advance america cfsaa

=

=<div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-payday-lenders-spent-1-million-at-a-trump-resort-and-cashed-in" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-payday-lenders-spent-1-million-at-a-trump-resort-and-cashed-in</font></a></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.0" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In mid-March, the payday lending industry held its annual convention at the Trump National Doral hotel outside Miami.</b>&nbsp;Payday lenders offer loans on the order of a few hundred dollars, typically to low-income borrowers, who have to pay them back in a matter of weeks. The industry has long been reviled by critics for charging stratospheric interest rates — typically 400% on an annual basis — that leave customers trapped in cycles of debt.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.1" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The industry had felt under siege during the Obama administration, as the federal government moved to clamp down.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finds-four-out-of-five-payday-loans-are-rolled-over-or-renewed/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">A government study</a>&nbsp;found that a majority of payday loans are made to people who pay more in interest and fees than they initially borrow.&nbsp;<a href="https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/2464998?hl=en" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Google</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Facebook</a>&nbsp;refuse to take the industry’s ad</span>s.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.2" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the edge of the Doral’s grounds, as the payday convention began, a group of ministers held a protest “pray-in,” denouncing the lenders for having a “feast” while their borrowers “suffer and starve.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But inside the hotel, in a wood-paneled bar under golden chandeliers, the mood was celebratory. Payday lenders, many dressed in golf shirts and khakis, enjoyed an open bar and mingled over bites of steak and coconut shrimp.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.4" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They had plenty to be elated about. A month earlier,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Kathleen Kraninger, who had just finished her second month as director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had delivered what the lenders consider an epochal victory: Kraninger&nbsp;<a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-releases-notices-proposed-rulemaking-payday-lending/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">announced a proposal</a>&nbsp;to gut&nbsp;<a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/201710_cfpb_final-rule_payday-loans-rule.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">a crucial rule</a>&nbsp;that had been passed under her Obama-era predecessor.</span></font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.4" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Payday lenders viewed that rule as a potential death sentence for many in their industry. It would require payday lenders and others to make sure borrowers could afford to pay back their loans while also covering basic living expenses. Banks and mortgage lenders view such a step as a basic prerequisite. But the notion struck terror in the payday lenders. Their business model relies on customers — 12 million Americans take out payday loans every year, according to Pew Charitable Trusts — getting stuck in a long-term cycle of debt, experts say. A&nbsp;<a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201304_cfpb_payday-dap-whitepaper.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">CFPB study</a>&nbsp;found that three out of four payday loans go to borrowers who take out 10 or more loans a year.</font></p><p tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;" /><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="5.0" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
This year was the second in a row that the&nbsp;<b>CFSA&nbsp;</b>held its convention at the Doral. In the eight years before 2018 (the extent for which records could be found), the organization never held an event at a Trump property.Now, the industry was taking credit for the CFPB’s retreat. As salespeople, executives and vendors picked up lanyards and programs at the registration desk by the Doral’s lobby, they saw a message on the first page of the program from Dennis Shaul, CEO of the industry’s trade group, the<b>Community Financial Services Association of America,&nbsp;</b>which was hosting the convention. “We should not forget that we have had some good fortune through recent regulatory and legal developments,” Shaul wrote. “These events did not occur by accident, but rather are due in large part to the unity and participation of CFSA members and a commitment to fight back against regulatory overreach by the CFPB.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="5.2" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asked whether the choice of venue had anything to do with the fact that its owner is president of the United States and the man who appointed Kraninger as his organization’s chief regulator, Shaul assured ProPublica and WNYC that the answer was no. “We returned because the venue is popular with our members and meets our needs,” he said in a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6128988-CFSA-Statement-2019-05-31.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">written statement</a>. The statement noted that the CFSA held its first annual convention at the Doral hotel more than 16 years ago. Trump didn’t own the property at the time.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="5.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The CFSA and its members have poured a total of about $1 million into the Trump Organization’s coffers through the two annual conferences,</b>&nbsp;according to detailed estimates prepared by a corporate event planner in Miami and an executive at a competing hotel that books similar events. Those estimates are consistent with the CFSA’s&nbsp;<a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/522156601/201843049349301624/IRS990" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: inherit; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">most recent available tax filing</a>, which reveals that it spent $644,656 on its annual conference the year before the first gathering at the Trump property. (The Doral and the CFSA declined to comment.)</font></p><p tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;" /><figure data-pp-id="6" data-pp-blocktype="image" class="image large left" style="font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1.625rem 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; width: 808.125px; float: none; clear: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s a way of keeping themselves on the list, reminding the president and the people close to him that they are among those who are generous to him with the profits that they earn from a business that’s in severe danger of regulation unless the Trump administration acts,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of consumer group Americans for Financial Reform.</font></span></figure><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.1" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The money the CFSA spent at the Doral is only part of the ante to lobby during the Trump administration. The payday lenders also did a bevy of things that interest groups have always done: They contributed to the president’s inauguration and earned face time with the president after donating to a Trump ally.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.2" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But it’s the payment to the president’s business that is a stark reminder that the Trump administration is like none before it. If the industry had written a $1 million check directly to the president’s campaign, both the CFSA and campaign could have faced fines or even criminal charges — and Trump couldn’t have used the money to enrich himself. But paying $1 million directly to the president’s business? That’s perfectly legal.</font></p><hr tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; border: none; margin: 2em 4em; height: 1px; background: rgb(216, 214, 211); outline: none;" /><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The inauguration of Donald Trump was a watershed for the payday lending industry. It had been feeling beleaguered since the launch of the CFPB in 2011. For the first time, the industry had come under federal supervision. Payday lending companies were suddenly subject to exams conducted by the bureau’s supervision division, which could, and sometimes did, lead to enforcement cases.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before the bureau was created, payday lenders had been overseen mostly by state authorities. That left a patchwork: 15 states in which payday loans were banned outright, a handful of states with strong enforcement — and large swaths of the country in which payday lending was mostly unregulated.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then, almost as suddenly as an aggressive CFPB emerged, the Trump administration arrived with an agenda of undoing regulations. “There was a resurgence of hope in the industry, which seems to be justified, at this point,” said Jeremy Rosenblum, a partner at law firm Ballard Spahr, who represents payday lenders. Rosenblum spoke to ProPublica and WNYC in a conference room at the Doral — filled with notepads, pens and little bowls of candy marked with the Trump name and family crest — where he had just led a session on compliance with federal and state laws. “There was a profound sense of relief, or hope, for the first time.” (Ballard Spahr occasionally represents ProPublica in legal matters.)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In Mick Mulvaney, who Trump appointed as interim chief of the CFPB in 2017, the industry got exactly the kind of person it had hoped for. As a congressman, Mulvaney had famously derided the agency as a “sad, sick” joke.</b></font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If anything, that phrase undersold Mulvaney’s attempts to hamstring the agency as its chief. He froze new investigations, dropped enforcement actions en masse, requested a budget of $0 and seemed to mock the agency by attempting to officially re-order the words in the organization’s name.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mick Mulvaney served as interim chief of the CFPB from November 2017 through 2018. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Mulvaney’s rhetoric sometimes exceeded his impact. His budget request was ignored, for example; the CFPB’s name change was only fleeting. And besides, Mulvaney was always a part-timer, fitting in a few days a week at the CFPB while also heading the Office of Management and Budget, and then moving to the White House as acting chief of staff.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s Mulvaney’s successor, Kraninger, whom the financial industry is now counting on — and the early signs suggest she’ll deliver. In addition to easing rules on payday lenders, she has continued Mulvaney’s policy of ending supervisory exams on outfits that specialize in lending to the members of the military, claiming that the CFPB can do so only if Congress passes a new law granting those powers (which isn’t likely to happen anytime soon). She has also proposed a new regulation that will allow debt collectors to text and email debtors an unlimited number of times as long as there’s an option to unsubscribe.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enforcement activity at the bureau has plunged under Trump. The amount of monetary relief going to consumers has fallen from $43 million per week under Richard Cordray, the director appointed by Barack Obama, to $6.4 million per week under Mulvaney and is now $464,039, according to an updated analysis conducted by the Consumer Federation of America’s Christopher Peterson, a former special adviser to the bureau.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kathleen Kraninger testifies during her confirmation hearing in July 2018. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kraninger’s disposition seems almost the inverse of Mulvaney’s. If he’s the self-styled “right wing nutjob” willing to blow up the institution and everything near it, Kraninger offers positive rhetoric — she says she wants to “empower” consumers — and comes across as an amiable technocrat. At 44, she’s a former political science major — with degrees from Marquette University and Georgetown Law School — and has spent her career in the federal bureaucracy, with a series of jobs in the Transportation and Homeland Security departments and finally in OMB, where she worked under Mulvaney. (In an interview with her college alumni association, she hailed her Jesuit education and cited Pope Francis as her “dream dinner guest.”) In her previous jobs, Kraninger had extensive budgeting experience, but none in consumer finance. The CFPB declined multiple requests to make Kraninger available for an interview and directed ProPublica and WNYC to her public comments and speeches.