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Earlier this fall we had some high stakes combat over passing the budget and extending the debt ceiling. On both issues, President Obama and the Republican Congress reached compromises that resolved the immediate standoff. However, these compromises still required specific appropriation bills in several major areas of the budget. It turns out that the passage of these bills is providing more grounds for conflict.
While there is agreement on the amount of money to be included in these bills, the conflict stems from Republican plans to include extraneous issues, referred to as “riders,” as provisions of the appropriation bills. These riders can cover a vast range of topics. We are virtually certain to see riders that would eliminate all funding for Planned Parenthood, as well as provisions that call for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. President Obama will certainly veto these bills, but this would prevent the commitment of a stream of funding and create a risk of shutdowns of particular departments or agencies.
Financial regulation is one of the areas drawing considerable attention from Republicans and a likely topic of one or more riders. In particular, the Republicans are likely to include riders weakening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and also to block a Labor Department regulation on financial advisers.
The Republicans’ big problem with the CFPB is that it seems to be doing its job. The bureau was set up first and foremost to prevent the sort of abusive lending that we saw in the peak years of the housing bubble. Millions of people bought or refinanced homes with mortgages that had interest rates which would reset to higher levels. While they may have been able to afford the mortgage with the initial rate, many homeowners found themselves unable to pay the rate after the mortgage reset. This was a major factor in many people losing their homes after the bubble burst.
The CFPB has sought to impose higher standards in the mortgage industry and other sectors of consumer finance, ensuring the people understand the terms and the risks involved when they take out a loan. The effectiveness of the CFPB is perhaps best demonstrated by the one area in consumer finance where it was prohibited from playing a role: car loans.
There have been numerous news accounts on the proliferation of subprime loans in the auto industry. In a smaller scale repeat of the subprime disaster in the housing market, millions of people are finding themselves unable to meet the terms of their car loans. They often end up losing a car that is essential for their job and transportation needs. While this reality might reasonably lead Congress to extend the authority of the CFPB to cover auto loans, instead we are likely to see riders cutting back the bureau’s budget.
The story with the Labor Department’s regulation on financial advisers is similar. Many financial advisers push stocks or other financial products to their customers because they get a commission based on their sales. This is disturbing both because people might not be well-situated to evaluate the risks and benefits associated with various financial assets and also because many people assume that a financial adviser is working in their interest.
The proposed Labor Department regulation would in fact require that financial advisers actually do work in the interest of their customers. This means that they should be giving advice based on what they believe to be in their customers’ interest, not because they are getting paid to push a particular stock, mutual fund, or other financial asset.
While the stake for the financial industry in opposing both the CFPB and the Labor Department regulation is clear, it is interesting to consider the argument they put forward. It essentially amounts to saying that we should trust people to look out for themselves and the government need not get involved.
Believing there is a role for government in regulating consumer finance doesn’t require thinking that people are stupid. Most people are not experts in finance or reading complex contracts. They have lives.
It isn’t surprising that smart lawyers can write contracts that deceive consumers about the terms to which they are committing themselves. Nor is it hard to believe that a financial adviser can deceive a customer who spends little time studying financial instruments.
We can say people should understand that the world of finance is dangerous waters and therefore spend the time necessary to protect themselves from scams. Or, we can say it makes sense for the government to make the waters safer. The CFPB and the regulation of financial advisers are efforts to do exactly this. The point is to remove some of the pitfalls that we know have been enormously harmful to tens of millions of families.
In fact, there is also a very strong argument for this regulation from the standpoint of promoting productivity and growth. In addition to preventing consumers from having to waste their time studying finance, these regulations also remove the incentive to create deceptive products. Would we rather have smart talented people designing better software and health care technology or figuring out ways to deceive people on car loans and mortgages? By foreclosing the deception option, financial regulation should be pushing people to devote their talents to productive work.
It is, of course, understandable that there are differences of opinion on such issues. If the Republicans want to have a public debate on allowing the financial industry to pursue deceptive practices, they can do that with freestanding bills. When President Obama vetoes the bills, they will have the ammunition they need to make this issue play a central role in the 2016 elections. Then the public will get to decide.
Originally written for Al Jazeera America.
