Since Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney usurped the additional job as part-time acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he's done his utmost to turn it into the Loan Shark Protection Bureau. His first move was to halt implementation of the agency's "Payday Rule" designed to protect consumers from predatory lending practices. Then he dropped an investigation into the World Acceptance Corporation's payday lending, a move that is a big red siren of corruption since the corporation also happens to have been a big donor to Mulvaney's congressional campaigns.
That giveaway to the loansharks has continued, Reuters reports, with previously unreported cases Mulvaney has dropped. Cases that would have returned some $60 million to defrauded customers.
The payday loan cases are among about a dozen that Richard Cordray, the former agency chief, approved for litigation before he resigned in November. Cordray was the first to lead the agency that Congress created in 2010 after the financial crisis. […]
Three are part of routine CFPB work to police storefront lenders. The fourth case concerns who has a right to collect payday loans offered from tribal land.
Cordray was ready to sue Kansas-based National Credit Adjusters (NCA), which primarily collects debt for online lenders operating on tribal land. […]
Consumers have complained that NCA threatened to have them jailed and sue family members, CFPB’s public database shows.
A CFPB investigation found NCA wrongly collected roughly $50 million, of which the agency’s lawyers wanted to return about $45 million, sources said.
NCA argues that triple-digit interest rate loans are perfectly legal on tribal land, cynically using "tribal sovereignty" as their excuse to fleece—and worse—consumers. Under Cordray's leadership, CFPB lawyers concluded that NCA had no right to collect on such online loans, "no matter where they were made." Mulvaney has dropped the case.
The other three cases concern Security Finance, Cash Express LLC and Triton Management Group, all of which are based in southern states that allow triple-digit interest rates on loans. Cordray was preparing to sue the organizations over aggressive collection activities, including harassment of borrowers at home and at work, their faulty record-keeping which jeopardized borrowers credit rating, and misleading customers into taking out further loans by telling them that was a way to repair their credit.
Sixty. Million. Dollars. That's how much Mulvaney is denying the forgotten men and women his buddy Trump says he cares so much about, the people with economic anxiety who have to rely on payday lenders to try to stay afloat.