Thread by @doctorow

After the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration and Elizabeth Warren created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, a watchdog charged with rooting out and punishing predatory financial practices.

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They understood that future administrations could neuter the Bureau, so they cooked up a future-proofing plan: the Bureau's head would be appointed for five years, and could not be fired by subsequent administrations.

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In her memoir, Warren recounts how she chose not to run the Bureau herself, which led to Obama appointing Richard Cordray to run it. That was a huge mistake.

Once Trump assumed office, Cordray RESIGNED FROM HIS POST to make an unsuccessful bid for governor of Ohio.

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This allowed Trump to fill the post with a succession of finance predators and sociopaths, each worse than the last: men and women who declined to prosecute Equifax for doxxing the entire country, and dropped enforcement against payday lenders.

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What's more, Trump's appointee will have the job for half a decade AFTER Trump leaves office, thanks to the Obama/Warren future-proofing scheme and Cordray's absolute, blinding, reckless fucking idiocy.

Seriously: fuck that guy. Sideways. With a brick.

Forever.

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That director is Kathy Kraninger, who has taken the position that she has too much independence and that her agency should be subordinated to the whims of the executive. But that was just for openers.

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Kraninger's signature initiative is the protection and promotion of payday lenders, whose 400+% APR "two week" loans are designed to take an average of five months to repay.

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Those are the GOOD loans. The bad ones, like car-title loans, have a 90% reborrow rate and result in repossession 20% of the time.

The primary customers for these loans are poor people, which, in America, means brown and Black people.

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Kraninger is key to Trump's covid response: her agency responded to the emergency by tearing the heart out of the remaining protections against predatory lenders, allowing them to make loans without assessing whether the borrower can repay them.

theintercept.com/2020/08/12/cfp…

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As @TerriFriedline explains in her excellent piece for @theintercept, the rule change comes just as the eviction moratoriums and expanded unemployment payments are expiring - leaving Americans desperate for cash to avoid homelessness in the midst of a pandemic.

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These Black and brown people are ideal fodder for the overwhelmingly white, wealthy predatory lenders who will strip them of every remaining asset before discarding them.

Image:
Paul Sableman, modified
flickr.com/photos/pasa/72…

CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

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