Consumer Protection Law Commons^™

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Financial Regulation For The 21st Century

Patricia A. McCoy

After existing regulatory systems failed to prevent the recent financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a sweeping reform designed to alleviate the crisis and prevent its recurrence. Out of this Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was born. This new agency is charged with making markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans, a task that was previously spread out among seven different federal agencies with varying priorities. This Article describes, with a series of concrete case studies, four key principles that have guided the Bureau as it strives to fulfill …

Information Revolution: “Choice Of Control” To “Choice And Control”, Subhajit Basu, Christina Munns

Subhajit Basu

Please do not cite without permission of the authors.

In this article, we critically analyse whether the ‘privacy framework’ for health records is ‘fit-for-purpose’ for the NHS’s ‘information revolution’ and argue that the NHS’s ‘proxy-individual’ information-guardian role could inadvertently mask individuals’ intended roles, effectively circumventing autonomy-based laws by limiting the power of individuals to be autonomous. We suggest that moving ‘choice of control’ to individuals will render ‘privacy’ redundant whilst validating ‘confidentiality’ via consent from empowered individuals. This power shift would expose the overdue need for options to increase levels of individual ‘control/privacy,’ moving from the NHS’s paternal ‘proxy-individual’ conception …

Implementing Dodd-Frank: A Review Of The Cftc‟S Rulemaking Process: Testimony, Michael Greenberger

Michael Greenberger

The Relationship of Unregulated OTC Derivatives to the Meltdown. It is now accepted wisdom that it was the non-transparent, poorly capitalized, and almost wholly unregulated over-the-counter (“OTC”) derivatives market that lit the fuse that exploded the highly vulnerable worldwide economy in the fall of 2008. Because tens of trillions of dollars of these financial products were pegged to the economic performance of an overheated and highly inflated housing market, the sudden collapse of that market triggered under-capitalized or non-capitalized OTC derivative guarantees of the subprime housing investments. Moreover, the many undercapitalized insurers of that collapsing market had other multi-trillion dollar …

Federal Preemption And Consumer Financial Protection: Past And Future

Patricia A. McCoy

Starting in 1995 and throughout the subprime boom during the next decade, Congress failed to take action to curb predatory mortgage lending. Many states and cities filled the void by passing anti-predatory lending laws of their own. Lenders, worried about potential liability, quickly organized a full-scale attack on the state and local initiatives. Their most potent strategy lay in challenging the laws and ordinances under federal preemption rules for national banks and federal savings associations that precluded states from enforcing their anti-predatory lending laws.

The Dodd-Frank Act curtailed the preemption rules by establishing that state consumer financial laws can only …

Public Engagement In Rulemaking: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’S New Approach

Patricia A. McCoy

No abstract provided.