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kraninger is new to public testimony, but she already seems to have developed the politician’s skill of refusing to answer difficult questions. At a hearing in March just weeks before the Doral conference, Democratic Rep. Katie Porter repeatedly asked Kraninger to calculate the annual percentage rate on a hypothetical $200 two-week payday loan that costs $10 per $100 borrowed plus a $20 fee. The exchange went viral on Twitter. In a bit of congressional theater, Porter even had an aide deliver a calculator to Kraninger’s side to help her. But Kraninger would not engage. She emphasized that she wanted to conduct a policy discussion rather than a “math exercise.” The answer, by the way: That’s a 521% APR.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A while later, the session recessed and Kraninger and a handful of her aides repaired to the women’s room. A ProPublica reporter was there, too. The group lingered, seeming to relish what they considered a triumph in the hearing room. “I stole that calculator, Kathy,” one of the aides said. “It’s ours! It’s ours now!” Kraninger and her team laughed.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Triple-digit interest rates are no laughing matter for those who take out payday loans. A sum as little as $100, combined with such rates, can lead a borrower into long-term financial dependency.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s what happened to Maria Dichter. Now 73, retired from the insurance industry and living in Palm Beach County, Florida, Dichter first took out a payday loan in 2011. Both she and her husband had gotten knee replacements, and he was about to get a pacemaker. She needed $100 to cover the co-pay on their medication. As is required, Dichter brought identification and her Social Security number and gave the lender a postdated check to pay what she owed. (All of this is standard for payday loans; borrowers either postdate a check or grant the lender access to their bank account.) What nobody asked her to do was show that she had the means to repay the loan. Dichter got the $100 the same day.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The relief was only temporary. Dichter soon needed to pay for more doctors’ appointments and prescriptions. She went back and got a new loan for $300 to cover the first one and provide some more cash. A few months later, she paid that off with a new $500 loan.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dichter collects a Social Security check each month, but she has never been able to catch up. For almost eight years now, she has renewed her $500 loan every month. Each time she is charged $54 in fees and interest. That means Dichter has paid about $5,000 in interest and fees since 2011 on what is effectively one loan for $500.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, Dichter said, she is “trapped.” She and her husband subsist on eggs and Special K cereal. “Now I’m worried,” Dichter said, “because if that pacemaker goes and he can’t replace the battery, he’s dead.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Payday loans are marketed as a quick fix for people who are facing a financial emergency like a broken-down car or an unexpected medical bill. But studies show that most borrowers use the loans to cover everyday expenses. “We have a lot of clients who come regularly,” said Marco (he asked us to use only his first name), a clerk at one of Advance America’s 1,900 stores, this one in a suburban strip mall not far from the Doral hotel. “We have customers that come two times every month. We’ve had them consecutively for three years.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These types of lenders rely on repeat borrowers. “The average store only has 500 unique customers a year, but they have the overhead of a conventional retail store,” said Alex Horowitz, a senior research officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, who has spent years studying payday lending. “If people just used one or two loans, then lenders wouldn’t be profitable.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read More</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Whack-a-Mole: How Payday Lenders Bounce Back When States Crack Down</b></font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In state after state that has tried to ban payday and similar loans, the industry has found ways to continue to peddle them.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was years of stories like Dichter’s that led the CFPB to draft a rule that would require that lenders ascertain the borrower’s ability to repay their loans. “We determined that these loans were very problematic for a large number of consumers who got stuck in what was supposed to be a short-term loan,” said Cordray, the first director of the CFPB, in an interview with ProPublica and WNYC. Finishing the ability-to-pay rule was one of the reasons he stayed on even after the Trump administration began. (Cordray left in November 2017 for what became an unsuccessful run for governor of Ohio.)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ability-to-pay rule was announced in October 2017. The industry erupted in outrage. Here’s how CFSA’s chief, Shaul, described it in his statement to us: “The CFPB’s original rule, as written by unelected Washington bureaucrats, was motivated by a deeply paternalistic view that small-dollar loan customers cannot be trusted with the freedom to make their own financial decisions. The original rule stood to remove access to legal, licensed small-dollar loans for millions of Americans.” The statement cited an analysis that “found that the rule would push a staggering 82 percent of small storefront lenders to close.” The CFPB estimated that payday and auto title lenders — the latter allow people to borrow for short periods at ultra-high annual rates using their cars as collateral — would lose around $7.5 billion as a result of the rule.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The industry fought back. The charge was led by Advance America, the biggest brick-and-mortar payday lender in the United States. Its CEO until December, Patrick O’Shaughnessy, was the chairman of the CFSA’s board of directors and head of its federal affairs committee. The company had already been wooing the administration, starting with a $250,000 donation to the Trump inaugural committee. (Advance America contributes to both Democratic and Republican candidates, according to spokesperson Jamie Fulmer. He points out that, at the time of the $250,000 donation, the CFPB was still headed by Cordray, the Obama appointee.)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Payday and auto title lenders collectively donated $1.3 million to the inauguration. Rod and Leslie Aycox from Select Management Resources, a Georgia-based title lending company, attended the Chairman’s Global Dinner, an exclusive inauguration week event organized by Tom Barrack, the inaugural chairman, according to documents obtained by “Trump, Inc.” President-elect Trump spoke at the dinner.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In October 2017, Rod Aycox and O’Shaughnessy met with Trump when he traveled to Greenville, South Carolina, to speak at a fundraiser for the state’s governor, Henry McMaster. They were among 30 people who were invited to discuss economic development after donating to the campaign, according to the The Post and Courier. (“This event was only about 20 minutes long,” said the spokesperson for O’Shaughnessy’s company, and the group was large. “Any interaction with the President would have been brief.” The Aycoxes did not respond to requests for comment.)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2017, the CFSA spent $4.3 million advocating for its agenda at the federal and state level, according to its IRS filing. That included developing “strategies and policies,” providing a “link between the industry and regulatory decision makers” and efforts to “educate various state policy makers” and “support legislative efforts which are beneficial to the industry and the public.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ability-to-pay rule technically went into effect in January 2018, but the more meaningful date was August 2019. That’s when payday lenders could be penalized if they hadn’t implemented key parts of the rule.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Payday lenders looked to Mulvaney for help. He had historically been sympathetic to the industry and open to lobbyists who contribute money. (Jaws dropped in Washington, not about Mulvaney’s practices in this regard, but about his candor. “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” he told bankers in 2018. “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read More</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The CFPB’s Declaration of Dependence</b></font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Born as a fiercely independent agency meant to protect citizens, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has quickly been subsumed into the Trump administration. Banks, student-loan agencies and payday lenders are the winners.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Mulvaney couldn’t overturn the ability-to-pay rule. Since it had been finalized, he didn’t have the legal authority to reverse it on his own. Mulvaney announced that the bureau would begin reconsidering the rule, a complicated and potentially lengthy process. The CFPB, under Cordray, had spent five years researching and preparing it.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, the payday lenders turned to Congress. Under the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers can nix federal rules during their first 60 days in effect. In the House, a bipartisan group of representatives filed a joint resolution to abolish the ability-to-pay rule. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., led the charge in the Senate. But supporters couldn’t muster a decisive vote in time, in part because opposition to payday lenders crosses party lines.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By April 2018, the CFSA members were growing impatient. But the Trump administration was willing to listen. The CFSA’s Shaul was granted access to a top Mulvaney lieutenant, according to “Mick Mulvaney’s Master Class in Destroying a Bureaucracy From Within” in The New York Times Magazine, which offers a detailed description of the behind-the scenes maneuvering. Shaul told the lieutenant that the CFSA had been preparing to sue the CFPB to stop the ability-to-pay rule “but now believed that it would be better to work with the bureau to write a new one.” Cautious about appearing to coordinate with industry, according to the article, the CFPB was non-committal.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Days later, the CFSA sued the bureau. The organization’s lawyers argued in court filings that the bureau’s rules “defied common sense and basic economic analysis.” The suit claimed the bureau was unconstitutional and lacked the authority to impose rules.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A month later, Mulvaney took a rare step, at least, for most administrations: He sided with the plaintiffs suing his agency. Mulvaney filed a joint motion asking the judge to delay the ability-to-pay rule until the lawsuit is resolved.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By February of this year, Kraninger had taken charge of the CFPB and proposed to rescind the ability-to-pay rule. Her official announcement asserted that there was “insufficient evidence and legal support” for the rule and expressed concern that it “would reduce access to credit and competition.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kraninger’s announcement sparked euphoria in the industry. One industry blog proclaimed, “It’s party time, baby!” with a GIF of President Trump bobbing his head.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kraninger’s decision made the lawsuit largely moot. But the suit, which has been stayed, has still served a purpose: This spring, a federal judge agreed to freeze another provision of the regulation, one that limits the number of times a lender can debit a borrower’s bank account, until the fate of the overall rule is determined.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the wrangling over the federal regulation plays out, payday lenders have continued to lobby statehouses across the country. For example, a company called Amscot pushed for a new state law in Florida last year. Amscot courted African American pastors and leaders located in the districts of dozens of Democratic lawmakers and chartered private jets to fly them to Florida’s capital to testify, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The lawmakers subsequently passed legislation creating a new type of payday loan, one that can be paid in installments, that lets consumers borrow a maximum $1,000 loan versus the $500 maximum for regular payday loans. Amscot CEO Ian MacKechnie asserts that the new loans reduce fees (consumer advocates disagree). He added, in an email to ProPublica and WNYC: “We have always worked with leaders in the communities that we serve: both to understand the experiences of their constituents with regard to financial products; and to be a resource to make sure everyone understands the law and consumer protections. Educated consumers are in everyone’s interest.” For their part, the leaders denied that Amscot’s contributions affected their opinions. As one of them told the Tampa Bay Times, the company is a “great community partner.