many thousands of books since I added an 8 GB SDHC High Capacity memory card. But best of all I love the search feature. Indexes do not exist across multiple books -- at best it helps for the one volume in which it exists, which is often very few of the possible books you will need it for.

[Miguel]

My sound bite for CFPA:

Banks are stealing your money; we need a consumer financial arrest (CFA) now!

[Mike Gilmore]

It is time for an agency to set the consumer's table with quality credit- credit products with a crushproof roof at any speed.

[CS]

Sorry to be so long-winded but this is a sore spot. I don't know anyone who hasn't been negatively affected by this big fraud on America, including those that were smart enough not to fall for the scams and hype themselves. Regardless, we're all being forced to PAY for the mess, since congress chose to give billions to it's industry friends as a bailout and/or tax break, while American citizens saw their incomes fall or jobs evaporate.

IF a new agency is created, my fear though, is that it will be like so many other toothless govt agencies that are run by the very people they're supposed to police. So, while I support a Consumer Financial Protection Agency being formed, I would NOT support it if it were a poorly structured and run agency. Do I trust the govt to get it right? No.

Perhaps a cheaper and more effective approach would be to have consumer groups, including Public Citizen, write a book to educate consumers, then make the govt pay to print and distribute it to every American. I have always believed that if educated, consumers could put crooks out of business and make it unattractive for new criminals to enter the "profession." But sadly we are a nation of clueless consumers, due to lack of truthful info in readily available places, not due to actual lack of intelligence.

[CS]

It's true, and unfortunate, that most Americans don't understand what's going on with lawmaking. Most Americans still get far too much of their news from TV networks which do a very poor job of informing people of anything useful, because it might be objected to by corporate advertisers or owners of the media.

So, Americans are in the dark, still, about what caused the housing bubble, that there was a lot of criminal fraud going on IN the housing and finance industries, or how it led to the crash.

This lack of education allowed Americans to be easily swindled and easily made apathetic or resigned.

To convince Americans that better regulation of the financial industry is needed, they have to be educated on how this industry, by greed and crime, took out the U.S. Economy.

Good luck getting any mainstream media source to tell the truth about that, and to name all the players so far indicted, investigated, fined, sued or even jailed, for fraud. That group of criminals is the tip of the iceberg and the crimes are still going on. So is the industry hype that convinced so many Americans to buy into artificially inflated housing and toxic loans.

Even now, many in the housing and finance industry are painted as victims of the economic crash when they are in fact the REASON it crashed.

Reducing it to a soundbyte might be best accomplished by this FBI document, something I sure never heard on TV news, but we all SHOULD have, and should've heard it AT LEAST as often as we heard about Britney Spears panties:

"Based on existing investigations and mortgage fraud reporting, 80 percent of all reported fraud losses involve collaboration or collusion by industry insiders." http://www.fbi.gov/publications/financial/fcs_report052005/fcs_report052005.htm