PayThink

"The 20% down payment is not part of our proposal," said Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, in Senate testimony, about the qualified mortgage rule.

Fanatical insistence on lending to risky borrowers to get them to buy more houses destroyed trillions of dollars. Now there's pressure to make even riskier, unsecured loans to these consumers. A freer, fairer market would do better.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has, as required by Dodd-Frank, appointed members to a board that will consult twice a year with director Richard Cordray. The members range from bank executives to consumer advocates.

The Dodd-Frank Act has a champion in Treasury Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Mary Miller. To those who would repeal or roll it back she warns that doing so could lead to another crisis.

Underserved consumers need access to high-quality small loans from financial institutions that are based on sound underwriting and include tools for budgeting and saving.

A couple of columns back I shared (actually, tried to start) a rumor that Discovery Channel was launching a new series called LoanShark Week. Not to be outdone, the state of Pennsylvania's Treasurer, Rob McCord, tried to draw attention to his department's unclaimed property database (about one-in-10 Pennsylvanians have unclaimed property, with $1.9-billion waiting to be claimed) by highlighting every Shark Week-related name his department could identify that had unclaimed property.

If some regulation of financial products and services is a good thing, then shouldn't a lot more of it be even better? As everyone trying to run a credit union these days knows, the answer to that question is "of course not."

Children's Miracle Network Hospitals has forged a wonderful partnership with the credit union community over the last 17 years and in that time credit unions have established a remarkable legacy at children's hospitals throughout the United States.

I would argue that the testimony by credit unions to Congress that the regulatory burden is the number-one concern is either a delusion or dishonest.

Congress has punched traditional bankers in the nose, and if we do nothing in the next 50 days, they will continue this abuse with impunity.