Elizabeth Warrens consumer watchdog hounded legit businesses time to shut it down

Recognizing that free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it, allow me to offer Treasury Sec.Scott Bessent some insight on his new gig as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.The bureau, originally the brainchild of Sen.

Elizabeth Warren, was built on the misguided principle that protecting consumers in the financial services arena should be “above politics.”In Washington-speak, that means an entity that’s not accountable to elected politicians — or, by extension, to the people who elected them.That was bad enough. But under the leadership of Barack Obama appointee Richard Cordray, the bureau decided that being “above politics” also meant that it could be “above the law.” Thus it was, for example, that the CFPB set out to regulate automobile dealerships, even though it was explicitly prohibited — in statute — from doing so. And that it started engaging in “regulation by enforcement”: Filing lawsuits against financial service providers for past practices as a means of announcing that something that had been permissible would be illegal going forward.And its participation in various manifestations of Operation Chokepoint, whereby banks were discouraged from providing services to entirely legal businesses — pawn shops and gun manufacturers, for example — because Democrats simply didn’t like them.And by sending “civil investigative demands” — basically taxpayer-funded fishing expeditions — to financial service businesses, without telling them what they were being investigated for.But you get the point.By the time President Trump came to office the first time, the CFPB had become something closer to a progressive vigilante shakedown shop than a government regulator. When he asked me to fill the role of the bureau’s acting director in 2018, the president’s instructions to me were crystal clear: Rein the place in.   And that’s exactly what we did.

More precisely: We simply started following t...