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kraninger spent her first three months in office embarking on a “listening tour.” She traveled the country and met with more than 400 consumer groups, government officials and financial institutions. Finally, in mid-April, she gave her first public speech at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The CFPB billed it as the moment she would lay out her vision for the agency.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kraninger said she hoped to use the CFPB’s enforcement powers “less often.” She alluded to a report by the Federal Reserve that 40% of Americans would not be able to cover an emergency expense of $400. Her suggestion for addressing that: educational videos and a booklet. “To promote effective approaches to savings and particularly emergency savings,” Kraninger explained, “the Bureau recently launched our Start Small, Save Up initiative. It offers tips, tools and information to help consumers build a basic savings cushion and develop a savings habit. Later this year, we will be launching a savings ‘boot camp,’ a series of videos, and a very readable, informative booklet that serves as a roadmap to a savings plan.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Having laid out what sounded like a plan to hand out self-help brochures at an agency invented to pursue predatory financial institutions, she then said, “Let me be clear, however, the ultimate goal for the bureau is not to produce booklets and great content on our website. The ultimate goal is to move the needle on the number of Americans in this country who can cover a financial shock, like a $400 emergency.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Back at the Doral the month before her speech, $400 might not have seemed like much of an emergency to the payday lenders. Some attendees seemed most upset by a torrential downpour on the second day that caused the cancellation of the conference’s golf tournament.</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inside the Donald J. Trump Ballroom, the conference buzzed with activity. The Bush-era political adviser Karl Rove was the celebrity speaker after the breakfast buffet. And the practical sessions continued apace. One was called “The Power of the Pen.” It was aimed at helping attendees submit comments on the ability-to-pay rule to the government. It was clearly a matter of importance to the CFSA. In his statement to ProPublica and WNYC, Shaul noted that “more than one million customers submitted comments opposing the CFPB’s original small-dollar loan rule — hundreds of thousands of whom sent handwritten letters telling personal stories of how small-dollar loans helped them and their families.”</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A couple of months after the Doral conference, Allied Progress, a consumer advocacy group, analyzed the new round of comments that were submitted to the CFPB in response to Kraninger’s plans. In one sample of 26,000 comments, the group discovered that 27% of the statements submitted by purportedly independent individuals contained duplicative passages, all of which supported the industry’s position. For example, Allied Progress reported that 221 of the comments stated that “I have a long commute to work and it’s better for me financially to borrow from Cash Connection so that I can still make it to work than to not take care of my car and lose my job because of absences.” There were 201 asserting that “I now take care of my parents and my children” and I “want to be able to enjoy life and not feel burdened by the additional expenses that are piling up.” Allied Progress said it doesn’t know “if these are fake people, fake stories, or form letters intentionally designed to read as personal anecdotes.” (Cash Connection couldn’t be reached for comment.)</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="7.3" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taking account of public comments is the final task before Kraninger officially determines whether to put the ability-to-pay rule to death. Whatever she decides, it’s a likely bet that decision will be challenged in court, the CFSA will weigh in and the payday lenders will still be talking about it at next year’s annual conference. A spokesperson for the CFSA declined to say whether the event will be held at a Trump hotel.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-trumps-top-aide-unleashed-predatory-lenders-and-betrayed-the-working-class/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the Washington Monthly, and here at Political Animal, we’ve written from time to time about the&nbsp;<b>Trump administration’s efforts to defang the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but none of us has done as comprehensive a job of it as Nicholas Confessore. His new piece in the New York Times Magazine focuses on Mick Mulvaney’s time as the CFPB’s acting director.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I often hear liberals wonder aloud how so many low-to-moderate income Americans can support the Republican Party when it is clearly not in their financial interests to do so, and nowhere is that more clear than on the issues surrounding the CFPB. Confessore demonstrates this very ably by doing a deep-dive into the payday lending/short-terms loans industry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the following excerpt, he explains how the payday loan industry rose in influence and power during the Bush administration by making loans to people who (they hoped) would not be able to pay back the money. The CFPB was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, who was convinced of its necessity by her research into consumer debt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Elizabeth] Warren and other consumer advocates argued that payday lenders built their industry on a similar sleight of hand. They marketed themselves as lenders of last resort, offering emergency loans for a broken-down car or an unexpected medical bill. But according to Nick Bourke, a former financial-services consultant who now directs consumer-finance research at the Pew Charitable Trusts, what fed the industry’s growth were not emergency expenses but the increasingly unstable incomes of the working poor. As their hourly wages fluctuated at the whims of workplace-optimization software, payday-loan customers — typically white women earning around $30,000, according to Pew’s research — borrowed to pay their rent or electric bills. The average customer paid $55 in fees to borrow $375, due on their next payday. But most found that they couldn’t afford to repay the loan after two weeks. They took out another loan to cover the first, and usually another.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Consumer advocates called this cycle a “debt trap” and argued that payday lenders, much like credit-card companies, disguised the true costs of their products.</b>Store clerks emphasized the small-seeming fees and pushed customers to roll their old loans into new ones, so that the fees snowballed, eventually exceeding the cost of the original loan. While most banks made money by finding customers who could repay their debts on time, payday lenders made money by finding customers who couldn’t. “If borrowers repaid loans in just two weeks and walked away as advertised, lenders would go out of business,” Bourke says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What really distinguishes the short-term loan industry from regular banks is precisely the focus on finding customers who will default. They’ve also historically been unregulated by the federal government and free to charge grossly usurious rates. Several states decided to regulate the industry at the end of the last decade, and some like North Carolina banned payday loans outright.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Naturally, there are some consumers who have good experiences taking out emergency loans, and it can work for someone with poor credit who genuinely needs to borrow money for a very short period of time. These feel-good stories are what the industry relies on to rationalize their predatory business model. The overall effect of the industry is ruinous, however, as it sucks up billions of dollars from the people least able to part with their money.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CFPB didn’t initially think that the payday loan industry would be a high priority for them. But that quickly changed once they opened their doors under their first director, Richard Cordray:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the human and financial costs of the subprime-mortgage crash mounted, the new bureau was inundated with whistle-blower tips and consumer complaints. Cordray and his leadership team initially planned to focus on the biggest consumer-finance players, like mortgage lenders and credit-card companies; payday lenders were a relatively small industry compared with Wall Street. But it was growing quickly: The crisis had been good for business, pulling more middle-class families into the payday-loan market. And unlike banks, payday lenders were unregulated by the federal government. “It was affecting a lot of people at the margins who could least afford to run into trouble,” Cordray told me recently.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In 2012, the C.F.P.B. began conducting supervisory exams of payday lenders, a process that required them to open up their offices and books, and sometimes yielded evidence of predatory lending for the bureau’s enforcement team to take up</b>. A company called Ace Cash Express, investigators found, harassed overdue borrowers by using phony legal threats. The investigation yielded a potent illustration of the debt trap: Ace Cash’s training manual, which instructed employees to pressure borrowers into paying off overdue loans by taking out new ones, illustrated its customer-service doctrine with a graphic resembling a recycling symbol, with one “short-term” loan fueling the next in an endless loop of debt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At first, the CFPB went after the most egregious examples of exploitative behavior they could find, and they also put an emphasis on online lenders. In 2015, they began developing a new rule to apply to the industry that they hoped would end the practice of making deliberately bad loans. Lenders would be scrutinized, and they would be expected to examine a borrower’s ability to repay a loan before granting them one. Systemic abuse of the system could lead to hefty fine and even criminal charges. Before the new rule could be implemented, however,</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Donald Trump surprisingly won the 2016 election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>He then jammed Mick Mulvaney in as the interim replacement for Richard Cordray,</b>&nbsp;and Mulvaney set about not only saving the payday lenders from oversight and regulation but cutting the teeth out of the entire bureau. He was so effective at this job that Trump was convinced to make him the White House chief of staff.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All is not lost, and if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020 the bureau may be salvageable as an advocate for working people. I imagine a President Elizabeth Warren would be especially invested in that outcome. It seems to me that if people grasped that the Republican Party is on the side of predatory lenders and against protecting people from fine-print scams and debt traps, that a lot of them would be less inclined to take their side because of cultural issues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The problem is getting them to understand this when there is not much effort going on to keep them focused on NFL players and scary immigrants and the War on Christmas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/magazine/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-trump.html"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/magazine/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-trump.html</font></a></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div><b>Mick Mulvaney’s Master Class in Destroying a Bureaucracy From Within</b></div><div>The C.F.P.B. was created to protect Americans from predatory lenders after the financial crisis. President Trump’s new chief of staff took it apart on his way to White House.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div><b>By Nicholas Confessore</b></div><div>April 16, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>One rainy afternoon early in February 2018, a procession of consumer experts and activists made their way to the headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington to meet Mick Mulvaney, then the bureau’s acting director. The building — an aging Brutalist layer cake, selected by the bureau’s founders for the aspirational symbolism of its proximity to the White House, one block away — was under renovation, and so each visitor in turn trudged around to a side entrance. Inside the building, Mulvaney had begun another kind of reconstruction, one that would shift the balance of power between the politically influential industries that lend money and the hundreds of millions of Americans who borrow it.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Three months earlier, President Trump installed Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, as the C.F.P.B.’s acting director</b>. Elizabeth Warren, who helped create the agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, envisioned it as a kind of economic equalizer for American consumers, a counter to the country’s rising structural inequality. Republicans had come to view her creation as a “rogue agency” with “dictatorial powers unique in the American republic,” as the party’s 2016 platform put it. In Congress, Mulvaney had established himself as an outspoken enemy of the bureau, describing it, memorably, as a “joke” in “a sick, sad kind of way” and sponsoring legislation to abolish it.</div><div>
