Elizabeth Warren named Special Counsel to CFPBFollow

Official source.She was the one who suggested the Bureau in the first place, and the progressive's first choice for the position. By naming her as a special advisor, she will be acting as the interim director while avoiding an expected lengthy Senate confirmation battle. (She is expected to be nominated to the formal position after the midterms.)

Since you totally ignored my attempt to help here, I've decided that I'm not going to respond to this thread out of spite.











Damn.

Call me nitpicky, but doesn't the whole political-appointee-to-a-government-agency-without-Senate-confirmation thing run afoul of the Constitution? Wasn't there a spat about this very subject earlier this year?

It's early, and I haven't had much coffee, so I could be completely wrong.

She's advising the board instead of heading it. Devil's in the details, it would seem.

It's sad that the two are considered mutually exclusive.

It's a liberal girl, Varus. You forgot to call her a bull ****.

Why does Varus hate educated people? What absolute agenda does he have against folks who make their living studying the world and teaching others? Is it because they're smarter than him? Is it because they (quite often if they're good) make more money than him? Is it because people in government solicit their opinions more often than people like him?

Yes, Elizabeth Warren was a Harvard Professor. She was also the chair of the 5-person Congressional Oversight Panel in charge of ensuring TARP funds weren't squandered. It's because of her team that Bush's final gift to the banks is actually getting paid back with interest.

Her three favorite targets are credit card companies, banks, and fraudsters illegally advertising themselves a brokers for industries when they have no licenses to practice in them. She wants to shut down predatory lenders and curb the worst excesses of the industry. A lot of that has already been done, in the new regulations outlined in the legislation. Her role as an adviser would be to ensure compliance with the rules - right now most banks are working on compliance (for example, my bank told me that it will no longer approved debit card transactions that should have been declined then slap me with a $35 fee - not that I've over drafted in the last 6 years, but still.)

The most amusing description of her has been "She's a grandmother that will make grown men cry." But her students love her - she was named Harvard Law's teacher of the year twice.

Sort of like a pitbull with lipstick - but also with a law degree.

(She's more attractive than Elena Kagan, but she's no Palin. Dems pick their women leaders based on their accomplishments, not their appearance.)

I believe the "predatory lenders" she's referring to are those that are running rackets and scams, not those who offer legitimate sub-prime mortgages. The ones that lie about the terms, like not clearly explaining what an ARM is, or who ask for an up front fee as part of a mortgage application and then never follow through on the mortgage and don't return the deposit. (When our first house failed to pass the inspection, we got our earnest money back from the realtor.)

Or if they do actually fulfill a mortgage, they don't run a credit check or verify income, and then once they close the deal, they sell the loan to a bank who is stuck with a dud mortgage for people who got in way over their heads.

You do realize that many folks in the "private sector" have the same law degrees, business degrees, and academic degrees as those who work in academia or the government? The only difference tends to be who hired them right after they graduated.

Not going to speculate on Varus' reasoning, but the saying "that's academic" exists for a reason. A lot of times, the real world doesn't work the way the books and formulas say they do. Most good academics understand this, but sometimes you get people who insist on implementing policy and regulation based on how their academic understanding of the world says things should work, and they end out making things much much worse. Warren shows some of the symptoms of this (although she's not nearly as bad as others Obama has appointed to positions, or Obama himself for that matter).



This. Not only is it a soundbite, but it's one of those things which on paper should work, but in the real world requires far more intrusive legislation than is practicable. A lot of Warren's work seems to focus on the cost of living changes over time. What's interesting is that she appears to know that it's not the cost of staple goods, or the drop in wages, but rather that people are choosing to spend more and go into debt, but she concludes that the "solution" is to somehow regulate the markets so that they can't allow people to spend more than they can afford.

That there is a pretty huge slippery slope if you stop and think about it. It's hard to see the dividing line between regulating industry so as to prevent them from allowing you to spend more than you can afford and restricting consumer choice outright. Also, as you say, people take risks to get gains. Should the government be the one who decides if someone is taking too much risk? That seems counter to the principles of freedom.




And honestly, this is where I'll repeat one of my common complaints about liberal thinking. Liberals tend to have a hard time seeing the difference between not doing things which harm people and doing things which help them. Sub-prime lending will take care of itself if there *isn't* a government hand in there trying to build social good-will by helping poor people buy houses. If you want to fix the problem, get the government out of the sub-prime business. But the left doesn't want to do that for reasons which tie back to the anti-academic aspect of this. They are so sure that they are smart enough to figure out how to provide help for poor people while avoiding abuses that they can't stop doing what they're doing to contribute to the problem and will instead look in every other direction for the fault. All their research tells them that they can control the market if they just have enough regulation, but what history shows us is that the more meddling of that sort done, the *worse* things get.


Not that I'm laying those particular things at her feet, but she's definitely of that same mind set.

I've been completely credit-cardless for the last 7 years and I haven't missed it. Part of Warren's goals is educating consumers that they don't have to go into massive debt and spend spend spend. An educated consumer is one who makes wise decisions. But too many lenders deliberately obfuscate the terms of their lending. That's why regulation is required - they can still bilk the suckers, but they need to warn them ahead of time that what they are doing is, in fact, bilking.

Edit: Hit enter early.



Edited, Sep 16th 2010 7:33pm by catwho

Given that Varus failed as a teacher, I'm guessing he's right around monkey-level in ability.

At the risk of opening the flood gates to a wave of insipid anti-Big-Brother rants, why not?