Tag Archives: regulation

Another CFPB Overreach

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Now it’s preparing to force banks to make whole those their customers who are conned by money-transfer service scams, regardless of whether the bank had anything to do with the scam.

Bank customers no longer should be responsible for their own decisions, even their foolish ones. We average Americans, holds the CFPB and its MFWIC, Rohit Chopra, are just too grindingly stupid to be responsible for ourselves.

Currently, banks must repay customers for charges they did not authorize. Chopra and his CFPB want banks, in addition, to have to refund these third-party transfers, done on the banks’ systems, if the customer authorizes the transaction and later changes his mind and cries foul. Customers are no longer expected to do their own due diligence regarding their money. That’s too much responsibility, you see.

This is one more reason this creature of Elizabeth Warren, this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, needs to be disbanded, the law creating it wholly rescinded, and metaphorical salt poured on the pages of the Code of Laws of the United States of America, our USC, and the child pages in our Code of Federal Regulations, our CFR, that contained it.

“Misquote”

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US District Judge Charles Atchley, Jr, issued a preliminary injunction barring the Federal government from enforcing President Joe Biden’s (D) Executive Order and his Department of Education’s “guidance” equating sex and gender identity that

unilaterally redefin[ed] federal law to not only prohibit male-female distinctions in school sports, restrooms, and locker rooms, but also compel employers to use employees’ preferred pronouns

The Biden administration, further, is threatening to withhold “substantial federal funding” if institutions did not comply.

In his ruling, Atchley

…chided the feds for ignoring the explicit text of the Bostock decision [Bostock v Clayton County, decided in 2020] even while citing it for support, noting the majority “explicitly refused to decide” the issue of bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes under Title VII. The guidance documents “advance new interpretations” of two federal laws and “impose new legal obligations on regulated entities.”

The judge was being generous in stopping there regarding ignoring the Supreme Court’s actual ruling. Biden and Miguel Cardona, Secretary of the DoEd, knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. They easily could have been held in contempt of court for their deliberate distortion of the ruling and sanctioned accordingly.

Yet Another Reason…

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…to stop doing business in or with the People’s Republic of China.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission is implementing changes to its rules governing publicly offered securities investment funds. These rules include requiring foreign-owned fund managers such as BlackRock and Fidelity to create Communist Party cells when operating in China.

And

In January 2021, HSBC executive Noel Quinn was unable to confirm to the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee that the bank had no party cells in its branches in Hong Kong and the mainland.

His own bank, and he doesn’t know how tied it is to the Chinese Communist Party.

The CSRC’s rules dovetail nicely with the PRC’s national intelligence law that requires companies operating inside the PRC to collect and deliver whatever intelligence information the intelligence community wishes (and companies domiciled in the PRC to go outside the nation to collect that information and deliver it).

It’s just not worth the national security risk to do any business with or within the PRC.

The New Pen and Phone

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) infamously bragged that he had a pen and a phone available if Congress wouldn’t do his bidding. And he proceeded to use them to reign via diktat—diktats often overruled in court (and remember, this was before former President Donald Trump (R) was able to restore textualist sanity and restrain judicial activism).

Behold, the President Joe Biden (D) version of the pen and phone tool for ruling, rather than governing: the permanent “public health emergency.”

The Biden Administration claims the declaration provides critical regulatory flexibility.

You bet it does.

Rent Control vs Market Competition

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Here’s an example of the failure of no competition in affordable housing, this one in St Paul, MN. The residents of St Paul last November voted to cap rent increases at 3% per year, forever, with no exceptions.

Mercatus Center [Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity project] Salim Furth compared St Paul building permits in the five months after passage of rent control with the average of the same months in the three years prior [i.e., immediately preceding the Wuhan Virus situation onset]. By that metric, St Paul’s multifamily permitting is…down 55%.

And

City data shows St Paul’s building permit revenue from January to May 2022 was $3.699 million, down from an average of $4.176 million from 2018 to 2021.

The claimed purpose was to protect affordable housing availability.

However.

St Paul’s rent control creates an incentive for developers to build luxury apartments to recoup their construction costs. But builders are also opting to leave St Paul. Citing rent control, investors recently paused development on the 3,800-unit Highland Bridge project. Its builders would have set aside 20% of units for affordable housing, with 10% going to those earning 30% or less of area median income.

The only ones who wouldn’t have predicted this outcome, who don’t understand its inevitability, are those who can’t stand the thought of individuals or private businesses making their own decisions, or free markets making their own aggregated decisions, independently of the limits and requirements set by Know Betters.