</div><div>Some of those invited to the meeting in February had picketed outside the bureau’s headquarters on Mulvaney’s first day at work. Their unease had only grown as Mulvaney ordered a hiring freeze, put new enforcement cases on hold and sent the Federal Reserve, which funds the C.F.P.B., a budget request for zero dollars, saying the bureau could make do with the money it had on hand. Within weeks, Mulvaney announced that he would reconsider one of the bureau’s major long-term initiatives: rules to restrict payday loans, products that are marketed to the working poor as an emergency lifeline but frequently leave them buried in debt. “Anybody who thinks that a Trump-administration C.F.P.B. would be the same as an Obama-administration C.F.P.B. is simply being naïve,” Mulvaney told reporters. “Elections have consequences at every agency.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Mulvaney was also aware that appearances have consequences.</b>&nbsp;For agency heads, it is important to appear open to all points of view about their regulatory decisions, especially if they end up having to defend them in court. In February, he agreed to meet with his critics in person. Thirty or so people gathered around a conference table as rain lashed the windows. Mulvaney, who is 51, has close-cropped hair and a bulldog countenance that befits his manner. A founder of the House’s hard-line Freedom Caucus, he can be sarcastic, even withering, in hearings and speeches. But Mulvaney struck a placating tone with his guests. He kept his opening remarks brief, according to six people who attended the meeting. Important things at the bureau would not change, he reassured them. “I’m not here to burn the place down,” he insisted. Mulvaney said he did not intend to discuss his plans for the payday-loan rule with them but encouraged everyone to share their views.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Many of Mulvaney’s guests came from advocacy groups, like Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending, that often did battle with Washington’s powerful financial-industry lobby. But the meeting also included a dozen religious leaders, among them officials from national evangelical and Baptist organizations, whose members tend to be among Trump’s most loyal supporters. These leaders viewed payday lending as not only unfair but also sinful, and they had fought against it across Trump country — in deep-red South Dakota, on the same day Trump won the presidency, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure effectively banning payday loans. The ministers had planned carefully for their moment with Mulvaney, and for 20 minutes they took turns detailing the harm that payday lending had inflicted on their neighborhoods and congregations. Eventually they gave the floor to the Rev. Amiri B. Hooker, who led an African-American church near Mulvaney’s old congressional district.</span></div><div>
</div><div>“I told him I was from Kershaw County,” Hooker told me recently, recalling his exchange with Mulvaney. “He smiled and asked how were the good folks from Kershaw.” When Hooker pastored in Lake City, an hour away from Kershaw, a quarter of his congregation either had taken out payday loans themselves or knew someone who had. He told Mulvaney about an 84-year-old congregant in Lake City whom, during a week that she was so sick that she missed services, he saw hobbling toward him down the street. “She said, ‘I had to go pay my bill,’?” Hooker recalled. The woman had taken out a $250 loan almost three years earlier to cover her granddaughter’s heating bill. She was still paying it off, Hooker told Mulvaney, at a cost of $75 a month, rolling over the loan into a new one each time.</div><div>
</div><div>[How cities make money by fining the poor.]</div><div>
</div><div><b>Despite his earlier reticence, Mulvaney seemed eager to offer his own view of how the bureau ought to operate. It wasn’t up to the federal government to stop people from taking the kind of credit that suited them</b>, he suggested: “<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There’s no reason people should be taking these loans — but they do.</span>” He pointed out that there wasn’t anyone in the room from North Carolina, where payday lending was illegal.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They should plead their case to state officials. “You have a place to go to address payday loans, and it’s not me,” he said, according to multiple attendees.&nbsp;</span>As the C.F.P.B.’s acting director, he wouldn’t stop enforcing the law as written. He only wanted a more efficient bureau, he explained, one steeped in evidence-based decision-making, one that educated consumers to make good decisions on their own. Mulvaney provided few details about how it would all look, but he promised the pastors he would follow up to let them know which way he decided to go on payday-loan regulation. “I’ve never heard from him,” Hooker says.</div><div>
</div><div><b>In the months that followed, Mulvaney’s vision for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would become clearer.&nbsp;</b>This account of Mulvaney’s tenure is based on interviews with more than 60 current or former bureau employees, current and former Mulvaney aides, consumer advocates and financial-industry executives and lobbyists, as well as hundreds of pages of internal bureau documents obtained by The New York Times and others. When Mulvaney took over, the fledgling C.F.P.B. was perhaps Washington’s most feared financial regulator: It announced dozens of cases annually against abusive debt collectors, sloppy credit agencies and predatory lenders, and it was poised to force sweeping changes on the $30 billion payday-loan industry, one of the few corners of the financial world that operates free of federal regulation. What he left behind is an agency whose very mission is now a matter of bitter dispute. “The bureau was constructed really deliberately to protect ordinary people,” says Lisa Donner, the head of Americans for Financial Reform. “He’s taken it apart — dismantled it, piece by piece, brick by brick.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mulvaney’s careful campaign of deconstruction offers a case study in the Trump administration’s approach to transforming Washington, one in which strategic neglect and bureaucratic self-sabotage create versions of agencies that seem to run contrary to their basic premises. According to one person who speaks with Mulvaney often, his smooth subdual of the C.F.P.B. was part of his pitch to Trump for his promotion to White House chief of staff — long one of the most powerful jobs in Washington. Mulvaney’s slow-rolling attack on the bureau’s enforcement and regulatory powers wasn’t just one of the Trump era’s most emblematic assaults on the so-called administrative state. It was also, in part, an audition.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau emerged from a liberal concern that the American political economy was increasingly defined by inequality and consumer debt.&nbsp;</b>As a young academic in the 1980s, Warren began studying how and why some Americans ended up taking on more debt than they could handle. The act of borrowing money, she learned, was growing increasingly risky and complex. As the consumer-credit industry grew, credit-card companies and mortgage lenders began to design their products to appear cheaper than they actually were. Unlike most things people buy, financial products became defined by their ever-lengthening terms and conditions: mandatory arbitration, reverse amortization, interest-rate calculations that can change at a whim, cross-default clauses and two-cycle billing, mysterious credit scores that emanate from Equifax and Experian as if from the temples of an obscurantist cult. “The real money was in the fine print,” Warren told me recently.</div><div>
</div><div>Warren, who is now a senator from Massachusetts and a Democratic candidate for president, spoke to me by phone as she was making her way to New Hampshire for a campaign swing. On the trail and off, Warren depicts the rise of the consumer financial industry as part of an elemental structural shift in American life. Wealthy people and big corporations were not just eating up a growing share of the pie; they had rigged the marketplace to help them do it. All that fine print didn’t just shift billions upon billions of dollars into the hands of lenders, Warren argued. It shifted power. Lenders could more safely harvest a few dollars in fees from the checking account of each customer, even when doing so broke the law, when mandatory arbitration clauses in the fine print prohibit customers from joining together in a class action to get their money back. Brokers could more easily push a family to a higher-cost mortgage, even when they qualified for a cheaper one, if the family believed they were getting the best possible deal. The increase in debt-financed consumption helped paper over the stagnating wages of the middle class and the growing gap between the rich and everyone else. But it was also driving an epidemic of social misery: bankruptcy and lost homes, anxiety and shame.</div><div>
</div><div>In her research, Warren found that people got in over their heads not because they were greedy or lacked self-discipline, but because they were being outmatched by a sophisticated and often predatory industry of lenders. Warren recalled being struck by “the number of people who said, in our interviews, ‘I never understood my payment would go up on that’ or ‘I didn’t understand I owed more on my house than I paid for it,’?” she told me. “Even after they had seen a lawyer and declared bankruptcy, they still didn’t understand what had happened.” In a 2007 article titled “Unsafe at Any Rate,” Warren proposed the creation of a new regulatory agency to oversee consumer-credit products. When she lobbied lawmakers on Capitol Hill after the financial crisis, Warren would take them a selection of credit-card agreements. “I’d lay three of them down on the table, and I’d say, ‘Tell me which one is the cheapest credit card.’?” None could.</div><div>
</div><div>Warren and other consumer advocates argued that payday lenders built their industry on a similar sleight of hand. They marketed themselves as lenders of last resort, offering emergency loans for a broken-down car or an unexpected medical bill. But according to Nick Bourke, a former financial-services consultant who now directs consumer-finance research at the Pew Charitable Trusts, what fed the industry’s growth were not emergency expenses but the increasingly unstable incomes of the working poor. As their hourly wages fluctuated at the whims of workplace-optimization software, payday-loan customers — typically white women earning around $30,000, according to Pew’s research — borrowed to pay their rent or electric bills. The average customer paid $55 in fees to borrow $375, due on their next payday. But most found that they couldn’t afford to repay the loan after two weeks. They took out another loan to cover the first, and usually another.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Consumer advocates called this cycle a “debt trap” and argued that payday lenders, much like credit-card companies, disguised the true costs of their products. Store clerks emphasized the small-seeming fees and pushed customers to roll their old loans into new ones, so that the fees snowballed, eventually exceeding the cost of the original loan. While most banks made money by finding customers who could repay their debts on time, payday lenders made money by finding customers who couldn’t. “If borrowers repaid loans in just two weeks and walked away as advertised, lenders would go out of business,” Bourke says.</div><div>
</div><div>Improbably, the payday-loan industry earned a fortune from the working poor. The short loan terms and frequent rollovers pumped out profits faster than conventional lending, requiring less capital and yielding bigger profits. Beginning in the 1990s, federal and state deregulation set off a payday-loan gold rush. In states like Utah, North Carolina and Missouri, the number of storefront lenders tripled or even quintupled practically overnight. Lenders clustered around big military bases throughout the South, where they could target service members, most of them young, low-paid and living the kind of peripatetic lives that made them ideal payday-loan customers. “Anybody with $50,000 can get into payday lending in some states,” one former payday-loan executive told me. “The model is designed to print money.”</div><div>
</div><div>Some of the largest payday lenders built national franchises and took their companies public during the frothy 2000s, fueling further expansion. Silicon Valley venture capitalists stepped in, building lead-generation databases and online platforms to compete against traditional storefront lenders. So did Wall Street. In recent years, leading private-equity firms, including Golden Gate Capital and the Fortress Investment Group, have acquired or bought stakes in almost two dozen short-term lenders. Payday lenders, which once operated on the fringes of the financial world, are now in unlikely alignment with the titans of high finance: Each has benefited enormously from Trump’s deregulatory policies, which Trump has cast as populist and his likely 2020 opponents have assailed as plutocratic.</div><div>
