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A little real estate humor to begin December

The CFPB is one of those federal entities that is truly known by it’s initials.    Even more so than FBI or CIA, you have to think for a minute to remember what it stands for.   . . . ?  Consumer . . . .???     Now to make things more difficult, the head of the CFPB stepped down mid-term and tried to appoint a replacement.   The President, citing some legal precedent and administrative regulations, appointed a different replacement.     It has become the battle of dueling donuts . . .  although it seems that Trump’s man for the job has a deeper donut budget to win over the rank and file.   But I digress.  The best way yet to obfuscate the full name of the CFPB is to hear the new name coined by Robert Schmidt of Bloomberg Business Week.   STOP reading here unless  you do not want to ever think of Consumer Finance Protection Bureau again when you hear the initials CFPB.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-30/the-cfpb-center-for-partisan-bickering

For those of you that have continued to read this blog entry this long, you probably already know that the CFPB, the brainchild of Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, is henceforth to be known as THE CENTER FOR PARTISAN BICKERING.

The Bloomberg article is worth reading to get background on what the Bureau does and is supposed to do.    The problem it seems, is not that it might actually inadvertently aid a beleaguered consumer once in a while, directly or indirectly.   That it does so with a typically bloated budget is no badge of dishonor in DC.    But the conflict has arisen with the current administration’s policies of deregulation.  One of the populist notions that swept in the Trump administration in 2016 is that the expense of regulatory compliance is just passed on to the consumer anyway.   Does anyone have bank or lending fees that seem to be going down?    So why do consumers need to pay higher fees to the banks to keep them in business and pay higher taxes for a DC watchdog Bureau that doesn’t actually advocate on behalf of individual consumers?    Bank regulation has been around since the 30’s.  Why should the CFPB take the approach that adding yet one more bank regulatory bureau is the best way to protect consumers?  If the old regulators have failed, why not get rid of them or hold them accountable rather than just investing billions in duplication?

It appears that the judicial branch has given the edge in the litigation for who will be the next head of the CFPB to Trump’s appointee, Nick Mulvaney.  He will take the approach that rather than just adding additional regulatory burden on banks, the CFPB will actually be true to its name and advocate in ways that more directly protect consumers.  But I promised more humor in today’s post, so I will hand off the baton to my friends at the National Real Estate Post to give you a more entertaining analysis:

https://thenationalrealestatepost.com/expect-to-see-a-new-cfpb/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNationalRealEstatePost+%28The+National+Real+Estate+Post%29

Don’t hesitate to send us your own real estate jokes and stories!   let us know if you prefer your name be changed to protect your innocence if we repost your submission!

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