With the CFPB weakened, could risky lending make a comeback?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the banking watchdog created after the subprime mortgage meltdown and the 2008 global financial crisis, has been thrown into chaos as the Trump administration works to drastically limit its operations.

 

Last month, workers at the CFPB were told to stop working, effectively shutting down the agency, though that order has since been challenged by a federal judge.

 

Although the CFPB, which is tasked with ensuring banks, lenders and other financial companies play fair with consumers, is severely weakened, Americans shouldn’t be too worried about a repeat of the subprime mortgage crisis that led to its creation, experts told CNN. Lenders and banks are currently more stringently regulated than they were in the years leading up to the crisis, and Americans who borrow money are more protected.

 

Still, with the hobbling of an agency that often acts as a safety net for consumers, Americans may need to become their own consumer advocates when dealing with lenders of all types.

 

“The CFPB’s mission is to protect individuals. After the financial crisis, we saw there were a lot of individuals who had been taken advantage of,” said John Griffin, a finance professor at The University of Texas at Austin who has argued that rampant fraud played a role in the financial crisis. “But I don’t think the CFPB would be able to stop another financial crisis.”

 

The agency, which was a brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren when she was a Harvard Law professor, was created as part of Dodd-Frank, a 2010 federal law passed in an attempt to correct the financial vulnerabilities that contributed to the global financial crisis. The CFPB has since delivered $19.7 billion in consumer relief, with 195 million people eligible for that relief, according to the agency.

 

“Gutting consumer protections while simultaneously permitting financial firms to take on greater risk is a dangerous combination,” Warren said in a statement to CNN. “Working families cannot afford for policymakers to repeat the mistakes of the past.”

 

The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment on the impact of its recent changes.

 

A safer home loan market?

 

Buying a home is usually the biggest purchase Americans make in their lifetimes. Although it’s always been important to fully understand the terms of a loan when taking out a mortgage, that may take on even greater importance if the CFPB is diminished.

 

Still, the home loan market is safer now than it once was, said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

 

“When Dodd-Frank passed, it included mortgage reform,” Rheingold said. “The types of loans that were being made that created the subprime crisis really can’t be made anymore, because they would be violating the law.”

 

The housing meltdown of 2008 occurred partly because banks and lenders gave out risky home loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Those mortgages were then bundled into complex financial products that collapsed when homeowners started defaulting on their loans.

 

The meltdown led to a crash in home prices and millions of foreclosures.

 

Home loans that required little-to-no proof of income were common before 2008, but today, such loans are rare, said Laurie Goodman, founder of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute.

 

“Prior to the financial crisis, income wasn’t adequately documented, you sort of took the borrower’s word for it,” she said. “Today, a ‘no doc’ loan would be extremely foreign.”

 

Housing market protections codified into law in the years after the financial crisis also include stronger lending standards and clearer disclosures for loan holders.

 

Here’s what you should know

 

However, the defanging of the CFPB would still strip away vital protections for consumers, said Griffin.

 

“Gutting an organization like the CFPB does hurt investors on smaller financial transactions where they can get taken advantage of,” he said. “The CFPB has played a role to provide additional scrutiny to go after unjust fees or unjust financial transactions.”

 

When borrowing money for a home, Americans should pay close attention to the terms of the loan, ensuring there are no hidden fees or relationships. At a time when mortgage rates hover just under 7%, borrowers should shop around to multiple lenders to ensure the most favorable terms.

 

The agency protects consumers from more than just predatory mortgage loans, though. Its broad purpose is to protect from financial abuses in general, including those from credit card companies, auto loans and student loans.

 

Rheingold recommended that consumers continue to file complaints with the CFPB when they have issues with financial products or services. If the CFPB doesn’t take immediate action, your state’s attorney general or legal services programs may still file a lawsuit against a bad-behaving company if you raise the issue to them, he said.

 

Some fear that financial companies could grow increasingly emboldened to engage in predatory practices like hidden fees and unfair loan terms, though it’s hard to predict exactly what those abuses would be.

 

“Will we go back and make the exact same mistakes as we have in the past? We probably won’t. But we’ll make a different set of mistakes,” said Goodman.