</div><div>“When you think about structures that perpetuate racial and economic inequality — this is it,” says Diane Standaert, the director of state policy at the Center for Responsible Lending, which advocates tighter regulation on lenders. “These are entities that suck up billions of dollars a year from people making $25,000 a year. And it’s going into the pockets of the wealthiest people in the world.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Mulvaney began his political career in the heart of payday-loan country, just as the industry’s headlong expansion began running into serious resistance</b>. In South Carolina, short-term lending is not only a significant industry but also a political force.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Payday lenders dole out more campaign money than traditional banks do,</span>most of it to committees controlled by the Legislature’s powerful Republican leaders. The country’s biggest payday-loan chain, Advance America, is based in Spartanburg, where a local business school is named for a company founder, George Dean Johnson Jr., and the company’s chief spokesman, Jamie Fulmer, serves part time as a city councilman.</div><div>
</div><div>Mulvaney, who worked as a lawyer, restaurateur and real estate developer before entering politics, ran for a seat in the State House in 2006, when South Carolina had around a thousand payday lenders, one of the highest densities in the country. Two years later, Mulvaney won election to the State Senate, in a district that stretched along South Carolina’s border with North Carolina, which had outlawed payday lenders in 2001. Mulvaney, a junior lawmaker, received only a sprinkle of checks from the payday-loan industry during his time in the Legislature. But payday lenders did a brisk business in and around Mulvaney’s district, throwing up billboards along Interstate 77 and advertising in the Charlotte phone book to draw customers from across the border. For some constituents, particularly in rural areas of the district, payday lending served as a de facto line of credit. Emma Doyle, a close aide since Mulvaney’s time in Congress, told me that his views of the payday-loan industry were shaped, in part, by hearing from lower-income constituents who relied on payday lenders when they had nowhere else to go. “It was something he had worked on, something he had heard from a lot of people about,” Doyle told me. “Not everybody ends up in a debt trap. Not everyone ends up saying, ‘I wish I hadn’t taken this out’ or ‘I wish it hadn’t been available to me.’?”</div><div>
</div><div><b>North Carolina’s expulsion of payday lenders was the first in a series of setbacks for the industry that unfolded through the decade</b>. In 2005, federal officials began cracking down on “rent-a-bank” schemes, in which payday-loan companies formed partnerships with banks in states that had loose lending regulations to export high-interest loans to customers in states that banned them. A year later, with tens of thousands of American soldiers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress passed the Military Lending Act, imposing a rate cap on payday loans and auto-title loans to service members. Over Mulvaney’s first two years in the Legislature, several other states passed new restrictions on lenders, and proposals to follow suit were among the most hotly debated legislation in the Capitol.</div><div>
</div><div><b>At first, payday-loan supporters successfully bottled up the bills in committee.</b>&nbsp;But in 2008, as the subprime-mortgage implosion set off a global financial crisis, the politics of financial regulation abruptly shifted. Public anger against lenders spread around the country, and amid the wreckage of lost homes and destroyed savings, the wave engulfed payday lenders too. In the November elections, Democrats in Washington began drafting the Dodd-Frank reform act, adopting Warren’s idea for a new consumer financial regulator. Even in South Carolina, there were calls to ban payday lending altogether. “You had a lot of horror stories out there about people carrying multiple loans and taking out one loan to pay off another loan,” recalls Wes Hayes, a Republican who served with Mulvaney in the State Senate.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div><b>Hayes began working with Advance America and other lenders on a compromise that would limit South Carolinians to taking out one payday loan at a time.&nbsp;</b>“We were trying to break the cycle,” he told me. For payday lenders, Hayes’s bill was also a kind of breakwater, intended to absorb the anger building against the industry in South Carolina and elsewhere. Advance America pushed lawmakers to support the compromise. Johnson, the company’s co-founder, personally lobbied the state’s governor at the time, Mark Sanford, according to a former Sanford aide. “It strengthened the consumer protections that were in our state, but also allowed consumers access to the credit they needed,” Fulmer says.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But not everyone was convinced. In the Senate, Mulvaney belonged to a small group of young conservatives who called themselves the William Wallace Caucus, after the Scottish freedom fighter portrayed in “Braveheart.” Like a growing number of conservatives around the country, they viewed the Republican Party of the Bush years as adrift from small-government principles.</span>&nbsp;In the depths of the recession, Mulvaney sided with Sanford against their fellow Republicans when Sanford tried to reject federal stimulus money — funds that Mulvaney cast as an ominous expansion of big-government power. Hayes’s payday-loan bill came to the floor a few weeks later. Sanford, the aide told me, was skeptical that borrowers were being misled by payday lenders and made clear he would veto the bill. Republicans in the Legislature laid plans to override him. In May 2009, Hayes’s compromise passed overwhelmingly.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Only four members of the State Senate voted against the legislation. One of them was Mulvaney. A few months after the vote, he announced that he would run for Congress, joining the Tea Party wave that was building around the country.</span></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The C.F.P.B. that opened its doors in 2011 had been carefully constructed to survive the fight ahead. Warren and her colleagues wanted a bureau that could resist the political pressures that, in their view, had cowed and co-opted other financial regulators leading up to the crisis. The C.F.P.B. was funded directly by the Federal Reserve, insulating it from congressional appropriators. The sole political appointee was its director, who would serve a five-year term and could be fired only for wrongdoing. Facing stiff Republican congressional resistance to the prospect of Warren taking the job, Obama ultimately picked Richard Cordray, a cerebral former Ohio attorney general.</div><div>
</div><div>The new agency had the feel of a start-up. Cordray, a Democrat, made an effort to recruit broadly, bringing in financial-industry veterans and former prosecutors, but Warren’s creation inevitably attracted Warren acolytes and veterans of consumer-advocacy groups, many of whom landed in the enforcement division. As the human and financial costs of the subprime-mortgage crash mounted, the new bureau was inundated with whistle-blower tips and consumer complaints. Cordray and his leadership team initially planned to focus on the biggest consumer-finance players, like mortgage lenders and credit-card companies; payday lenders were a relatively small industry compared with Wall Street. But it was growing quickly: The crisis had been good for business, pulling more middle-class families into the payday-loan market. And unlike banks, payday lenders were unregulated by the federal government. “It was affecting a lot of people at the margins who could least afford to run into trouble,” Cordray told me recently.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2012, the C.F.P.B. began conducting supervisory exams of payday lenders, a process that required them to open up their offices and books, and sometimes yielded evidence of predatory lending for the bureau’s enforcement team to take up. A company called Ace Cash Express, investigators found, harassed overdue borrowers by using phony legal threats. The investigation yielded a potent illustration of the debt trap: Ace Cash’s training manual, which instructed employees to pressure borrowers into paying off overdue loans by taking out new ones, illustrated its customer-service doctrine with a graphic resembling a recycling symbol, with one “short-term” loan fueling the next in an endless loop of debt.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Other investigations underscored the contempt that some lenders had for their new regulator. When the bureau informed Cash America, a major firm based in Texas, that it planned to conduct an examination, employees there shredded internal records and deleted recordings of phone calls with customers. Managers at the firm instructed employees to mislead the bureau’s examiners about its sales practices and stripped its call center of posters exhorting the employees to collect on debts. (The bureau later found that Cash America had illegally overcharged hundreds of service members and their families and ordered the company to pay a $5 million fine.)</div><div>
</div><div>The exams also provided an insider’s view of the historically insular industry, data that in turn guided the bureau’s enforcement lawyers and regulation writers. A bureau study of 15 million loans found that customers who kept rolling their loans over — taking out 10 or more a year — were the cream of the payday-loan industry, generating three-quarters of all loan fees. Advance America and other lenders disputed these findings, arguing that the bureau had undercounted one-time borrowers. But Cordray and his team saw evidence of a major regulatory failure: State-level reform efforts had largely failed to rein in the industry’s most abusive features, like debt traps. And lenders were devising ever-more-sophisticated tools to evade state regulation altogether: Some incorporated on Indian reservations or in offshore financial havens, selling loans online and claiming to be immune from state laws entirely.</div><div>
</div><div>A faction in the bureau advocated a strategy of hyperaggressive enforcement lawsuits to bring the industry to heel. Instead, Cordray settled on a two-pronged strategy, according to current and former bureau employees. Enforcement lawyers would begin prosecuting the industry’s worst scofflaws, especially the growing online lenders. But at the same time, the bureau would develop a package of tough rules that would apply to everyone.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>In 2015, the agency outlined its core proposal, one that would eliminate debt traps:</b>&nbsp;an ability-to-repay rule. Under such a rule, payday lenders would have to check whether borrowers could afford to pay back a loan before making it in the first place — a short-term loan would have to actually be short-term, not just bait for a debt trap. The rule would have real teeth: If companies lent money to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back, they could face prosecution and sizable fines. “We wanted to prompt reform in the industry,” Cordray says. “If they couldn’t reform their products, some of them would get out of the industry altogether.”</div><div>
</div><div>[Why jobs aren’t the solution to poverty.]</div><div>
</div><div><b>The backlash against the proposal was severe.</b>&nbsp;Dennis Shaul, who leads the<b>&nbsp;</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Community Financial Services Association of America, an industry trade group founded by Advance America </b>and other payday lenders</span>, told me that his group would have supported some limits on repeat borrowing. But the ability-to-repay rule, his members felt, was designed to shrink their industry. “We felt their solution was arbitrary,” Shaul says. The association worked with Jones Day, a powerhouse Washington law firm, to mount an all-fronts legal challenge. Advance America accused consumer-advocacy groups like the Center for Responsible Lending, whose alumni dotted the bureau and who had consulted closely with it on the proposed rules, of “infiltrating” the C.F.P.B. (The revolving door, of course, spun both ways: Shaul was recruited by the industry after working for Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who was an author of Dodd-Frank, and dozens of former bureau officials have gone on to work for the financial industry.) The industry mustered studies, including one by the bureau’s former assistant research director, finding that the bureau’s proposal would cut revenue so drastically as to put storefront companies out of business.</div><div>
</div><div>Not everyone in the industry agreed with this argument. The former payday-loan executive told me that most of his old industry would have survived under the ability-to-repay rule, but with a less lucrative business model. “You’d still make money,” the former executive says. “It would just be less money.” But payday lenders found a willing audience in Congress, where Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee — including Mulvaney, who joined the committee in 2013 — had worked aggressively to bring Washington’s new watchdog to heel. The committee was led by Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican who regarded the bureau as a constitutional abomination and Cordray as a “benevolent financial-product dictator,” as he put it in one hearing. Hensarling hammered Cordray with subpoenas and accused the bureau of mismanagement and waste. Mulvaney regarded Hensarling as a mentor and held similar views about the bureau’s structure and powers. “Some of us would like to get rid of it,” Mulvaney told a reporter in 2014. At oversight hearings, Mulvaney questioned Cordray relentlessly about the bureau’s budget and his payday-loan proposal, even introducing a bill that would allow states to opt out from the ability-to-repay rule for five years. Payday lenders, seeing Mulvaney as an ally, donated tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.</div><div>
