Tag Archives: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Chamber of Commerce Gives Wall Street, Polluters, What They Ask For

When it comes to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, you know the drill. Regulation is bad. Dirty energy is good.

And why shouldn’t it be? We are talking, of course, about Corporate America’s biggest booster.

In advance of the annual “State of American Business” speech by Thomas J. Donohue, the Godfather of corporate lobbying, I made some predictions about what the speech would include.  I concede it was not exactly a challenging task. But I did have a little fun with the Chamber’s always-predictable hypocrisies. You can read my column for TheStreet.com here.

Antilla 2015 Awards

Earlier this month, the New York press club The Society of the Silurians said I’d won its “Excellence in Journalism” award for my online columns for TheStreet.com.

From the judges: “In these searing columns, Antilla highlights the anti-consumer sentiment that has taken hold of significant portions of the Republican Party as it attempts to distance agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”

My stories also have been entered into the national competition for The National Federation of Press Women, which said this week that I’d won first place in two of its “at-large” contests, which include 27 states that don’t have direct affiliations with NFPW. One winning entry was for my columns for TheStreet about the fleecing of senior citizens by stock brokers. A second winning entry was in the feature category, for my article in The New York Times about sex discrimination at Sterling Jewelers, the biggest retail jewelry operation in the United States. The winners in the “at large” categories have been entered into NFPW’s national competition.

Looking To Get Financially Literate? Don’t Expect Business “Educators” to Help

April is Financial Literacy Month, which is supposed to be a time when we marvel at the progress we’ve made in making the public smarter about finance.

Yet after nearly two decades of effort, the studies not only show little progress, but actual backsliding in the public’s financially savvy.

The problem has much to do with who’s in back of most literacy efforts: business. A credit card company isn’t going to warn you not to spend more than you can pay off in a given month, and a brokerage firm isn’t going to send you to Finra’s BrokerCheck to be sure you’re broker isn’t a sleazeball.

I wrote about the problems with literacy efforts in my column for TheStreet. You can read it here.

The Agency that Helps Consumers, Irritates Republicans

When a Federal agency reins in sleazy debt collectors and slipshod mortgage servicers, that’s more than enough to get politicians enraged — at the agency, not the bad guys.

The two-year-old Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has already collected $3 billion to return to aggrieved consumers, and has done such good follow-up when consumers call to complain that lenders and others who fall under its jurisdiction are actually helping customers right away rather than face the ire of the CFPB.

In my story for TheStreet.com today, I talk about the bizarre reaction to CFPB from Republicans in the House of Representatives.

A gaggle of chest-beating Republicans has been in attack mode against the CFPB since before it even opened its doors, trashing the agency’s architect, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, and passing bills to try to weaken its authority. The latest effort, up for a vote in the House of Representatives in coming weeks: the Consumer Financial Protection and Soundness Improvement Act of 2013, which would reduce the agency’s pay schedule and make it easier to overturn its rules, among other curtailments.

Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, actually makes a good point when he criticizes CFPB for collecting extensive consumer data that is a worry in these times of compromised personal information, but he’s so over-the-top in his condemnations that his constructive criticisms could get lost.

A favorite practice of Hensarling’s is to introduce CFPB Director Richard Cordray at official hearings with taunts about the agency being “accountable to no one,” which is always kind of funny since the CFPB chief is sitting across from his cantankerous questioners precisely because he is being held accountable. Hensarling managed to squeeze references to Cordray as “credit czar” and “national nanny” and “benevolent financial product dictator” in a single sentence at a hearing in September.

You can read my story here.