Why would an agency that had the authority to write unlimited checks on the Federal Reserve Board need to have a stockpiled trust fund of 73 million?

As a practical matter, the CFPB is now under the control of the Executive Branch. Given that the Democrats are not enthusiastic about that fact, and that Republicans have been arguing that the CFPB operates outside of the bounds of the Constitution, now would be an excellent time for the two parties to agree on fixing the agency's structure. It could be made either into an "independent agency" with representatives from both parties sitting on a commission, or an agency responsible to the…

Form PF is fundamentally useless. (See .) The financial industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing systems to answer questions that were poorly considered and written. Anyone familiar with the relevant area of law could see that the questions posed on the form could not possibly generate useful or consistent results. Leaving aside the time and money wasted, if one believes that the information properly collected might have been useful to the regulators, then the waste was even…

Under the prior Administration, regulators simply refused to acknowledge that there were problems in the fixed income markets, perhaps because it would have meant acknowledging that there had been negative consequences to Dodd-Frank. The fact that spreads in certain securities declined, as Commissioner Stein noted, is not evidence of improved liquidity if the size of the orders as to which those spreads relate has declined substantially, or if those orders relate to a materially lesser…