</div><div><b>But as the 2016 election approached, aggressive enforcement by the C.F.P.B. and other federal regulators had cast a pall over the industry.</b>&nbsp;Its money machine began to slow. That year alone, storefront-payday-loan fees plummeted by more than a quarter, according to an internal industry presentation that I obtained. The C.F.P.B. was “biased against our industry, our product and our customers,” Fulmer, the Advance America spokesman, told me. “We were in a very perilous position coming to the fall of 2016.”</div><div>
</div><div>Like almost every industry in America, payday lenders weren’t prepared for a Trump victory. But it quickly became clear that his election presented an opportunity. While Trump ran as a populist, promising to tear down a “rigged system” — language that echoed Warren’s own rhetoric — his anti-Wall Street rhetoric fused with a pro-Wall Street platform. Advance America and others from the industry flooded Trump’s inauguration committee with more than a million dollars in contributions.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump stocked his cabinet with billionaires and Wall Street veterans, including Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who became his chief economic adviser. Trump, with Hensarling’s encouragement, tapped Mulvaney to run the Office of Management and Budget.</span>&nbsp;The new administration immediately came under pressure to dismiss Cordray, who had almost 18 months left in his term as C.F.P.B. director. But Cohn and others in the White House were cautious, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The move would have plunged the administration into a risky legal battle against the bureau. They also believed — correctly, as it turned out — that Cordray would leave the bureau to run for governor of Ohio; a high-profile firing might actually help his campaign. Cohn persuaded Trump that the Cordray problem would soon take care of itself and began identifying candidates to replace him.</div><div>
</div><div>The list was short. To take over the agency immediately, without a time-consuming nomination fight, the White House needed someone who had already been confirmed by the Senate for another administration job. Trump settled on Mulvaney, asking him to continue as budget chief and also run the bureau until he could appoint a permanent successor there. Mulvaney, according to people close to him, did not campaign for the job but eagerly accepted it, drawn to the opportunity to remake the C.F.P.B. In November 2017, just weeks after finalizing the new ability-to-repay rule, Cordray announced his departure. Citing succession rules laid out in Dodd-Frank, Cordray tried to install a top aide, Leandra English, as the new acting director. The C.F.P.B.’s own general counsel sided with the White House, writing a memo backing Mulvaney’s appointment; English fought the appointment in court but ultimately quit. Mulvaney landed at the bureau just after Thanksgiving, bearing a bag full of doughnuts for his new colleagues.</div><div>
</div><div>Mulvaney had given some thought to taking control of a bureaucracy that didn’t necessarily want him there. He told reporters that he wanted his second agency to be more like his first, the Office of Management and Budget, where career employees are matched with appointees who serve at the president’s pleasure. “Maybe they didn’t think they needed to have any political people here because a lot of the people here were political anyway,” Mulvaney said. To become less political, Mulvaney decided, the bureau would first have to become more political. Each of the senior career officials in charge of the bureau’s divisions, who had the title of associate director, would get a Mulvaney-appointed twin, known as a policy associate director, or PAD. To lead the PADs, Mulvaney hired Brian Johnson, a senior Hensarling aide who had helped lead the inquisition of Cordray’s bureau. In his old job, Johnson helped draft a report — titled “Unsafe at Any Bureaucracy” — alleging that the bureau used shoddy statistics and legally questionable tactics to prosecute auto lenders accused of having racially discriminated against car buyers. In his new job, Johnson quoted Adam Smith and attacked what he called “paternalistic” policies. According to two former staff members, Johnson, citing an overlooked subsection of Dodd-Frank, soon revised a boilerplate description of the bureau’s mission that was appended to the bottom of news releases. It would henceforth include a reference to eliminating “unduly burdensome regulations.”</div><div>
</div><div>Emma Doyle, who went on to serve with Mulvaney at the bureau, told me that the PADs were intended to make life easier for career employees. “It’s helpful to be able to translate what the director’s vision is back down to staff and have the staff have an intermediary interceding on their behalf,” she said. But the appointments drew outrage inside and outside the C.F.P.B. Older agencies were accustomed to the ebb and flow of administrations, each with its own priorities. But many at the bureau believed in Warren’s idea of a regulator that permanently represented the interest of consumers — at least, as they defined it. Each side argued that the other wanted to politicize an otherwise pristine bureaucracy. “I originally designed the agency to be as nonpolitical as possible,” Warren told me. “When Mulvaney came in and brought in his own team of political hacks and put them in the agency, I was shocked.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Mulvaney’s appointments were particularly alarming to the bureau’s supervision and enforcement staff, led by a former line attorney named Chris D’Angelo</b>. When Mulvaney first arrived, D’Angelo urged his staff not to assume the worst, people who worked with him told me. But D’Angelo grew alarmed when Mulvaney named his<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;PAD, a midlevel administration financial-services lawyer named Eric Blankenstein, who had little experience in consumer enforcement</span>. D’Angelo took his case directly to Mulvaney. He argued that career enforcement officials at other financial regulatory agencies, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, reported directly to the appointed head of the agency, in order to create a clear line of accountability for enforcement decisions.</div><div>
</div><div>Mulvaney did not budge. (D’Angelo, who left the bureau in February, declined to comment.) After Blankenstein arrived, lawyers in the enforcement office were ordered to prepare summaries justifying every active enforcement matter — more than 100 open cases, most of them not yet public. Two days later, without warning, the bureau filed a one-sentence notice in federal court in Kansas announcing that it was withdrawing a high-profile lawsuit against a quartet of payday lenders, a case known as Golden Valley.</div><div>
</div><div>The Golden Valley lawsuit was a product of Cordray’s enforcement strategy against scofflaw lenders. According to the bureau’s complaint, Golden Valley and three other lenders were technically owned by the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake, a California tribe, but were largely run out of a call center in Kansas. The lenders made payday loans over the internet, claiming that tribal ownership allowed the firm to ignore usury laws in states where its triple-digit interest rates were illegal. Using a legal theory the bureau had successfully employed in earlier cases — that trying to collect on illegal loans is itself a deceptive business practice under Dodd-Frank — the bureau filed suit against Golden Valley and the other lenders in the spring of 2017. The sudden withdrawal mystified and worried other lawyers in the division, who wondered what implications it held for their own cases.</div><div>
</div><div>As the grumbling spread throughout his division, Blankenstein convened a staff conference call. According to two people who were on the call, Blankenstein told them that in a previous meeting Mulvaney asked several questions about the Golden Valley case, including whether the defendants had fair notice that the bureau would view their conduct as illegal under Dodd-Frank. One person on the call later described this “fair notice” argument to me as one that could, in practice, justify throwing out many of the bureau’s other payday-loan cases, which advanced much the same theory as the Golden Valley lawsuit. But strikingly, according to the two people on the call, Blankenstein claimed that he himself didn’t know exactly why Mulvaney pulled the case.</div><div>
</div><div>Some career employees saw a kind of strategic ambiguity at work, designed to muddle decision-making and insulate Mulvaney as he neutered the agency’s enforcement work. The bureau’s enforcement lawyers typically spent months or years developing cases from the bureau’s complaint database or from information garnered from supervisory exams. In a memo to the staff, Mulvaney pledged to prioritize enforcement according to the volume of consumer complaints the bureau received, nearly a third of which related to debt collection and only 2 percent of which concerned payday lending. But bureau employees told me it was difficult to discern which particular cases and legal theories Mulvaney might allow to go forward, casting a chill over the work. Where Cordray had allowed lower-ranking enforcement lawyers to present cases to him directly, Mulvaney required lawyers to present their cases through Blankenstein, and bureau employees told me they had little sense of whether Blankenstein was arguing for them or against them when he took cases to Mulvaney. Craig Cowie, a former bureau enforcement lawyer who supervised several major payday-loan cases, including the one against Golden Valley, worked under Mulvaney for six months. “I never met him,” Cowie told me. “I was never even in the same room as him.” (Cowie declined to discuss any specific case, citing confidentiality rules.) “And I don’t recall him ever visiting enforcement,” he added.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>By February, Mulvaney had spread a kind of bureaucratic fog across his new agency.</b>&nbsp;He moved the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity from Blankenstein’s enforcement division to his own director’s office, frustrating coordination between the bureau’s experts on discriminatory lending and the lawyers who enforced the law. He took responsibility for coordinating the bureau’s oversight of the Military Lending Act away from the bureau’s service member affairs chief — a revered retired Army colonel — and gave it to a young aide with little experience. Cordray sometimes wouldn’t end a meeting until everyone in the room had weighed in on the matter at hand. Mulvaney, by contrast, began restricting more meetings to senior officials. The move was not atypical of federal agencies. But, employees told me, the effect was that information flowed up the chain of command and rarely back down. The practice also provided protection: Mulvaney’s team faced a torrent of leaks from within the bureau and intense scrutiny from without, as consumer groups demanded Mulvaney and Johnson’s calendars and email correspondence. One group, Allied Progress, filed more than 250 public-records requests during Mulvaney’s tenure.</div><div>
</div><div>If secrecy served to protect Mulvaney, it also made the C.F.P.B. even less efficient, worsening just the kind of management problems Mulvaney had, in theory, set out to combat. Junior staff members played endless games of telephone as they tried to suss out Mulvaney’s marching orders. “You had to have a meeting after the meeting so that people would know what was decided,” one former employee told me. (Mulvaney and Johnson ultimately compromised, allowing junior staff members to dial into more meetings.) Cordray had allowed enforcement lawyers to send out a civil investigative demand — a kind of noncriminal subpoena — with the approval of a midlevel supervisor. Bureau lawyers told me that the practice allowed them to make narrower, less burdensome requests of lenders, because they had to jump through fewer hoops to ask for more. But Mulvaney viewed the requests as an onerous demand of the lenders who received them — to be used only by bureau lawyers as a last resort. All civil demands had to go through Blankenstein. Over the coming months, the pace of investigations would slow drastically.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Mulvaney presented his decisions as part of an earnest effort to fulfill the bureau’s stated mission. He was not trying to undermine the bureau, he argued, but operate it within the plain black letter of Dodd-Frank.&nbsp;</span>“I intend to execute the statutory mandate of the bureau to protect consumers,” he wrote to the staff in one memo. “But we will no longer go beyond that mandate.” To career employees, however, Mulvaney’s crusade against statutory deviation increasingly felt like an ideological publicity stunt, one that came at the expense of the agency’s ostensible mission. Mulvaney commenced a lengthy effort to change the bureau’s name, reasoning that Dodd-Frank had technically created something called the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, not the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “C.F.P.B. doesn’t exist,” he told bankers at a conference in April. “C.F.P.B. has never existed.” A new working group was convened to execute Mulvaney’s decision, while staff members were prodded to begin using the new name on internal documents. Mulvaney appeared not to consider the vast costs of rewritten paperwork and compliance procedures that a renaming might place on the banks and on other businesses the bureau regulates: $300 million, according to an internal agency analysis later obtained by The Hill. (The name change was abandoned in December.)</div><div>
