George Rebane
Ever hear of the Office of Financial Research? OFR was created by Obama’s Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, it’s mission was to bring brains to bear on avoiding the next one by developing new prediction methods. It “was supposed to anticipate trouble and issue warnings”, but ten years and $500M later this new agency has turned out to be, let’s say, less than satisfactory (‘dud’ would have been shorter). Part of their problem is government’s perennial epidemic of poor organization and morale. The morale part resulted from losing battles with other government bureaus, and being called to account by Republicans for “squandering” its charter to “significantly improve regulatory oversight of financial risk”. (more here) So what else is new? The feds could have saved a bundle and gotten some real information about pending crises in a whole slew of areas affecting global finances by subscribing to Didier Sornette’s work at the Financial Crisis Observatory of ETH Zürich (about which RR readers were last informed here).
Among President Trump’s many denied accomplishments is the revamping of Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, born of the Dodd-Frank mess, and given the goal of regulating fair markets and a stable financial system, all for protecting the consumer. What the CFPB actually wound up doing is creating a quagmire in the consumer banking sector that primarily hurt the middle- and lower-class borrowers and seekers of other financial services. ('We're from the government, and we're here to help') It did all this by issuing a flood of “poorly designed regulations (to) choke off access to credit, drive up interest rates, and eliminate choices.” Another harbinger of what America will be like when the socialist elites take total control of our country. Trump put in Mick Mulvaney to turn around the CFPB which is now rolling back the stifling regulations and finally becoming the agency that it was advertised to be. Mulvaney’s new guiding principles for CFPB focus on inclusion, innovation, choice, competition, and respect. You can read more about this revamping here.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment