Trump Acts To Make Predatory Finance Great Again

The following is part of an article by economist Paul Krugman:

Just over two years ago Wells Fargo agreed to pay $3.7 billion — $1.7 billion in penalties and $2 billion in damages — to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. . . .

This settlement followed earlier scandals at Wells Fargo, notably the “cross-selling scandal” in which, among other things, bank employees opened as many as 2 million accounts in customers’ names without their authorization. Altogether the bank has paid $6.2 billion in penalties since 2016.

Overall, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who conceived of CFPB, the bureau “has returned over $21 billion to families cheated by Wall Street.”

But now the agency that won those settlements has been effectively abolished. On Monday Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget and now CFPB’s acting head, sent the email above to all of the agency’s staff telling them to stay away from the office and do no work. . . .

 By any reasonable standard, CFPB has been an outstanding success story.

Why, then, rush to shutter the agency? . . .

It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so. But now we have government of, by and for financial predators. Trump has famously left behind a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid contractors, and is furiously grifting even now. Musk has faced multiple lawsuits from vendors and former employees over unpaid debts.

And let’s not forget that crypto, which has gained a lot of influence with this administration, has yet to find a real-world use case other than money laundering.

So the best way to explain the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as I see it, is as part of an effort to make predatory finance great again.