</div><div>Nor was Mulvaney reluctant to ignore the statute when it suited him, former employees told me. In a memo that spring, he announced the creation of new bureau offices dedicated to “cost-benefit analysis” and “innovation.” Technically, neither office was prescribed by Dodd-Frank. Almost as an afterthought, Mulvaney effectively dissolved the student-loan ombudsman’s office — a position that was mandated by Dodd-Frank. A Mulvaney spokesman told reporters that the reorganization was a “very modest organizational chart change.” But on the same day, Mulvaney signaled that the bureau would scale back a long-awaited overhaul of student-lending rules. Last August, the ombudsman, a Cordray veteran named Seth Frotman, quit in protest, accusing Mulvaney of ignoring Dodd-Frank’s intent. “It felt like we were in some Ayn Rand debate club,” Frotman told me recently.</div><div>
</div><div><b>As Trump appointees elsewhere around the government were learning, it takes a bureaucracy to deconstruct one, and in all the speed and confusion, some of Mulvaney’s own priorities began to suffer.</b>&nbsp;By the spring, months after he announced that the bureau would reconsider Cordray’s ability-to-repay rule, little apparent progress had been made. One problem, according to two former lawyers with the agency, was that Mulvaney and Johnson had more experience interrogating regulatory agencies than running them. Mulvaney had first asked the head of the research, markets and regulations division, a former financial-industry lawyer named David Silberman, if he could simply delay the new payday-loan rule. “They thought they could come in and snap their fingers,” a former lawyer there told me. But the law lays out a lengthy, nuanced procedure for writing or revising federal rules. In a joint memo with the legal division, according to a former staff member, Silberman’s team warned Mulvaney that he had little basis on which to delay Cordray’s rule and that he would most likely lose in court. Mulvaney had good reason to listen to them. As Trump officials at other agencies tried to roll back environmental and other regulations, they were losing in court at an embarrassingly high rate; in many cases, judges slapped down the administration for failing to follow proper rule-making procedures.</div><div>
</div><div>Next, a team in Silberman’s division was asked to devise arguments in favor of replacing the Cordray rule with a new rule, one that would challenge the underpinnings of Cordray’s regulation. The work was inherently awkward: There were no new studies or industry data that might provide a basis to replace the rule, meaning they would have to attack their own analysis of the payday-loan industry. Most of the original authors were recused from the work, leaving a bare-bones team of about a half-dozen people to finish the job. “You would be arguing against yourself,” a former employee in Silberman’s division told me. “You’d be saying, ‘Everything I argued last year, I’d have to say I was wrong about.’?” By the spring, Silberman’s division had begun generating timelines and option memos for the bureau’s senior staff members, including proposals to get rid of the rule’s central feature, requiring payday lenders to make sure people can repay their loans.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet Mulvaney and his deputies provided little feedback or direction on the proposals, according to former Silberman staff members I spoke with. “It was radio silence from them on what direction they wanted to take,” the former staff member told me. The process stalled. Payday lenders, who had expected quick action from Mulvaney, began to panic. Cordray’s ability-to-repay rule would go into full effect in August 2019, in a little more than a year. Mulvaney’s team might come up with a new rule before August, but it might not, and in the meantime payday lenders would have no choice but to reconfigure their businesses — or shut them down — to prepare for the old one. Shaul, the leader of the Community Financial Services Association, told me that he had difficulty getting any sense of where the bureau was headed. “I was not able to get to see Mulvaney,” Shaul told me. “I was hoping we could convince Mulvaney to repeal that rule and craft a new rule.” What they needed was certainty, or at minimum some kind of delay. As months passed without any word, Shaul told me, his members were increasingly set on suing the agency.</div><div>
</div><div>What happened next underscores some of the absurdity and complexity of turning an agency inside out. In early April, Johnson granted Shaul an introductory meeting at the agency’s headquarters. At the last second, Shaul emailed to say he would be bringing Chris Vergonis, one of the association’s lawyers at Jones Day — and one of the people who would prepare any lawsuit against the agency. His presence was potentially dangerous for Mulvaney’s team; it could raise questions about whether the bureau was improperly coordinating with the industry. According to notes of the meeting, taken by a career bureau employee and obtained by the consumer group Public Citizen, Shaul told Johnson that the association had in fact been preparing to sue the C.F.P.B. to stop Cordray’s rule but now believed that it would be better to work with the bureau to write a new one. With the Cordray rule looming, Shaul stressed, they would need to move quickly.</div><div>
</div><div>A person familiar with the meeting, who asked for anonymity because of the legal sensitivities involved, told me that Shaul and Vergonis kept pushing for details of the new rule and at one point asked outright what reaction the bureau would have to a lawsuit. According to the staff notes, Johnson replied carefully, as a good lawyer would; it would be inappropriate for him to discuss either the rule or the lawsuit, he told them. Shaul gave me a similar account. “I found them so cautious as to preclude our having any real discussion,” he told me. “We came away from the meeting thinking that we were not going to get many answers.” Four days later, the Community Financial Services Association and another industry group filed suit against the bureau.</div><div>
</div><div>The C.F.P.B.’s response was atypical of a regulatory agency. In mid-May, the bureau’s lawyers called Vergonis with a proposal: They now wanted to in effect join forces with the industry, by asking a judge to stay both the compliance date of Cordray’s rule and the lawsuit. In a kind of regulatory jujitsu, the bureau would cite Mulvaney’s own decision to reconsider the Cordray rule as an excuse to stop the clock on the August 2019 implementation. There was just too much fog. “The bureau’s decision to initiate rule making to reconsider the payday rule creates inherent uncertainty,” the bureau lawyers and Vergonis’s team wrote in court papers filed later that month. “There is no way to know whether plaintiffs’ members will ultimately need to comply with the payday rule, a modified payday rule or no rule at all.”</div><div>
</div><div>The bureau still had not explained what kind of rule it planned to propose, much less implement, and in June, a Texas judge rejected the request for a stay of the compliance date. But that October, the C.F.P.B. announced that its new rule would indeed target the ability-to-repay requirement. Not long after, the judge agreed to grant the stay, in effect delaying the core of Cordray’s old rule. Inside the bureau, according to two former employees and an industry lawyer I spoke with, the regulation-writing team lurched into high gear, rushing to deliver what the bureau had promised. The industry had won what it needed most: time.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Almost from the moment Mulvaney arrived at the C.F.P.B., rumors ricocheted around Washington that Trump was eyeing him as a future White House chief of staff. Mulvaney denied these rumors with the studied self-deprecation of a man whose star was on the rise. But by the time the White House had settled on a nominee to succeed Mulvaney at the C.F.P.B. — Kathleen Kraninger, his deputy in the budget office — in June, Mulvaney was going into the bureau’s offices only twice a week. C.F.P.B. staff members were just as likely to catch a glimpse of him on television: Mulvaney’s dual agency hats made him an in-demand guest on cable shows, where he capably defended Trump against the day’s mini-scandal. The president reportedly enjoyed watching him butt heads with cable hosts, and despite a packed schedule, Mulvaney found time to polish his skills. In April, after a contentious morning Senate hearing where he made headlines sparring with Warren, he boarded an evening flight to Los Angeles. There, he spent most of two days in media training with Frank Luntz, the famed Republican messaging guru and a friend dating back to Mulvaney’s time in the South Carolina Legislature. (A spokesman for Mulvaney told me that Luntz donated his services.)</div><div>
</div><div>Mulvaney continued to give speeches at financial-industry conferences, issuing sweeping pronouncements of bureau policy and often taking aim at Warren, a favorite target of his boss. When Warren sent Mulvaney letters demanding information about his conversations with payday lenders or his decision to freeze the bureau’s data-collection efforts, a former employee told me, Mulvaney’s team would take special relish in devising confrontational replies. Mulvaney and his staff members, for their part, viewed their tussles with Warren as a way to deliver the senator an unpleasant taste of her own medicine — an object lesson in the unaccountable bureaucracy that she had birthed and that he was remaking according to a different vision. “The bureau is not going anywhere,” Mulvaney told a conference of mortgage bankers in October. “There is no appetite on Capitol Hill for getting rid of the bureau. We are here.”</div><div>
</div><div>But within the walls Warren had so carefully constructed, the bricks began to loosen. Over the last year, Mulvaney’s temporary hiring freeze has turned into an indefinite one, slowly shrinking the C.F.P.B.’s staff by attrition. Bureau news releases, once packed with colorful details about abusive lending practices, have been toned down to dry legalese. According to a report by Christopher Peterson, a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America, enforcement at the bureau appears to have dwindled radically. In 2018, the bureau announced just 11 lawsuits or settlements, less than a third of the number during Cordray’s last year. In the months since Mulvaney reorganized the Office of Fair Lending, the bureau has not brought a single case alleging illegal discrimination. While Mulvaney pledged data-driven enforcement, his bureau brought only one case against debt collectors, who account for more complaints to the C.F.P.B. than almost any other industry<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Where Mulvaney or his successor have allowed cases to go forward, lenders have often settled with lowered fines or none at all. When the bureau settled a three-year prosecution of a group of payday lenders called NDG Enterprise — which found that the<b>&nbsp;group had falsely threatened American customers with arrest and imprisonment if they failed to repay loans —</b>&nbsp;NDG walked away without paying a cent.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After Trump announced in December that he was promoting Mulvaney to the top staff job in his administration, senior White House officials told reporters that he was the president’s “original Plan B.” As Trump’s acting White House chief of staff, Mulvaney sits — however temporarily — at Washington’s bureaucratic apex, with influence far beyond the C.F.P.B. In the months leading up to the announcement, Mulvaney sometimes brushed off questions about his ambitions by joking that he was busy enough running two agencies. Now, in a sense, he runs them all.</span></div><div>
</div><div>A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 32 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Make America Pay Again. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe</div><div>
</div><div>Related Coverage</div><div>Consumer Protection Bureau Cripples New Rules for Payday Loans</div><div>Feb. 6, 2019</div><div>Image</div><div>Payday Rules Relax on Trump’s Watch After Lobbying by Lenders</div><div>Feb. 2, 2018</div><div>Image</div><div>How Cities Make Money by Fining the Poor</div><div>Jan. 8, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div></div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/05/02/alec-payday-loan-company-gets-reprieve-under-trump-administration">https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/05/02/alec-payday-loan-company-gets-reprieve-under-trump-administration</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

