Richard Cordray Quotes
Reasonable regulations are essential to protect consumers from harmful practices and ensure that consumer financial markets operate in a fair, transparent, competitive manner.
Cordray, Richard. Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2020.
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was established over much Conservative opposition in the reforms that were established in the wake of the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. And the Republican Party was critical of everything that it did. The issue of whether or not the Federal government should even have a role in consumer protection was been debated for over a century. This quotation is very ironic in that the first major federal legislation to assist American consumers was pushed though by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Over 100 years later, it was the Republican Party that fought to weaken or eliminate Federal efforts. Ryan, the Republican legislative leader, led the effort. Ironically, most businesses agreed with him about the micromanagement as it was they who had to change their modes of operation to comply with CFPB regulation, but the vast majority of consumers did not feel that they were being micromanaged although many agreed that the companies interacting with consumers were certainly being managed much more tightly.
Criticizing federal regulators in the 1989 Savings and Loan scandal:
This quotation is particularly interesting in it shows how far partisanship and ideology can go into deluding political perception. Wallinson is a man of integrity who we must assumed believed what he said. Yet in the 30 years he referred to, most had Republican Presidents and there were a number of Republican controlled Congresses. During all that time the Republican Party platform called for continuous deregulation. Every Republican President and even Democrat William Clinton has bragged about their success at deregulating the business and financial environment in America. During that period, left wingers paraded to testify to Congress that the deregulation policies and practices was in their view injuring the country, While there was great debate over the desirability of deregulation, virtually no elected politician of the left or right denied that deregulation was happening. The Chamber of Commerce during that time always complained that the deregulation was not occurring fast enough and consumer groups claimed the rate was too fast. Yet Wallinson instead of taking the position of most conservatives that the deregulation had little or nothing to do with the Financial Crisis of 2008, actually convinced himself that there had been no deregulation. Human perception of political reality can be easily altered by ideology. Similar delusions have also occurred for left wingers. It is the ideology who is vulnerable regardless of what the ideology is.
Richard Adams Cordray is an American lawyer and politician who served as the first Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from 2012 to 2017. Prior to his appointment, Cordray variously served as Ohio's Attorney General, Solicitor General, and Treasurer. He was the Democratic nominee for Governor of Ohio in 2018.