are benefiting from the deregulation frenzy of the Trump Administration.

ALEC of course is the corporate bill mill that provides a library of

lobbyist-drafted or approved “model legislation” to right-wing state

lawmakers across the land.</font>

</p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Advance America is the largest payday loan lender in the United

States, with 2,500 locations. The company did not return our call about

its latest activities, but in 2014 Advance America was listed as a

“trustee level” financial sponsor of ALEC</b>.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump administration’s treatment of Advance America and the

predatory payday loan industry shows how the Trump teams “deconstruction

of the administrative state” often pits the low income and working poor

against giant companies, companies that enjoy the protection of the

politicians who take their money.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CFPB CRACKS DOWN ON PAYDAY LENDING INDUSTRY</font></h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>The Center for Media and Democracy has crunched the numbers

and Advance America had over $40 million in class action lawsuit

pay-outs, fines and restitution as a result of cases brought by state

attorneys generals since 2009.</strong> The company was found to be

cheating consumers by overcharging and ladling on the hidden fees. In

some instances, when people authorize withdrawals from bank accounts to

pay the loan, the banks will also charge fees.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This type of predatory lending prompted the Consumer Financial

Protection Bureau (CFPB), the federal consumer agency championed by U.S.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Obama, to crack down on the

industry.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among other things, the CFPB issued a rule in 2017, that would have

forced the payday industry to “reasonably determine that the consumer

has the ability to repay the loan,” and would have prevented lenders

from attempting to collect payment from people’s bank accounts in ways

that racks up excessive fees. The rule also would have made payday loan

companies notify consumers before attempting to withdraw payments from

their account.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But when President Trump put Mick Mulvaney in charge of the CFPB, he literally put the fox in charge of the hen house.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MULVANEY WREAKS HAVOC AT CFPB</font></h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Many consumer groups including Americans for Financial Reform and

U.S. PIRG consider Trump’s appointment of Mulvaney to be illegal. </span>

Mulvaney already had a job as the director of the Office of Management

and Budget. The CFBP already had an acting director as provided by

statute, long-time CFPB deputy director Leandra English. Now the issue

is <a href="https://uspirg.org/blogs/blog/usp/us-pirg-urges-appeals-court-block-president-trumps-illegal-appointment-mick-mulvaney" target="_blank" rel="noopener">in court </a>and

a federal judge is expected to rule soon.&nbsp; But Mulvaney did not sit

around waiting for the courts to rule, he got right to work.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Advance America, owned by the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Salinas, has

its U.S. headquarters in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Mulvaney’s old

House district includes parts of Spartanburg.</font></span></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As a Republican U.S. House member from South Carolina, Mulvaney took

over $62,000 from payday lenders.</b> This week he gave a speech to the

American Bankers Association and told them how his office operated.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/04/25/daily-202-mick-mulvaney-s-confession-highlights-the-corrosive-influence-of-money-in-politics/5adfea2230fb043711926869/?utm_term=.f904450ca7d6&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said Mulvaney</a>.

“If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If

you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Well, Mulvaney appears to have carried that policy, right into the

nation’s most important consumer protection agency. In December 2017,

Mulvaney abnegated his responsibility to protect consumers by deciding

to indefinitely postpone the new payday lender rule.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By putting the rule on ice, Mulvaney helps Advance America and other

payday lenders by allowing them to continue to lend short term money

without any real credit check of borrowers.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Next he <a href="http://ourfinancialsecurity.org/2018/01/stop-debt-trap-statement-mulvaney-drops-lawsuit-payday-lenders-charging-950-interest/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dropped the CFPB lawsuit</a>

against four predatory lenders who were unlawfully making loans with

interest rates of an astounding 950 percent APR in at least 17 states.

</span>Mulvaney even wants to deep-six the critically important, public data

base where consumers can register complaints against abusive financial

firms, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/04/25/605835307/the-consumer-complaints-database-that-could-disappear-from-view" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports NPR</a> this week.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a need for short term lending in times of economic distress

for consumers and especially for those who are “unbanked”–do not have

access to affordable community banks or credit unions in their

neighborhoods–but the industry has a long history of charging excessive

fees and interest rates, as much as 500% per year in some states, and

then suing borrowers and garnishing wages for repayment.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Payday loans “trap borrowers in an unaffordable cycle of debt,

causing severe financial harm such as bank penalty fees, delinquency on

other bills, or even bankruptcy.” Mulvaney’s action “shows disdain for

consumer protection and low-income communities that are targeted by

these debt trap loans,” says the public interest group <a href="http://ourfinancialsecurity.org/2018/01/stop-debt-trap-statement-mulvaney-predatory-lenders-signal-plan-kill-payday-lending-rule/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Stop the Debt Trap</a>.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The history of state attorneys general lawsuits and class action

claims against Advance America, summarized below, as well as the fact

that almost all payday lenders do business in multiple states clearly

shows the need for federal legislation, not just state oversight, which

might be spotty in some states.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>2018:</strong> Advance America

forced to pay $160,000 to state of California and refund $88,000 to

customers for charging above legal interest rates, and for using lead

generators to find borrowers, a practice <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-advance-america-20180312-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">prohibited by California law</a>.</font></span></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p style="padding-left: 30px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>2015:</strong> Advance America

agrees to refund $8 million in loan fees and interest to Pennsylvania

customers and write-off $12 million in loans, for <a href="http://www.mcall.com/news/local/watchdog/blog/mc-borrowers-will-get-refunds-under-settlement-with-payday-lender-advance-america-20150211-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">exceeding state interest rate limits</a>

by charging excessive fees to get around the state interest rate cap.

“We maintain that this company disguised its outrageous interest rates

as fees, misleading consumers and violating the law,” former state

Attorney General Kathleen Kane said. “Payday lending practices adversely

impact vulnerable consumers and often force them into a cycle of debt

from which many cannot recover.”</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p style="padding-left: 30px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>2010:</strong> Advance America

settles a class action lawsuit in North Carolina by paying 140,000

customers $18.75 million in restitution. In both the class, the largest

of its kind against a payday lender and the state <a href="https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010/09/payday-loan-lawsuit-brings-18-million-settlement-against-advance-america.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Attorney General accused</a> Advance America of charging excessive fees and fines.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p style="padding-left: 30px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>2009:</strong> Advance America

agrees to pay a minimum of $2 million to Georgia borrowers to settle all

class action claims in the state. The average borrower would receive up

to $90 to settle lawsuits that claimed the company violated state law

by charging excessive fees to <a href="https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Advance+America+%28AEA%29+Settles+Class+Action+Lawsuit+in+Georgia%3B+Announces+Plans+to+Close+Operations+in+New+Hampshire/4376170.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">get around interest rate caps</a>.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

</font><p><font style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></p>
=
</div></div>